2013 read #87: The Magician King by Lev Grossman.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman
400 pages
Published 2011
Read from June 28 to June 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I want a new Harry Potter. Hell, everyone -- publishers especially -- wants a new Harry Potter. It's not often that I feel the need to read more about a particular character or world, a real deep down eagerness to peep behind further curtains and dig into deeper mysteries in the same old place. Let's see, there was Harry Potter; The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion; the first three Song of Ice and Fire books; the Hyperion Cantos; Le Guin's Hainish cycle (though nothing has matched The Left Hand of Darkness); Tad Williams' Otherland series (up until the end, which was kind of a letdown after almost 4000 pages of buildup) and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn; Greg Bear's Way series (which I barely remember now, but certainly enjoyed about fifteen years ago); and (let's be honest) Jurassic Park. Those are the only books that have given me that certain special need, a certain, well, fannishness. I like that feeling, and wish more books would deliver it, but I'm fickle. I can't sustain interest in something just because a familiar name is on the cover: each book has to be good, enjoyable on its own merits. I plowed through four or five books in the Wheel of Time before I gave it up; revisiting The Eye of the World's first few chapters a couple years ago, I realized I had zero interest in getting back into it again. I barely made it two and a half books into the Sword of Truth before throwing it aside as tedious, hackneyed crap. I only managed to digest three entire Pern books to impress a girlfriend.

When I read The Magicians back in April, I was skeptical about the sequel that I knew already existed out there. For one thing, the otherwise mostly excellent Magicians recapitulates, beat for beat, the ending of Neverwhere, which kind of pissed me off, having just read Neverwhere for the first time in January. For another, the whole concept of The Magicians mashed together "dark and gritty Harry Potter" with "dark and gritty Narnia"; I didn't see where Grossman could even go from there, having seemingly exhausted both settings, short of schlepping his upper middle class alcoholic wunderkind wizards off to "dark and gritty Land of Oz" or "dark and gritty Middle-earth." The conceit had been enjoyable, but further storytelling opportunities seemed lacking. The story had been told, the happy ending achieved; what else was left to do with the worlds of Brakebills and Fillory, beyond cashing in?

Some biggish spoilers from here on out.

The Magician King takes the conventional sequel route and expands outward, showing more of its established worlds, Earth and Fillory, and detailing yet more of Quentin's tedious entitlement complex. It does so lazily and almost without direction at first, taking its time building up momentum. Likewise, where The Magicians seemed like a focused dissertation on young adulthood, higher education, privilege, and ambition, The Magician King sprawls out in a messier fashion through broader themes of childhood, growing up, death, loss, acceptance, and redemption. Where The Magicians borrowed the ending of Neverwhere, The Magician King toward the end exhumes and cannibalizes the entire operating theory of American Gods. That's hard not to do when dealing with folklore and magic; I'll go ahead and assume American Gods borrowed freely from some earlier novels I'm just not acquainted with. But The Magicians' ending was kind of glaring, whereas The Magician King makes effective if brutal use of its gods-are-real-and-fucking-creepy cribbings. And what The Magician King lacks in emotional punch and direction, it makes up for by eschewing most of the "entitled rich kids doing drugs in self-destructive urban ennui" crap that bogged down the middle of The Magicians.

I don't think I ever seriously doubted that I would love The Magician King. But so far I'm still on the fence about whether I'm truly a fan of the series. I look forward to a third book, since one appears to be forthcoming, but I'm not quite there, you know? Even though it's the only series I know of that can toss off references to Hofstadter, Teletubbies, and The Venture Bros. without breaking a sweat, it just isn't the next Harry Potter for me. Yet.

2013 read #86: The Buried Pyramid by Jane Lindskold.

The Buried Pyramid by Jane Lindskold
399 pages
Published 2004
Read from June 24 to June 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This was a fun pulp adventure, entertaining enough for me to overlook its predictability and workmanlike prose style. I mean it, this book was all kinds of fun to read.

