Star's Reading Blog

Carmilla is another one of my lunch-hour Librivox selections. The description that made me pick it up is as follows:

Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. First published in 1872, it tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by over twenty years, had a strong influence on Stoker’s famous novel.

I haven’t got much to say about it, really. It’s just about what you might expect from the above description. There isn’t a lot of surprise here for an audience that is even remotely familiar with later vampire literature, particularly Stoker’s work. For example, the mention of Carmilla as the vampire is not really a spoiler; it’s perfectly obvious what she is from the moment she first appears, even if the fangs don’t come out until later. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading it. It’s a fun read, though not a deep one.

I have come to a point that I’m very sorry to find myself at. I generally don’t regret reading books. It’s not time lost or wasted, even if the book isn’t very good. Even a bad book has lessons to teach me about writing, and ranting about them is as entertaining as raving about the good ones. In some cases, regardless of quality, it’s just good to read something that “everyone” else has read so you’ve got a handle on what’s interesting to other people around you. And, if nothing else, why you disagree with the general fascination with it.

Nonetheless, I am very sorry to have ever read the Twilight series.

I want to be very clear here: This is not some sort of backlash reaction against something that has become intensely popular. The Twigirl Brigade doesn’t help, but they have little to do with the actual work and whether I should or should not have read it. I found the series to be very poorly-written throughout for various reasons, and not a little alarming. It was sort of a low-level alarm, an increasing sense of “geez, this guy is creepy”, until we hit Breaking Dawn. Very few books go beyond being boring or frustratingly bad into actively pissing me off, but this one managed it.

I won’t go into why. It isn’t relevant here. That isn’t why I wish I hadn’t ever read the series — well, not directly.

I wish I had not read it because it’s now taken up residence in my brain, whether I will or no, and it won’t go away. When I read other things that have even slightly similar elements (whether that’s YA vampire lit or teenaged romances or what), I can’t help but draw comparisons. It isn’t fair to the other authors, and it’s not what I want to spend my time thinking about. It was such an example of bad (and even horrifying) writing, though, that I cannot quite help pointing at other things and going, “Hey! Stephenie Meyer! THIS is how you do this bit!”

This is how you write a girl with special powers convincingly. This is how you build tension between two characters. This is how you have a vampire show up in a character’s bedroom without being a stalker. This is how you make the menace and otherness of the vampire apparent without getting melodramatic about it. This is how you write an antihero. This is how your female main character deals with reconciling the darkness of the vampire with the lightness of herself (er, very literally). This, by the way, is how you write a heroine with a backbone. And this is how you assert that the vampire is stronger, can hurt her if he’s not careful, but that she needs his help, without reducing her to a mopey useless pile of angst.

That’s a start on the things that kept intruding on my experience reading Sunshine. It’s distracting and, as I mentioned in my post about that book, it’s not really fair to either work to keep comparing them like that.

The funny thing is, I wouldn’t actually even say that they’re the worst books I’ve ever read. They just piss me off and stick around in my brainspace worse than other books that were of poorer quality. (And this, I suppose, I do partly blame the Pop Culture Phenomenon That Is Twilight machine for. But honestly, I’d still rather not have read them.)

I’ve pledged to myself that I will not mention Twilight in this entry, but damn, it’s hard. There are points of similarity here and there, but McKinley’s treatment of them uniformly kicks Meyer’s ass. And I’ll stop there, before I make this about Twilight-bashing again. Because that’s all it would be, and that’s not really fair to either book.

Rae — who most people call Sunshine — is a baker. She makes the cinnamon rolls (as big as your head!) in her stepfather Charlie’s coffeeshop. Cinnamon rolls, muffins, tarts, bread, desserts of all kind; if it needs baked, Sunshine is your girl. Then, one evening, she just wants to get away for a little bit. So she drives out to the lake, to the house where she used to meet her grandmother. And gets herself nabbed by a gang of vampires. She isn’t their only prisoner; she isn’t even a prisoner so much as she’s provisions. The other prisoner is a vampire himself. Sunshine is forced to draw on the early, half-forgotten training her grandmother gave her in the use of the magic inherited from her father. And everything changes, whether she wants it to or not.

This book gets shelved as YA. I… am not quite sure why that is, to be honest, unless it’s an offhand “this is Robin McKinley, of course it’s YA” judgement. If it were a movie I’d rate it R, and thus I don’t think I’d classify the book as “young adult”. Which is not to say that young adults shouldn’t read it, any more than no one under 17 should see an R-rated movie. I’d put it in the “OK for mature young adults, parental discretion advised” category, though, for violence and gore and sexual references and situations. This is not a complaint. I liked the book very much and I don’t particularly give a damn about whether it’s YA or adult fiction. I’m just puzzled, that’s all.

