2013 read #53: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
212 pages
Publihed 1968
Read from April 27 to April 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Cute, sweet, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, fairly delightful in most places. Am I correct in assuming The Last Unicorn set the template for the self-aware fantasy novel, where genre-conscious archetypes discuss the expectations and perquisites of their respective roles? Was this the inspiration, the original fountain for the darling whimsy of Pratchett, the predictable but satisfying motions of Gaiman, the tedious pablum of Piers Anthony? It's a pretty good book no matter what. And so thoroughly late '60s, midnight carnival and everything.

2013 read #52: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
397 pages
Published 2007
Read from April 1 to April 26
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

It is perhaps inevitable to frame my impression of this book in terms of woodlands. Deakin ambles along through a series of thematically linked but autonomous essays, taking the time to savor berries and nuts and dabble his feet in streams, lingering in sun-dappled glades where a gleam of insight or a beam of brilliance or a sudden startle of magnificent words slip through the green, wandering away from the main path and talking to shepherds and hippies and sculptors, following the flow of water and seasons and genes, getting lost and liking it that way. His path has no set destination; you can pick up the book at any point and follow him along, absorbed in the minute vistas he details, the loving, lingering attention he gives to everything from the large-scale transpiration of David Nash's Wooden Boulder to the folk ubiquity of the Green Man in Devonshire church carving to the symbiotic inseparability of fire and ecology in pre-Cook Australia. He narrates the history of the wood in his furnishings and describes shaping his hedges. He delights in observation with an artist's eye and a humanist's boundless heart. Certain ideas and phrases reappear along his meanderings like vegetative shoots of beech pushing up amid the other trees beside the path. (I don't know whether this was a thematic choice or a sad inevitability of circumstance; Deakin died "shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood," and it's possible the editorial staff took a somber, hands-off approach to his words.) Deakin has what I think is a gift for simile. Describing the process of adding blackthorn drupes to make sloe gin, he writes, "[The drupes] are always best fully ripened after the first frost, then posted one by one down the gullet of a bottle of cheap supermarket gin with added sugar, as geese are forcefed for pâté in the Dordogne." Once in a while he dawdles just a bit too long along the way, chatting up old artist friends and savoring the heft of willow cricket bats, but the journey is never without its charm, its leaf-peep revelations. It doesn't matter how long the excursion lasts; this book is made for desultory sampling and quiet reverie.

What confirmed this book as one of my absolute favorites so far this year was the interlude Deakin spent exulting in the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan and the wild walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan. For years now I've known of no more appealing landscape than the steppe valleys of Tuva and Altai, but in these wild fruit and nut forests Deakin paints a word-picture so heartbreakingly lovely and unforgettable that I can't hope to convey the effect it had on me, or the hold those lands now have on my mind. No weaver of fantasy could ever imagine a country so divine. Deakin's words carry such gentle, patient conviction that it almost doesn't matter what the truth on the ground might be; with effortless proselytism Deakin has converted me. Corny as it may sound, I believe in his Eden.

2013 read #51: The Borrowers by Mary Norton.

The Borrowers by Mary Norton
180 pages
Published 1952
Read from April 23 to April 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Norton did an excellent job at writing an old-fashioned children's novel. If I didn't make a habit of looking for the publication date before I begin to read these books, I would have pegged The Borrowers to the Edwardian era, or shortly thereafter. There's something proper and mustily charming about the precise descriptions of the borrowers' living arrangements, and naturally the quick, vivid, gently absurd caricatures of servants and bedridden aristocracy seem drawn from a period piece. Coming into this book fully grown, I have to say that on the whole it feels a bit flimsy, but the charm lies in the details -- in, if I were inclined to make an unworthy pun, in the little things.

2013 read #50: The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
402 pages
Published 2006
Read from April 22 to April 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The phrase that most often got attached to this book was "Harry Potter for grownups." George R. R. Martin, in one of the cover blurbs, claims that The Magicians is to Harry Potter as "a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea." That blurb in particular, and the Potter comparisons in general, are overselling the resemblance just a bit. Sure, about half of The Magicians largely takes place at a magical academy sequestered out of sight in a bucolic region, but that's just the start, and in any case Brakebills doesn't resemble Hogwarts so much as an upper-crust liberal arts college experience, complete with student clubs focused more on drinking and debating insignificant bullshit with friends (and sleeping with each other) than on academe.

Near the end of their Brakebills education, one character despairs over the lack of any meaningful post-academic future. Her magical parents study the minutiae of fairy music or redesign their house every few years to duplicate historical dwellings in all their anachronistic inconvenience. "That's exactly the problem," she tells the POV character. "You don't have to do anything.... You don't know any older magicians except our professors. It's a wasteland out there.... You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters."

Magicians in this world natter along and collect obsessions so they don't go crackers over their own useless over-specialization, just like those of us with (cough) anthropology degrees. Overall, then, the first half of The Magicians seemed to me to have more in common with a grad school-set Bildungsroman than with any of Harry's adventures. It is the common pre-2008 story of privileged white kids worrying about their own superfluity as they drink and fuck and jockey for social position. Take away the magic and you have an almost uncannily mundane depiction of college life.