2013 read #85: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
163 pages
Published 1971
Read June 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I like that Le Guin told the story of the Tombs of Atuan (referred to in passing in A Wizard of Earthsea) from the perspective of a new character with her own story and her own motivations, even if that character was kind of a stock fantasy heroine who helps the hero because of course she does. The story itself was kind of predictable, the sturdy but unsurprising sort of high fantasy plotline that ends in happily ever afters -- though I appreciated the emotional weight of the last two chapters, and the fact that "happily ever after" did not, in this case, necessarily mean true love. Overall, a basic fantasy tale told well, though I felt it could have been more than that with some extra effort.

2013 read #84: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
221 pages
Published 1838
Read from June 24 to June 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I suspect I don't have the academic training and literary sophistication to fully appreciate this book. Richard Kopley, who wrote the introduction and interpretive endnotes for the Penguin Classics edition, drew upon a century and a half of Poe scholarship to pull Christological and personal metaphors from the text, two levels of reading I never would have suspected without his guidance, while generally ignoring or minimizing the racial reading, which I found to be the most blatant subtext of all. The whole thesis of paired mirrors at the start and end of the book was either unconvincing or pretty much beyond my abilities to really get. Yes, there's a certain amount of symmetry to Pym, but interpreting the "perfect" white-skinned figure at the end as the "Penguin" from the beginning is... well, it's a bit of a stretch, if you ask me. Especially in a book as full of obvious Providential metaphor, with a continuing contrast between black and white. But maybe I'm not cut out for literary criticism.

Ignoring the racial subtext is disingenuous. Hell, calling it "subtext" is a bit dishonest; it's right there in the text. I really only read The Narrative as homework before I read Pym by Mat Johnson. The cover and blurb of that book have intrigued me for months. I even had it checked out for a while earlier this year, but elected to hold off on it until I had the chance to read Poe's original novel. Johnson's Pym, so far as I can tell from the blurb, focuses on that racial text/subtext. I'm glad I absorbed some of Kopley's interpretation, but right now I'm definitely looking forward to Johnson's take on it.

2013 read #83: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
183 pages
Published 1968
Read from June 20 to June 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

My library doesn't seem to know what to do with the Earthsea books. This volume, the first in the series, was in the young adult room. The next book, The Tombs of Atuan, is absent entirely from their collections; I just ILL'd it from Bay Shore. The Farthest Shore is on the adult literature shelves, while the final book, Tehanu, is in the juvenile collection.

This series has been at the periphery of my awareness since before that Legend of Earthsea miniseries came out; one of my long-ago LiveJournal friends referenced the series a lot, and I meant to look it up but kept forgetting about it for the longest time. I didn't even realize it was by Le Guin until I looked up her bibliography a few months back. It's interesting to place this volume in the context of her career and its intersection with feminism. Published only a year before The Left Hand of Darkness, and only two years after the admittedly pre-feminist Planet of Exile, Earthsea represents a potentially illuminating transitional period in Le Guin's development as an author. Sadly, I didn't come away from Earthsea feeling Le Guin had much to say about gender -- possibly because it was, after all, intended as a fairly straightforward high fantasy adventure for younger readers. Gender roles in Earthsea are pretty much standard for high fantasy of the period (or, for that matter, for high fantasy right up until the 1990s), and I don't think I, as a lazy critic, can glean much of substance from the fact that women are shut out entirely from official magic use. Perhaps this gets developed in the later installments.

All that aside, this was a fun fantasy adventure, the main character leavened with plenty of Le Guin's signature pathos and critical introspection. I look forward to The Tombs of Atuan getting here and to seeing how this series grows.

2013 read #82: The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer.