Full disclosure: I’m predisposed to like McKinley, and (certain series involving sparkly “vegetarian” vampires aside) relatively predisposed to like vampire stories. I was pretty certain of liking this book before I started it.

…And I wasn’t disappointed. I really liked the exposition from the outset. We start off with pretty much just the coffeeshop and Sunshine’s family, things that wouldn’t be terribly out of the ordinary in the here-and-now. As the plot progresses, we gradually wade deeper and deeper into an urban-fantasy setting that turns out to be quite different from the world we know — but McKinley takes us in a step at a time rather than dumping us into the middle of the deep end. It’s very effective even just as exposition in and of itself, but it also sort-of reflects Sunshine’s own journey; she has this world and this self-identity that she thinks of as normal, but as the plot progresses she wades farther and farther into strange, occult territory. It’s a sort of subtle touch that I really like.

What I love about this book, though, is that it isn’t… neat. There are things you should not look for here. The “but I’m really a good vampire and I don’t eat humans anymore honest” speech is notably absent, for which I am profoundly grateful. (It works with some vamps. It wouldn’t work with Constantine. Who I’ll add to the list of fictional vampires who would totally kick Edward Cullen’s scrawny sparkly ass in about two seconds flat. …Dammit. Sorry.) In fact, don’t look for unalloyed good in anyone, even Sunshine herself. Don’t look for a nice neat wrap-up, either. The plot has enough of a feeling of conclusion that I am satisfied with it in the end, but it’s not a neat end; it’s all ragged edges and question marks. I rather like that, because, you know, life is like that. It would be nice if at the end of four hundred pages all our troubles got tied up in a nice neat package with a pretty bow on, but they don’t. Life is not a neat thing. It’s messy and disorganized, and I rather like stories that acknowledge that and act appropriately.

Not that it’s my new favoritest book evah, and I’ll step down from my Gaiman fangirldom long enough to disagree with his assessment of “Pretty much perfect” printed boldly across the cover. Some of those final question marks are a little too big, some of the ends a little too loose. There are things that I think it would have been better to let lie if they weren’t really going to get addressed. (And they probably never will be; McKinley has stated, with some exasperation, that she is not currently planning a sequel.) There are places where my suspension of disbelief wears a little thin, especially near the end. There are things that get a little cliche. I could do with a little more depth for the antagonistic characters — defeating them is less the point than exploring Sunshine’s heritage and her connection to Constantine, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. It’s not a perfect book.

But it’s a very good one, and one I very much look forward to revisiting at some point.

Spoiler alert!

I’ve been picking up short audiobooks at work, just for the heck of it, LibriVox selections of two or three hours that I can wander through at a leisurely pace. The most recent is The Diamond Master.

The book begins with a gem merchant being sent, anonymously, a very large and flawless diamond; shortly thereafter, he discovers that several of his colleagues received identical gifts. The mystery of who sent them is swiftly resolved, and for the rest of the book we are left to wonder where these diamonds — which have not been imported, of which there are too many to have smuggled in without attracting attention, and which are unlikely to have come from within the country as the US is not a major diamond producer — are coming from.

It’s an entertaining enough yarn, but is an unfortunate example of a story that has not aged well. Jacques Futrelle wrote The Diamond Master in 1909. At the time, there had been many attempts to create synthetic diamonds, some of them even successful. These experiments, however, could not be replicated reliably and generally produced very small stones. At the time, it would have been perfectly inconceivable to the reader that diamonds of any size, much less gem-quality, could be manufactured.

Now? Not so much. Gem-quality diamonds were first synthesized in 1970. Lab-created gemstones, in general terms, are relatively common these days. And thus, a modern reader will probably have some concept of the solution to the conundrum. This wouldn’t entirely spoil the story, though, if handled in a particular way. Unfortunately, Futrelle chooses to be reasonably explicit about how the mysterious diamonds are created, as though putting forth his own proposal for such a process. While the process itself is not generally unreasonable and in fact does bear some resemblance to actual diamond-synthesizing processes, the results are too-obviously impossible exaggerations. (25 carats was the largest synthetic stone I could find a reference for; at one point in the story, a synthetic replica of the Koh-i-Noor is produced, and it’s better than four times that size.) Suspension of disbelief becomes difficult under those circumstances.

