bunn

 These two books were published 2004 & 2005 but I've only just read them. They are clearly reacting to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (which is why Pp recommended them to me). 

He suggested them as 'Lord of the Rings from the other side' but I don't think that's quite correct, because the narrative doesn't really support the Dark Lord whose name begins with S (Satoris, not Sauron, though clearly it was supposed to suggest Sauron)  as being In the Right Really.  The Elves-and-Humans faction didn't really appear to be the bad guys.  In fact, the more the story went on, the more I was thinking, OK, Satoris started this whole thing with a justifiable grievance, but he's not exactly trying to make things better, is he?  He could try initiating peace and friendship!  It's an option untried!   The Fjelltroll are lovely, but it's reasonable for that to be not obvious to people who are 1/4 their size and without tusks! 

I think I was probably supposed to find Tanaros Blacksword, an immortal general, to be a more sympathetic character than I did.  Tanaros killed his wife and his boss for sleeping together, then went over to Satoris's cause to spend a thousand years brooding on it. Perhaps I find jealousy a particularly unlovely vice, but honestly I was rooting for the wife/boss pairing within about five minutes of learning about them.

Honestly, Tanaros's problems would have entirely gone away if he had just gone for the threesome.  Or taken up a hobby other than murder and stopped thinking about other people as his possessions.  That would also have worked. 

Cerelinde, the Celebrian-and-Arwen analogue, clearly feels some sympathy for Tanaros, and... I could see where she was coming from, in the sense that 'all people are human'.  His tiredness and desire to just get the job (of being Leader of the Forces of Darkness) done was sympathetic, I suppose, but I was looking sideways at him even before the 'just following orders' massacre. 

The Sauron-archetype, Satoris, who Carey makes into a wounded sex-god of the Fisher King type, seemed intriguing: I liked the backstory about him being betrayed, wounded, and his friendship with the dragons.  But then he retreated into a giant mountain-fortress, and stopped doing anything other than being an archetype.  And we never got his Valar-sibling-enemies perspective, and I was really hoping we would. 

The water-bearer Dani, his uncle Thulu and the Yarru people made intriguing and likeable substitutes for Hobbits. 

I absolutely loved the not-orc Fjelltroll.  They were brilliant.  The idea of a people who are sapient but not problem-solvers, creative, but without a lust for power, friendly and fiercely loyal - and making them the soldiers of evil was really interesting.  They were like enormous, deadly, talking dogs.   And I was intrigued by their creator, Neheris-of-the-Leaping-Waters.  Wish we'd got to meet her. 

It was a story that kept me reading with enthusiasm, and I think a lot of it will stay with me, even if I found the ending rather unsatisfying, and the writing was sometimes a tiny bit more purple than it really needed to be (you could do a nice drinking game just with the word 'aught'. )  A solid 4/5.

I haven't finished reading this yet, but I already know it's going to be the kind of book where I just want to read out random passages to strangers, so here is a bit I liked:

"To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter.  To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing... Was there ever such a thing as pure memory?  I doubt it.  Even when we convince ourselves that we're being dispassionate, sticking to the bare facts with no self-serving decorations or omissions, pure memory remains as elusive as a bar of wet soap."

This is so true.  I don't remember actual stuff that happened.  I only remember the story I told myself about it afterwards.  It's a way better story, anyway. Internally consistent, people have motivations that make sense, it's just so much better than the primary world.

The first chapter is titled "Don't Be Beastly To Your Secret Service"  and is mostly about people working for MI5 and MI6 ranting at spy-thriller writers.  It amused me enormously, and here is a randomly selected line, about his experience at MI5:

"Spying on a decaying British Communist party twenty-five thousand strong that had to be held together by MI5 informants did not meet my aspirations."

Or, on British Intelligence in general "I would guess there is not a spy agency anywhere in the Western world that has enjoyed more mollycoddling from its domestic media than ours. Embedded scarcely covers it. Our systems of censorship, whether voluntary or imposed by vague and draconian legislation, our skills in artful befriending, and the British public's collective submission to wholesale surveillance of dubious legality are the envy of every spook in the free and unfree world."

He contradicts himself a bit, but I find him too hilarious to care.

Oh drat, some LJ change has disabled my 'all power corrupts but we need electricity' tag for being too long.  ALAS.

I can only assume that all the people voting for Brienne and Jaime to win in a battle against Sabriel and Mogget, have only read A Song of Ice and Fire, but not the Abhorsen series, and don't really understand what they are up against.

http://grrm.livejournal.com/476984.html

Sabriel is way more resourceful than either Jaime or Brienne, and has powers they don't.  But Mogget is essentially a Vala.  Actually, it occurs to me that Mogget is more or less Morgoth.  Morgoth, if someone had turned him into an adorable cat at an early stage in his career.

And Jaime Lannister?  You are not Fingolfin.  You aren't even Boromir.  If someone dumped you into either the Old Kingdom or Middle Earth, I'm pretty sure you'd be crying to go home within a week.