The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer
667 pages
Published 2010
Read from June 10 to June 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

My first impression of this book was not promising: right there on the second page of an enormous scholarly tome was an egregious editorial error. (The placement of a footnote implies Maximinus Daia ruled Licinius' territories instead of the Eastern Empire. I mean, come on.) It quickly became obvious that this was a "kings and wars" history, ignoring social history, technology, and most everything else not connected to rulers and their battles with other rulers -- a style of history that is frustratingly pat and superficial. But gradually, the sheer scope and ambition began to win me over. Although this book is overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe, where historical records of kings and wars are superabundant for this time period, Bauer follows the "kings and wars" thread whenever possible all over Eurasia, including places whose history is new to me, including Korea. I also came to appreciate the occasional character sketches she gave whenever she felt like giving more detail to a particular king or prince or general. The little details sprinkled through the vast breadth of the subject were a winning combination.

I generally like to own worthwhile history books, so despite our current penury, I went ahead and brought the preceding volume in Bauer's series, The History of the Ancient World. One day I want to get my hands on the entire series.

2013 read #81: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold
227 pages
Published 1949
Read June 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The better part of education, I think, is evocation. Anyone who remains unmoved through Leopold's depiction of the yearly cycle of nature at his sand farm, or his "sketches" of places like the Colorado Delta (before it was tragically dammed and destroyed), is probably a hopeless case. Leopold's plea for an ecological consciousness -- or even an ecological conscience -- is depressing; over sixty years later, we still face the same problems, engage in the same or worse destructive practices, and have yet to make a serious effort to address the same pressing issues that have only gotten more dire with time.

2013 read #80: Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
147 pages
Published 1966
Read from June 19 to June 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

It was both interesting and a little disconcerting to read a pre-feminist Le Guin novel, full of 1960s men of action and submissive, servile women, but Le Guin herself, in the rambling introduction to the 1978 edition, describes Planet of Exile with a hint of dismissiveness as an "easy-going adventure story," and I think I agree with her. A product of its period, this was a bit of sci-fi fluff without the underlying structure of Big Ideas that would support Le Guin's subsequent Hainish novels, and ultimately nonessential.

2013 read #79: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
353 pages
Published 2008
Read from June 17 to June 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

When an esteemed literary author writes fan fiction, it isn't called fan fiction. It's called a bold postmodern retelling.

When I was 11 or 12, one of my favorite novels was The War of the Worlds, which had been the first unabridged, unexpurgated "grownup" book I ever read. With a dim understanding of the concept of public domain, imparted by my brother, I resolved to rewrite The War of the Worlds but set it in the modern world of the mid 1990s, in and around Dayton, Ohio and its suburbs. I envisaged a one-to-one substitution of its London-area locales with towns and landmarks within the wider Miami Valley region. The project never got beyond that point, but once or twice I mused aloud about where each cylinder would hit -- Huber Heights, Xenia, Vandalia, downtown by the old Elder Beerman store.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is, in that one sense, similar to my old search-and-replace update of Wells' classic text; Ackroyd transplants much of Frankenstein's action to the familiar haunts of historical London, the same streets, landmarks, and places he seems to live and breathe in London: The Biography. The book is weakest where Ackroyd copies Mary Shelley too faithfully, particularly the chapter where the creature comes to Frankenstein and tells the tale of his encounters with humanity. Otherwise, Ackroyd's telling is delightful, sparkling with character and witty, succinct conversation. He excels at capturing the flavor of early Romantic prose without carrying the burden of its monotony. If all fan fiction were as accomplished and erudite as this, not even I would have a problem with it.

2013 read #78: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
210 pages
Published 1996
Read June 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

As a teen, I was fixated on wilderness. I obsessed over the Appalachian Trail and its sibling long-distance paths: the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide, the North Country, the Ice Age, the Florida. I delineated plans to connect the national scenic trails into a single continuous three or four year zig-zag across the US. Not content with that, I marked a road atlas with a plethora of bushwhacking routes and "base camps" for extended sojourns away from society, then pored through National Geographic maps to pinpoint likely routes and base camp locations in far northern Canada and in Australia, Mexico, Belize, Argentina. My conception of how wild the American wilderness could be was naive in the extreme, as was my idea of how easy it would be to traverse the Canadian Arctic or the Australian bush. "Resupply" never even entered my vocabulary; looking back on it all, I have no idea how I thought to feed and supply myself on these solo expeditions, or for that matter how I'd reach Baffin Island or Patagonia in the first place. Once the map was filled up with destinations, I daydreamed of hopping freight trains and building a secret cabin in the Montana wilderness.