Even so, it’s really a fairly interesting read… until the final chapter. When the process was explained, I felt disappointed, like there should be something more. It’s not really Futrelle’s fault as such; as I said, this would’ve been a much more suspensful piece in his own time. Problem is, I don’t live in his time, and I do have this knowledge, and that changes how I experience the work. It was fun enough, but I won’t be revisiting it anytime soon.

I want to give this series five stars. I really do. I can’t, quite.

It isn’t that the series isn’t excellently-written. There are very few things I can point to and say, “There. That’s not good.” If anything. Even my complaints aren’t so much “not good” as “not as good”. It’s just that… Well, the last book kind of loses me a little.

Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King. All of these show us the power of the Light and the Dark in (roughly, and mostly) our time, in our world, struggling for control over people just like you and me. They show us relatively ordinary people (the Drew kids) doing extraordinary things, and a formerly-ordinary boy (that’d be Will Stanton) dealing with suddenly becoming something well beyond ordinary. They show us the magic of the world around us, and the magic that is within us — and also (to the extent appropriate to YA lit) the rot and corruption that exist in the world and in humanity, and the potential for either the magic or the corruption to become dominant, and the ways in which the one can turn to the other. All that without really hitting us over the head with it too hard. I love that about this series.

Then we get to Silver on the Tree, and it starts out just like that, but shortly takes a sharp turn. Suddenly, Will and Bran are off on a Fantastical Quest in the mythical and dream-like Lost Land, Will is cut off from his Old One abilities and often seems like no more than a clever boy. They come back to the world we know eventually, briefly, just long enough to pick up the Drews and then be off to finish saving the world. The better part of the book just feels really disconnected, to me, from the world they’re trying to save. For all there are “ordinary” people there, they are still people who are bound up with the Light and have some knowledge of what’s happening. They’re ordinary mostly in that they aren’t Old Ones. I felt like there were a couple of characters who were supposed to be there to keep the whole thing grounded, but I didn’t feel like that was actually achieved. We needed Will’s family and the villagers and all the people, good and bad. We need to put a face on what’s at stake, and we don’t get to really do that after about the point at which Will and Bran meet up with the Drews. Everyone’s just… gone.

I am also divided about the ending. There is something in me that rebells against the sort of arbitrary decision that everyone should just forget what happened. Except Will, because he’s an Old One and therefore special. I am not entirely certain that it isn’t better that way, as the Lady said — but I’m not convinced that it was so necessary that it had to be done the way it was, either. It feels like a big cosmic Reset button, which I’m not a fan of.

On the other hand, Merriman gets a line in before that’s quite done that almost redeems the whole thing:

For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not be idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.

It would be cheating to ignore the religious implications there, so I won’t. I will instead say that they’re irrelevant. Whether you believe in a second coming or not, I think the message here is the same: The Light is not an excuse to be good, and the Dark is not an excuse to be bad. There is no need for anything to force our hands one way or the other, because we have the capacity for good and for evil within ourselves. We cannot sit around complacently waiting for a second coming. It may happen, or it may not, as you will, but in the meantime we’ve still got to deal with this world here and now, and in that scope it’s up to us to save it or to destroy it. It’s in our power to do either. And I think that’s an excellent message.

Despite that, though, I still feel like Silver on the Tree was the weakest book of the series. (The strongest… Well, as I’ve said before, there’s a reason why The Dark is Rising won the Newberry.) It should have been among the strongest, what with being the big finish, but it wasn’t. The disconnection from the world, all the while going on about saving it, just got in the way a bit too much. Still, not a bad book, and overall an excellent series.

Most people, if they know only one thing about Anansi Boys, will know that it’s somehow connected to American Gods. If they’re exceptionally unfamiliar with the former, they may be under the impression that it’s a direct sequel. Let’s get one thing straight: It’s not a sequel, not in any sense. It’s more of a sort of… tangent. There is one point of connection, Anansi himself, and even then the focus is more on his sons. The tone, the settings, the structure are all completely different. The two books bear very little resemblance to one another except on the level of both being undeniably Gaiman.

That’s not a complaint, but it’s not always a good thing either. My one big problem Anansi Boys is that Fat Charlie, though he later becomes quite likeable, is downright irritating at the beginning. He’s so very wrapped up in how embarrassing his dad is, and what seem like awfully petty complaints and concerns, that it’s at times difficult to carry on. (Actually, maybe I’m wrong and it has this in common with American Gods as well: You have to push past the thing at the beginning that makes you sort of want to stop reading.) This was my second read-through, and as a result I knew why he was written like this at the beginning. That didn’t make it less grating. It was a bit slow to get started, as a story, as opposed to American Gods where I was hooked right off.