But that's just the opening half. After the graduation, The Magicians becomes the Narnia fan-fiction it had threatened to become since chapter one, only it's fashionably dark and gritty reboot fan-fiction. I was prepared to roll my eyes at this section, with it de rigueur everything-sucks-and-everyone-is-miserable predictability, but a simple-minded talking bear getting methodically wasted on peach schnapps and a walking birch tree smoking a cigarette won me over. My one complaint is the surfeit of amateur-hour Bret Easton Ellis impersonation thrown in along the way -- which, however boring I found it, I must at least admit was in character. (Incidentally, I think I've teased out why "rich society kids do drugs and fuck each other and die in car crashes" fiction is so fundamentally unappealing to me. My first eighteen and a half years were objectively shitty by first world standards, and I have zero patience for the drama of kids so privileged they must sabotage their own lives to experience any adversity.)

Even here, Grossman redeems himself by being almost eerily adept at describing the rotten, poisonous sensations of jealousy and heartbreak, the self-destructive nihilism that comes with seeing a relationship failing around you and being powerless to change its course. In fact, regardless of the self-indulgence and affluent self-pity of the central character (and the utterly predictable ending), The Magicians was possibly the most moving and emotional book I've read so far this year.

2013 read #49: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
169 pages
Published 1972
Read April 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This one felt a bit flimsy and unremarkable compared to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. It felt closer to an early '70s children's book than the Le Guin classics I know and love; Sweetwater in particular sprang to mind. I think the main difference between this and her best work is the lack of personal emotional resonance here, which in turn comes from a lack of fully fleshed out characters. Each character is barely more than a broadly drawn figure to represent a particular perspective on the contact of cultures. I guess it's kind of neat that the main antagonist would, in more traditional hands, have been a blandly virile action hero protagonist; Le Guin paints him as a sociopathic, paranoid genocidist who thinks he's a good ol' boy and the planet's resident good guy. And even a weak Le Guin novel will delight me, given how much her work sources from anthropology; The Word for World is in essence a novel of culture contact and the cultural disarray that results from it. So this one was pretty good, not great, just a nice quick read.

2013 read #48: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
357 pages
Published 1990
Read from April 18 to April 19
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Without knowing the relative contributions of each author, and not knowing much about Pratchett's work beyond one story in that After the King anthology, I'm going to make this review pretty much all about Gaiman. I would say Good Omens is obviously a stock Gaiman plot: What if the metaphysical world and its creatures kept up with modern times and was run by career bureaucrats? It's basically Gaiman's entire novel career in embryo form, complete with a whimsical and self-aware style that had yet to take a step back and stop pounding your face with just how goddamn WHIMSICAL and SELF-AWARE it is. The prose in this book is trying very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard to be precious, and that's kind of annoying. I'm glad Gaiman managed to tone that down just a smidge in his later novels. Other Gaiman staples that make early appearances here: Flimsy characterization; the competent and eccentric young female lead with no obvious flaws; the mostly incompetent and humdrum male lead who just happens to be the only man who can save the day; the groan-worthy wordplay that's as clever as it thinks it is maybe one time out of twenty; the same themes of belief manifesting into reality, and human will butting up against bureaucratized divinity, that would get recycled in one form or another in Neverwhere and American Gods. We get it, Gaiman, that's your meal-ticket. Don't hold back from trying something new on our account, though.

The funniest, most charming bits are the few references that don't get underlined, such as "Mr. Francis" being the kindly gardener who encourages Warlock to love all living things. Another clever-if-obvious touch I liked was the pre-Samuel Johnson spelling of the dialogue in the flashback sequences. A particular highlight was the all-too-brief buddy cop interlude starring Crowley and Aziraphale. Once the narrative shifted its focus to the human cast, it suffered.

As always, I emphasize the negative in these reviews. I maintain the star ratings to give a relatively consistent idea of how much I actually liked each book. As you can see, I thought Good Omens was pretty good, all in all. That brings my Gaiman tally to one outstanding book (American Gods), one really good book (Neverwhere), two good books (this one and Anansi Boys), and one wretchedly banal short story ("And Weep Like Alexander," in that Year's Best anthology from 2012). I maintain my claim that, while he's good at what he does, Gaiman is ridiculously overrated. He writes well for an airport novelist, but this is not deep or provocative fiction by any stretch, especially when you realize he's been rewriting the same basic novel again and again since 1990. I must be deaf to whatever powerful influence he exerts over, like, half the nerds on the internet.

2013 read #47: Foundation by Peter Ackroyd.

