2014 read #109: Territory by Emma Bull.

Territory by Emma Bull
318 pages
Published 2007
Read from November 21 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The other day I looked through some of my early reviews, something I haven't done in a while. Two things struck me about those bygone days: my seeming miraculous ability to finish a book every forty-eight hours, and my inexhaustible enthusiasm for writing a rambling, wordy review for each and every one of them. This entire year I've struggled to maintain a ten books a month average, and especially in recent months I've been unable to scrounge up more than a paragraph for any given review, even if the book was 600 pages long and presumably full of all sorts of ideas and critical interest to unpack. Which is not to say I was incapable of brevity when I began this blog; the first one-paragraph review dropped as early as that February. The problem is I seem incapable of writing more than one paragraph nowadays, not even when it's an intricate book that should leave me with much to talk about. (The one exception is when I dislike a book enough to rant about it at length, but even The Hanging Stones wrung out a review that would barely be considered average length back in the old days.)

The root of this evil, I think, is how blasé I've become, glutted with wonders. I don't know how many books I read before I began this blogging project -- I always considered myself a reader, but during college I went through a Dark Age, reading at best half a dozen books beyond what I was assigned each year, and being a parent sapped much of my attention afterward, so my pretensions to literacy derive more from my teen years and early adulthood, and I know I read at best two or three dozen new books each year in those days. The math is disheartening but unmistakable: it won't take much more than a year or two at even my ten books a month pace to read more books during this project than in my entire life before Memory by Linda Nagata. Slowly, I'm becoming (in fantasy nerd terms, at least) almost sophisticated. Which means each book I read, even the terrific ones, stands out less and less from the rest of the pile. I have less and less to say because, most of the time, it feels like I've thought or said it all before.

Which brings me to Territory. It is, shall we say, an unchallenging book. The jacket summary claims that in "Bull's unique take on an American legend... absolutely nothing is as it seems," which is a stretcher -- anyone could tell in the very first chapter that the charismatic stranger in the green spectacles would turn out to wield supernatural powers (my money was on Faery, but sorcerer is just as good), and once the story's magic gets explicated, it turns out to be bog-standard elemental stuff, complete with a sarcastic Chinese mentor figure and the hero learning his skills at the exact moment they're needed. And of course there's a spunky Wild West newspaperwoman who writes adventure fiction on the sly and inevitably develops romantic tension with the man in the green spectacles, before getting shoved into an observer's role while the men do their thing. (Surprisingly, no love triangle develops.) It's entertaining enough as fantasy novels go, and it goes down easy, but what else is there to say about it?