Brienne could probably make a go of it in Middle Earth, or indeed the Old Kingdom, but she's no match for Mogget!Morgoth. 

This book came with a recommendation by Ursula Le Guin on the cover  "If Le Carré scares you, read Jo Walton"  it said.    So, here is a quote from one of my very favouritist authors, referencing one of my other very favouritist authors?  Ooo!

( Not that simple, alas. )

I found this, with a little irony, in one of my email inboxes this morning : Why can't we read any more?

It doesn't say anything new, of course, but it encapsulates a problem I've had, and so have you probably.  Email. Usenet. Web based forums. Lj.  Twitter. Facebook.   I have got  a great deal out of all of it, of course, and have learned a great deal.  But I have also spent way too much of my time sucked into things that don't matter, getting cross about things I can't change and focussing on things that don't leave me feeling I've achieved much.

The only thing I can't agree with in that blog is that it presents books as an alternative to this, and I don't honestly think they are.  Books for me are subject to exactly the same addictive behaviour.  I can remember my parents in the 70's talking about the guilty pleasure of 'committing book' - ie getting sunk into a book when you should really be getting on with something else.( Read more... )

I was re-reading The Other Wind yesterday.  In The Other Wind, it is revealed that long ago the people of Earthsea made an agreement, the Verw nadan, that they would divide into two peoples based on a choice.

Some of the people chose to keep the power to make new things and build wealth.  They renounced the Old Speech, the Langage of the Making and of magic, in which the true names of all things are made, and they gave up the power to fly on the wind, travel far and live long lives as dragons.  Those were the humans.

The other people, kept the ability to be dragons and speak the Old Speech, and to keep these things, they gave up the ability to make things and stories.

Now I am wondering which I would pick.

I have picked a big bag of crab apples, and a smaller bag of rowan berries, and am making rowan jelly.  There are still a lot of crab apples left, so I think I may pick some blackberries (it's such a good blackberry year!) and make some blackberry jelly too.  I wonder if you can embalm whole figs in jelly?  I have got so many ripe figs, I am running out of things to do with them!  The heatwave may be over, but the skies are still blue enough and the sun warm enough to ripen figs on a south-facing wall.

It's the time of year when I find myself constantly stopping to snack on blackberries and hazelnuts from the hedges.  There are so many nuts that there are enough for the squirrels and plenty to spare for me.

Which reminds me of a book I read recently: "Witch Light" by Susan Fletcher.

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I meant to pick the nuts in the garden today, and then cut back the nuttrees, but instead I have cut back the big sycamore near the window, which was leaning out perilously over the lane and (I suspect) annoying the neighbours who have to get past it.

Hey, it's Wednesday, and it's actually occurred to me to post about what I'm reading!  I keep seeing other peoples 'what I'm reading' posts on Thurs, and thinking vaguely 'maybe I'll do that next week'. And apparently, this is that week.

What I have just finished reading: The King's Peace by Jo Walton.  Dark Age Arthuriana set in a mildly alternate universe, told from the point of view of Arthur (Urdo)'s war leader, a woman called Sulien,    Fabulous world building, with a lovely epic Irish feel in places and in others, a little End of the Empire Sutcliff.  Sometimes a little confusing - there's a huge cast of characters, some of them pretty minor, and some who are mentioned in half a sentence towards the end of the book after having died years earlier.   There are definitely some places where the story could have used a little revision to make it clearer who is speaking, or remind the reader which character is which.   The format of the book is, similarly to Sword at Sunset, a telling by the elderly hero reporting on the events of her past life, and I don't think Walton slips from future to past as effortlessly as Sutcliff.

But on the whole:  a compelling retelling, and I shall read the next one.

What I'm reading now: Mist over Pendle by Robert Neill.  It's 1611, and Margery Whitaker, youngest daughter of a family of relentlessly joyless Puritans, has been sent off to live with a remote (but rich) cousin, because she has a disgraceful tendency to crinkle her forehead enticingly at young gentlemen.   I am not sure where this is going, but it seems very readable so far.

A Bloody Field By Shrewsbury - Edith Pargeter : a deeply unfair and biased review by bunn.
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Our Game - John le Carré
This is another of le Carré's books about belief, which I think in the end is what his Smiley books were about too...( Read more... )

Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman
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The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Currently reading: Fire & Sword by Louise Turner, aka endlessrarities :-)

I re-read Susan Cooper's Over Sea Under Stone, and Greenwitch, since it was summer, and the season seemed right - and then it occurred to me that I'd never visited Mevagissey (the village that Trewissick is based on).  So we resolved to go and do that.   It's only about 40 miles to Mevagissey, but the roads are narrow, winding and busy at this time of year.   So rather than going all the way there by car, we decided to go to Fowey, and take the ferry the rest of the way.

We got to Fowey a bit early for the ferry, so had to hang about a bit admiring the view.  We had not actually come to admire Fowey, but since we were there... ( Read more... )