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd
447 pages
Published 2011
Read from April 11 to April 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Peter Ackroyd is my favorite author whose books I never finish. This is the first Ackroyd book I managed to read in full, after getting about a third of the way each through London: The Biography and The Life of Thomas More, and a page or two into Venice: Pure City. I love Ackroyd's discursive style, his roving eye for trivia and sharp anecdote, but his rambling, info-dense manuscripts are meant for ownership, not rental, best appreciated a chapter at a time over a period of weeks or months rather than read straight through on a deadline. This book is new to my library's collections, so that deadline was particularly close; the library only lets out new titles for two weeks at a time. Luckily, Foundation was considerably less digressive and dense than the other Ackroyd works I've encountered. His narration was positively breezy at times, especially in the early going. As with most other histories of this scope, Foundation's main failing was how quickly it burned through what I would consider the truly interesting material. The first 898,000 years of hominid history in Britain are dispensed with in twenty-four pages, and the entirety of the Roman period is allotted a pitiful sixteen pages. That was the stuff I most wanted to read, damn it, the sort of thing foundation conjures in my mind. I was hoping we'd get at least a hundred pages of pre-medieval material; I've read plenty of medieval histories, after all, and felt drawn to this book by the promise of something different. Instead we're forging ahead to William the Conqueror, about five hundred years deep into the middle ages, by page 86. History gets less and less interesting the closer you get to the present. I don't know why I'm the only reader who seems to feel that way.

A deep time enthusiast's perennial disappointment with history books aside, Foundation was an excellent work, emphasizing the deep continuities of British history, which are always fascinating, even if Ackroyd might be overstating the case just a smidgeon. What's more, Ackroyd, as per his usual style, makes a point of incorporating the lives of common folk in his history, winnowing dozens of anecdotes from primary sources arresting in their intimacy and immediacy.

This book makes me want to tackle London: The Biography again, maybe once my backlog stack is a bit less overwhelming.

2013 read #46: Storm Kings by Lee Sandlin.

Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin
276 pages
Published 2013
Read from April 11 to April 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Long stretches of my formative years were spent on the Great Plains. Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, Kansas, eastern Colorado... then in later years eastern New Mexico, Nebraska, South Dakota. I'll spare you the usual romantic landscape cliches and truisms. I will say that, for years and years, I've been enchanted by the idea of the Plains before the plow and the railroad, when the vast sweep of grass and riverside cottonwood swayed and mussed and crackled in the spring and summer storms. Storms intoxicate me; their wildness makes me feel weightless. The image of massive squalls and tornadic cells roaring across an unbroken land is an altar scene in my brain's atavistic pantheist temple.

This book is at its best when describing the storms observed beyond the limits of contemporary science and cultivation. Sandlin's prose is direct and unadorned but winningly fluid, establishing the tension and terror of the moment with an ease most technothriller authors would envy. Sadly, there are only a handful of such episodes in this book. Much of its length is taken up with more historically substantive (but far less interesting) affairs of feuding scientists and army officers. This is a self-proclaimed history of storm chasers, after all, not storms.

That flaw is endemic to modern science literature, though, so I can't criticize Storm Kings unduly for it. It's what people seem to want in their natural history books; I'm some weird outlier, wanting more science and less personality. For what it is, Storm Kings is pretty great.

2013 read #45: The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World by Charles Freeman.

The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World by Charles Freeman
447 pages
Published 1999
Read from March 20 to April 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This was a dense, old-fashioned history tome, dwelling on kings and orators and the usual cultural achievements. While the lives of women and the subsistence of common folk were explored, each topic was confined to a special chapter, leaving the mass of the book to explore the usual formulaic themes and storylines. In other words, it does exactly what it says on the tin, as the British say. The biggest surprise in this book was the lack of proofreading that went into it. Countless typos and, in one case, several paragraphs transposed between chapters made for an irritating read. I like this dense flavorless sort of history once in a while, as brain-fiber if you will. Typos aside, it wasn't a bad representative of the genre. But between this and a bunch of stuff going on in my life the last few weeks, I haven't had much enthusiasm for reading each day.

2013 read #44: Walking the Big Wild by Karsten Heuer.

Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail by Kasten Heuer
246 pages
Published 2004
Read from April 1 to April 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

As a young teen, I loved the empty spots on the map. I filled them with a hash of speculative routes and symbols denoting possible basecamps, kayak adventures, and massive, continent-spanning bushwhacks. I traced lines along the mountain spines of the west and the white reaches of the north, naively figuring the terrain would be both easily traversable and utterly deserted. Water access never once crossed my mind.

One of my more ambitious routes roughly paralleled Heuer's path in this book: Beginning in Yellowstone, forging north along Montana ridgelines, clambering through the Canadian Rockies, fetching up in the Yukon. Heuer's account of Canada's backcountry amplifies that of Cassandra Pybus in The Woman Who Walked to Russia, dismembering my naive notions of the unspoiled blank spaces on the map. It's disheartening to realize that, despite Canada's positive reputation down here in the States, they're really kind of terrible at conservation; timber and energy conglomerates seem to win every time. Heuer's log of oil development and clear cuts and abandoned extraction roads rife with snowmobilers was nothing short of depressing.

This book reminded me of all the conservation-minded adventure books I read in the '90s, which used fairly banal adventure to generate sympathy and interest for naively optimistic conservation initiatives. Like those authors, Heuer is positive that grassroots education can overcome the PR campaigns of international corporations and their bottomless pockets. Looking back from these grim latter days of Western capitalism, it's like a window on a far more innocent time, even though it was just nine years ago.