The wilderness seduced my imagination in large part because I could not conceive of anything else. My father raised me so far outside the normal course of American society that I wanted as little to do with it as I wanted to do with him once I should leave him. "Getting a job" or "going to school" never crossed my mind when I imagined my future. I hated my father; I feared society, when I even thought about it at all. I had only one possible track in mind: I would churn out a bunch of novels, climb the bestseller lists, and make enough money to sustain years of wilderness voyages and remove myself entirely from human interaction for months or years at a time. Rejoining the society my father had kept me isolated me from never seemed to enter my calculations.

What changed my mind was a combination of facing the reality of feeding myself as an adult, and discovering girls. Well, that, and the fact that I'd been so sheltered my whole life that actually subsisting in the wilderness was as far from my realistic competence as getting my crummy, childish sci-fi stories onto the bestseller lists.

All this is to say I can identify with Chris McCandless' impulses, but not his abstract suburban philosophical motivations. I no longer understand the white middle class need for "meaning," even while I do feel the same sense of awe and transcendental understanding when I venture on my piddling little day-hikes today. Abstract philosophy probably made more sense to me when I was an adolescent and needed a framework for understanding human existence. Now, McCandless' bloodless, sexless imitations of Thoreau just make me feel a bit sorry for him.

I see Krakauer's self-insertion into his Into Thin Air narrative fits with his general journalistic style. Also, I see the movie adaptation of this book was so faithful, I felt I'd read the first few chapters before.

2013 read #77: Prospero Lost by L. Jagi Lamplighter.

Prospero Lost by L. Jagi Lamplighter
347 pages
Published 2009
Read from June 12 to June 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Embarrassing confession time: I haven't read The Tempest. I've read shamefully little Shakespeare, period. (*cough* I've only read Hamlet. *cough*) I've absorbed enough of The Tempest through its influence on modern sci-fi and fantasy novels that I would say it's probably my favorite work I've never read. A series like this is pretty damn irresistible to me, then. No matter how good or bad this first volume is, I am finishing this trilogy.

The bad news: Prospero Lost is poorly written, couched in pretty much bog standard fantasy prose -- tolerable enough for me to keep reading, bad enough for me to get impatient with it now and again. It's also structured poorly. There is no rising action or climax; or rather, it climaxes early and then coasts down through repeated restatements of the unsolved mysteries at the center of the plot, draining away any residual tension. It's quite obvious Lamplighter was contracted to write a trilogy, without any of the token first book resolution you often see in genre trilogies; this first volume exists mostly to set up whatever follows. Which is frustrating when you're reading the final fifty pages, expecting a major climax, and instead the main heroes just chill with Santa Claus at the North Pole (no joke), sipping hot cocoa and relaxing in a sauna.

The good news: Prospero Lost is tremendously entertaining. I mean, for goodness sake, it ends with the main heroes just chilling with Santa Claus at the North Pole, sipping hot cocoa and relaxing in a sauna. Before that point, a wind spirit invokes the human elemental spirits of Copernicus (air), Lavoisier (water), Newton (earth), and Oppenheimer (fire), and there are other clever touches like that, comparing favorably to Gaiman. This book was, if I may say so, a romp, despite its more boring stretches. I'm pumped to take up the next book in the series, so overall I'd say we have a success.

So far.

2013 read #76: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien
233 pages
Published 1971
Read June 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I keep digging up old memories of my brother's grade school English readers, the ones I read so assiduously in the years before I graduated to grownup books. The chapter "A Lesson in Reading" from this book was included in the reader I remember most clearly, probably a sixth grade text book circa 1991 with a powder blue cover. That reader also included the chapter from Sweetwater that I remembered so well. Like the Sweetwater chapter, when I read "A Lesson in Reading" I could recall it almost word for word. I must have read Randy's text book a lot to be able to remember it so clearly after twenty-two years. There are books I read a couple years ago that I don't remember anything about.