All in all, though: If you want a story about gods and their doings, but the gravity and occasional coarseness of American Gods doesn’t appeal to you, you should try Anansi Boys. It doesn’t lose the depth, but it’s lighter and more straightforward. It’s the difference between Mr. Wednesday and Mr. Nancy, really, when you come down to it. The difference between being on the verge of war, deeply involved with the Old Gods and blood and sex and violence and all that, and doing a softshoe shuffle down the beach on your way to karaoke night, where you will enjoy the best fun mortal life has to offer and die happy. The difference between the Allfather and the tale-spinning trickster. The Mysteries of life and death, of stories and of myths, are still there either way, but the two books represent two wholly different approaches to them.

I’m most of the way through the Dark is Rising sequence. Love. Always. I don’t know what more to say about it just now.

In glancing through what Wikipedia has to say about some of the mythology behind it (not the Arthurian stuff, but the Welsh stuff that shows through a little in The Grey King), I had a sudden and utterly inexplicable desire to read the Prydain Chronicles again. Which has nothing to do with its having roots in Welsh mythology, obviously. So I dutifully added it to my to-read list as next up. The books are already on the Kindle and everything.

As I was doing that, I glanced through the rest of my to-read list on Goodreads. I realized that… You know, I’ve got a lot of stuff there that I’ve never read before, and I’ve been doing a lot of focusing on stuff that I have read before lately. I’m rereading these things because they are so very good, but I have a yearning for something new as well. So maybe I ought to put aside Prydain for right now and try something new.

So. I shall. Something… maybe completely in a different direction, but not too different. Not too light, not something “classic” just now, but… Something… hm.

Sunshine. I do not know how I’ve managed not to read it yet, but it’s about time to correct that. After I get done with Susan Cooper.

Right, so I thought, this is the Internet. It knows all, if you know where to look. So I Googled “bugle calls in time enough for love”.

Results: One site which appears to have a PDF of Heinlein’s working notes (and several drafts of the novel), if you want to pay for it. One site discussing the book, but not really what the bugle calls are. Half a dozen pages mentioning bugle calls in the same breath as some combination of the words “love”, “time”, and “enough”. And then, down near the bottom but still on the first page…

…The blog entry I just posted.

So. Maybe the Internet doesn’t know. Or maybe my Google-fu is just that weak today, because I can’t imagine I am really the only one curious about this. I’m amused that I made it onto the first page of results, though.

(I was able to match about half of them to sheet music on the Army’s page about bugle calls, not that I didn’t know two of those anyway — I knew those well enough to sight-read and guess. Three of the seven are still a mystery to me, though.)

When Ira Howard died in 1873, he left a substantial trust designated to fund an attempt to lengthen human life. This money was used to fund what was initially a simple breeding experiment, paying large sums of money to induce people from long-lived families to marry and produce children on the theory that longevity was hereditary. Lazarus Long was born Woodrow Wilson Smith, a member of the third generation of the Howard families, as the participants in this experiment are called. In every genetic experiment, there will be the odd exceptional mutation, and he was it. 2300 years and many medical rejuvinations later, he was the oldest living human being by a long shot. And he decided that it was time to quit. Ira Weatheral, then chairman pro tem of the Howard Foundation, rejuvinated Lazarus initially against his wishes, then persuaded him to remain alive on the condition that Ira would listen to his stories and attempt to find something for him to do which he had not previously experienced. Time Enough for Love comprises three of the stories Lazarus told to Ira (or, in one case, to Ira’s executive computer Minerva), various bits and scraps of other stories and advice, and the story of what happened when a new experience was indeed found for him.

Love is the theme, obviously. There is even an outright discussion amongst the characters attempting to define it. More than that, though, the book is an examination of the forms love takes and the way we approach it. It’s difficult to approach this subject without getting a little preachy, and unfortunately Heinlein does fall into that trap somewhat. That’s what knocks this down from five stars to four for me, because I like a book with a message, but occasionally I felt like it went a bit over-the-top. (Golly gee whiz, you’ll never believe what social mores were like in 1916! That’s not an exact quote, but it captures the sense of a letter that goes on for a few pages, and it’s not the only time such an attitude appears. And yeah. We know. The year 4216 or whatever is vastly different from 1916. You don’t have to use a sledgehammer to pound that in.)