Anyway, this book was quite excellent. I liked it.

2013 read #75: Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell.

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
184 pages
Published 1960
Read June 14
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Yet another "young adult has to survive in the wild" novel, written in O'Dell's usual competent but overly dispassionate style. I liked this one slightly better than the other two O'Dell books I read this year, if only because Island had two moments with more emotional punch than a shopping list, a big improvement on what I'm used to from him. Maybe O'Dell peaked early? I keep coming back to his books because I know they're quick reads that are at least moderately enjoyable, even if they don't offer much of substance to my oh-so-sophisticated adult tastes. I'll probably pick up Zia at some point next month, because it's not like it's a huge investment of my time or anything. I read this one in a couple hours, tops.

2013 read #74: Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold.

Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold
400 pages
Published 2005
Read from June 7 to June 11
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Jane Lindskold is one of those authors of middling fame, prominent enough that I recognize her name from review blurbs on other books, not ubiquitous enough to be consistently available at your lowest common denominator chain bookseller. Child of a Rainless Year also occupies a middling position, halfway between a potentially quite good supernatural fantasy and one of those tediously detailed "local interest" books your Aunt Imogene began churning out after she retired from teaching history at Wapakoneta Junior High. Thrill as the narrator digs her teeth into this dialogue: "I read about the Plaza Hotel in some of the books you loaned me. Weren't the tin-work ceilings covered for a long time, and only recently restored?" Chill as our heroine pores through genealogical records and grills chicken dishes for visiting estate lawyers!

Much (way, way too much) of the book's length is given over to "I woke up, I got dressed in this sassy but sensible outfit with perfect accessories, and then I made a delicious breakfast and went out to learn more about local history" narration. Which is a shame, because despite all that, I think the story itself had promise. I like a good slow burn from time to time, and there were just enough hints of weirdness and memorable characterization and creepy description in the early going to keep me happy. By the middle of the book, though, just as the weird elements were ever so slowly coming to the foreground, I found my interest waning. "Magical realism/urban fantasy set in New Mexico" is right up my alley -- in fact, that's the sole reason I picked up this book -- but I can only grind my way through so much middle class verisimilitude in my fiction. There's a reason I don't pick up more literary fiction about rich white people getting married and moving to Napa Valley to be unhappy together, or rich white kids getting strung out on expensive drugs and having miserable parties with the young urban beautiful, or whatever -- the shit's boring. This may be the first fantasy novel I've ever read that focused more on estate lawyering and home restoration than on anything, well, fantastical. It was less House of Leaves, more afternoon HGTV marathons. I like the occasional low-key fantasy, but the second half of this story was so low-key it was almost muted.

I'm tempted to return the other Lindskold book in my library box unread, but "plucky young heroine vs. treacherous noblewoman in a race to uncover a lost pyramid" sounds too delightful to pass up. Besides, I like Lindskold's prose, and before I give up on her entirely, I'd like to see her apply it to something that isn't so utterly squaresville.

2013 read #73: Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin.

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin
335 pages
Published 1999
Read from May 31 to June 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It's hard to imagine anything more eccentric and British than this: A writer sets out to swim throughout the British Isles, dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools. Along the way, Deakin gives rich details of the natural places and human characters he meets: "Making my way back along the bank in the wetsuit through a field of cattle, carrying my flippers, mask, and snorkel, I met the farmer, who said he had fished the Dart for thirty years. He wore tweed, I wore rubber and stood dripping, but he seemed not to notice, or was polite enough not to say anything, and we chatted away on the bank about otters and salmon for some considerable time." Attempting an illegal swim across a harbor channel, he is accosted by the coast guard: "Oh God, not you again!" As with Wildwood, the Deakin book I read in April, the charm and appeal of Waterlog is in the sensual, sensory detail Deakin lavishes upon each encounter, each hidden pool and remote stream bank. Read all at once, the effect can become monotonous, but the rich descriptive beauty of his ineffably British peregrinations is enchanting in small, measured doses.

I can't set this book aside without noting the annoyance I felt toward Deakin's casual scientific ignorance. Dating the Cambrian to "a hundred million years ago" is inexcusable; it would take five minutes to look up the actual time period on the internet or in an encyclopedia. His digression in support of the "aquatic ape" hypothesis, while suitably poetic from a romantic swimmer's perspective, is baffling; that "theory" was discredited from almost the moment it was first published, and its continued currency among literate but nonscientific circles is frustrating. Every crackpot seems to have their own pet theory of human evolution; a physics professor at my old university, of all people, derailed a lecture to advance the idea that the ability to throw rocks was the primary impetus of human evolution. You can say this is a pet peeve of mine. Granted, Waterlog isn't a treatise on human evolution, but it would have taken one phone call for his editor to say, "Hey Roger, can we tweak this section a bit? No one has taken that hypothesis seriously in like fifty years, if ever." Missed opportunities.

Oh well. This was still a beguiling and lovely read. Incidentally, I feel a tad bit responsible for this book; I inadvertently caused my library to purchase it, and I'm the first person to get my hands on it after they put it into circulation. I hope plenty of library patrons after me find its eccentricity as captivating as I did.

2013 read #72: I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson
290 pages
Published 1999
Read from June 5 to June 6
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Humor columns are far from my favorite kind of writing. When I was a kid I used to read Dave Barry, but you can hardly blame me -- I was just a kid. I never imagined I'd put Bill Bryson into the same category as Dave Barry, but I guess there's just something about a weekly newspaper column that invites lazy jokes about governmental inefficiency and the inanity of summer blockbusters. And don't get me started on why stores only ever have one open checkout lane, am I right? Reading an entire book of three- or four-page humorous essays with lazy punchlines composed under inflexible deadlines has a dulling effect. Individual essays might well be hilarious in the best Bryson tradition, but cumulatively they get less and less funny. In the early going, especially, Bryson got in a rut where every essay opened with a non-sequitir observation, jumped to a seemingly unrelated topic, and then brought back the original non-sequitir as the punchline. A dozen essays in a row followed this exact structure. His compositions became looser and more natural as his column matured, but then he began incorporating serious political polemics about immigration and corporations spying on workers and whatnot. I may have shared his opinions on some topics, disagreed with him on others, but I'm not reading Bill Bryson to get his opinions on late 1990s social issues. I read him either for what he has to say on subjects that interest me (the history of science, the English language, the Appalachian Trail) or for funny. Those draws were often sadly lacking here.

In his books qua books, Bryson has a way of examining serious topics at length without detracting from the more lighthearted sections, one of the many benefits of compositional freedom and not adhering to length requirements. If he had written I'm a Stranger Here Myself as an actual book, he could devote a thirty page chapter to his assessment of the military-industrial complex or the evolution of the tax system, and I'm certain it would be interesting, regardless of whether I agreed with him on it or not. Certainly he wouldn't need to resort to lazy, Dave Barry-esque observations. A weekly column just doesn't seem to be a good fit for Bryson's style, or at least what I like about Bryson's style. Which makes I'm a Stranger Here the first Bryson book I wasn't crazy about.

2013 read #71: A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer.

A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer
306 pages
Published 1996
Read from June 2 to June 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Skipping as I did directly from little kid books to the staple family-friendly classics like Tom Sawyer and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I missed out on most of the usual "young reader" fare. Whenever I visit the bookstore or the library nowadays, I'm amused by the ubiquity of "dead dog" books on the tween shelves. To be fair, I only assume that any time a faithful dog appears in the title of a story or prominently on the cover, the dog isn't long for this world; it's an easy (too easy) way to give younger readers an emotional hit they are sure to relate to, though to me it seems like publishers and authors tend to underestimate their audience there. Similarly ubiquitous are the "12 year old survives on their own in the wild for a year" novels. Unlike dead dog books, I like these, or at least I like the idea of them. Reading them as an adult seems to be a case of diminishing returns, though.