That aside, Heinlein has constructed the perfect setting for looking at the nature of “love”. The Howard families have not completely eclipsed all other humanity when we join the story, but the characters we interact with are primarily Howards. A couple of thousand years into the experiment, genetics are paramount in the families’ decisions concerning marriage and reproduction. The social constructs we have put up around the concepts of love, sex, and marriage are secondary considerations at best — when they are considerations at all. That allows the author to take a closer look at what love actually is without the baggage we typically assign to it. It does have the unfortunate side effect of sometimes feeling as though he’s got a list of taboos he’s going through knocking down — but then again, why not? If one is to examine “love”, does it not make sense to question what we think of as standard assumptions about it? Does it not make sense to consider what would happen if the boundaries were different that govern to whom love may apply and under what circumstances and in what ways?

One might expect the result to be some sort of conclusion that love is inherently pure and simple and innocent. Far from it. I suppose that might be the case for some of the characters, maybe, but I don’t think I can say any of those things about Lazarus in particular with a straight face. It’s not an easy topic, or an easy question, and although there are some answers easily and readily supplied (“The more you love, the more you can love”), the exact nature of love is never quite pinpointed. Nor should it be. Love is a Mystery (capital intentional) of life, something that must be experienced, which is why Lazarus has such difficulty explaining it to the others. A book can pose what-ifs, but cannot tell you what it is, even through storytelling. As such, I appreciate that Heinlein puts up billboards and signposts to help us find it, but doesn’t actually try to nail it down. That almost redeems the occasional preachiness.

It’s not a book for everyone. (Is there such a thing?) I won’t try to pretend it is. Some people will find it very upsetting, what with its frank sexuality and casual approach to concepts like polygamy and incest and generally throwing out conventional boundaries. Some people will find it boring, and I’ll admit that it can take a while to get to the point sometimes. Some might find it a little pretentious, especially near the end when Heinlein starts getting artsy and throwing in a few bars of music as cues for what’s about to happen in the text. (Bugle calls. They’re military bugle calls, and completely appropriate, and an interesting thing to include, I think. I just wish I knew what all of them are.) Some people will just plain not like it. There are plenty of reasons why it might not appeal to a reader. But me? I like it. A lot.

(A side note: For extra fun, try being just in the midst of reading this book when you watch the Series Three Doctor Who episode “The Lazarus Experiment“. Whee!)

After the last time I read Time Enough for Love, I blogged a quick comment about how some people found the book (along with Stranger in a Strange Land) to be sexist and promote the domination of women. I wondered if these people had read the same book I had. I still wonder that.

Most-ish of the way through my second reading, I can think of only one woman I’d really say that Lazarus has “dominated”. I think it’s fair to use that term when referencing his behaviour toward Chairman Pro-Tem Arabelle Foote-Hedrick — but even that happened offscreen and had less to do with her being female than with her actions. There are other situations, many of them, in which Lazarus takes a position of authority over a female and gives her instructions which he expects to be obeyed. The thing is, what’s generally happening here is that they are in a situation requiring survival skills that the woman does not possess, and Lazarus does. Teaching a woman the things she needs to know to survive, giving her the tools to protect herself (and they do protect themselves), is hardly the same thing as dominating her.

In fact, as I indicated in my previous entry, the women are far more likely to manipulate Lazarus and assert their power over his life than the other way around. The more women are around him, the lower his chances of exerting any kind of real control. This is something I’ve seen done by other authors (::coughJordancough::), and it’s often annoying because the women come off with this air of smug superiority and the men just look weak and powerless. Which is only really a reversal of the domination problem, not a solution to it. It doesn’t bother me here, though. Why not? Two reasons.

The first is that there’s no air of superiority. The women have decided what needs to happen, and it will happen, but that doesn’t mean that they’re making a better choice. It only means that their choice is the one being made. They often have more information, or are taking a longer and broader view of what is necessary than Lazarus is, but they don’t get all smug about that. It’s also not just the women. Ira, Galahad, and eventually Justin are just as likely to join in, and even Lazarus gets his own bit of manipulation in here or there. We focus on the women because Lazarus focuses on them, but it’s really more of a group effort.

The other thing, though, is that it serves a purpose. It’s not there to make some stupid joke about how the women are always right, am I right, am I right, nudge nudge wink wink? It’s not there to put up a signpost that says “STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS OVER HERE!” It serves the theme of the work. Lazarus has lived for 2300+ years. He knows survival, and this is what he teaches to the people he cares for. What he hasn’t learned, though, is a thing that his shorter-lived family has known all along. Dora says it most explicitly when she explains to him that we all live for the same amount of time: we all live now. Lazarus says that he doesn’t think a shorter life allows time enough for love. He is constantly looking for it, trying to carve out that time and protect it. What his family (in every iteration) knows is that there is always time enough for love. This is what they are teaching him.