A Girl Named Disaster distinguishes itself from the likes of Julie of the Wolves by devoting over a third of its length to the family drama and cultural circumstances that drove Disaster to leave home and that greeted her on her return from the wild. Most unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying the culture and drama sections far more than the survival portion in the middle. There are only so many ways to describe making traps and finding berries, and setting the action in East Africa rather than the Catskills or the North Slope only makes it so interesting. Honestly, it kind of dragged. Family drama, though -- when done well, that's the rootstock of good fiction. I must be getting old.

2013 read #70: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
289 pages
Published 1997
Read from June 2 to June 3
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

In the context of a wider tragedy, one that resulted in a dozen deaths and the maiming of several others, is it unseemly for an author -- a person who escaped the disaster without physical harm -- to focus so much attention on his own sense of survivor's guilt and mental trauma? I get why Krakauer, as a journalist, felt he needed to incorporate the criticisms he received from family members of those who died in the 1996 Everest disaster, but presenting excerpts from survivors' letters after several pages describing his own PTSD fugue, his broken sobs and a night strung out on street hashish in Kathmandu -- it all starts to feel a bit like conspicuous contrition. Sure, Krakauer's account of his grief and shellshock is moving (he can be a powerful writer when he isn't listing times and facts dispassionately, as he does in the main disaster account), but is it entirely appropriate?

Well, the subtitle makes it clear this is meant as a personal account, and Krakauer does address the propriety of his catharsis in the introduction, so at least you know he's aware of the issue. I can't settle on an opinion myself. Not that it particularly matters; it was simply the angle that jutted out at me as I finished this read.

2013 read #69: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King.

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
389 pages
Published 2012
Read from June 1 to June 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The Wind Through the Keyhole is the fourteenth King book I've read to date, meaning I have now read more titles by King than by any other single author. I got curious to tally the runners up; here's how the list stands as of today:

Stephen King - 14
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - 13 (depending on how you divvy up the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger collections)
Roger Zelazny - 10
Mark Twain - 9
Michael Crichton - 8
Tad Williams - 8
J. K. Rowling - 7
Robert Silverberg - 7
Dan Simmons - 7
Kurt Vonnegut - 7

Raw numbers aside, what drove my interest in King was, almost exclusively, the Dark Tower series. At its best, that series mingles high fantasy and Western horror to create possibly the most absorbing and addictive fantasy setting I've encountered. The seven books in the main series are wildly uneven -- The Gunslinger is the best, followed closely by The Wastelands, with the final three post-car accident books way way down on the quality scale -- but for a few years I couldn't get enough of that story universe, going so far as to read books like Insomnia, which only connects to the Dark Tower in the most circuitous of ways. Those last three Dark Tower books may have cured me of my fixation, but when I saw The Wind Through the Keyhole on prominent display at the library, I figured Roland's world was worth a revisit.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

This time around, the story's enjoyability improves with its distance from the "present" of the Dark Tower series. The book is structured as a framing device within a framing device; trapped during a freak "starkblast" (a clumsy Game of Thrones reference?), Roland tells his ka-tet a tale of his youth, in which younger Roland tells a boy an In-World fairy tale, the titular "The Wind Through the Keyhole." The scenes set in the ka-tet's "present" are awful. King's heart doesn't seem to be in it at all; neither Susanna nor Eddie talk or act like themselves, Jake barely says a word, and Roland speaks and behaves incorrectly, given when this falls on the series' timeline. (As I remember it, Roland didn't begin to shed the Man With No Name act to be more like a friendly old grandfather figure, or revert to his goofy In-World speech patterns with all the thankee-sais and whatnot, until after he danced the commala in Wolves of the Calla, well after this point in their journey.) The tale of Roland's youth is fairly okay, a definite improvement. And the fairy tale at the center of the book is really quite good. But not amazingly good, d'ye kennit.