book list, July 2006

[edenfalling]

I made three resolutions this year. First, get a job. (Done!) Second, exercise more regularly and lose weight. (Done!) Third, keep a list of the books I read.

These are the books I read in July, 2006:

New: 33
---A Tolkien Miscellany, J. R. R. Tolkien (mostly fantasy, a bit of literary theory: I'd read a couple of the individual pieces before -- Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wooton Major -- but Tree and Leaf, Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the various Middle Earth poems were new to me, so I'm calling this a new book.)
---Southern Fire, Juliet E. McKenna (fantasy: a magical invasion of a decentralized archipelago whose people abhor magic as evil. There are a number of interesting concepts in the way McKenna sets up her society, but she finks out and uses boring elemental-style magic, and I found myself wishing that she had left the 'evil barbarian' magical invaders out altogether and just told a story about inter-island politics instead, because those and the fortune-telling systems were the parts that really interested me. Also, her names don't have a consistent ethno-linguistic 'sound,' and her spelling system is a mess. But I will be reading the sequel, when it comes out, because I like Kheda and I want to know what happens to him next.)
---The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (fantasy: this has been described as Ocean's Eleven in a fantastical version of medieval Venice, and, barring the Victorian London influences, that's about spot on. Marvelously engaging; go read it now!)
---The Mirror Prince, Violette Malan (fantasy: yet another 'let's do a new spin on elves and fairyland!' attempt that isn't actually new or particularly interesting at all. A waste of perfectly good time and money. The technical quality of the writing is good, though, even if the subject matter is pointless.)
---Time Was, Nora Roberts (romance: unexceptionable for the genre, though the standard sci-fi 'future' and the time-travel schtick would've been irritating if I'd actually cared enough to take it seriously.)
---Times Change, Nora Roberts (romance: sequel to Time Was, in which the previous lead characters' sister and brother get together. Hey, this is how I kill time while I'm closing the store some nights.)
---Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours, Jim Butcher (comics-based novel: pretty standard for a Spidey story, though Jim Butcher writes it quite well. I may have to look into his original work.)
---Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer (fantasy: definitely for kids, no particular depth, and quite fun, though it doesn't pay more than the barest lip service to realism and the fairy society would never in a million years actually work.)
---Fruits Basket, vols. 7-10, 13, Natsuki Takaya (manga: somehow manages to include slapstick humor, crack fantasy, high school travails, martial arts fighting, and pull-your-heartstrings drama/romance/tragedy... without seeming to have multiple personality disorder. Actually reduced me to sniffles a couple times, which is not easy to do!)
---Angel Sanctuary, vols. 1-20, Kaori Yuki (manga: this series ate my brain. It is fucked-up and brilliant, and I will review it in more detail later.)



Old: 6
---The Death of Chaos, L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (fantasy: I have ISSUES with Modesitt -- the sound effects alone could keep me going for twenty minutes -- but I keep rereading some of his books anyway, so clearly there's something there that resonates. I think, in this particular case, it's the wood-crafting scenes.)
---Fruits Basket, vols. 4-6, 11-12, Natsuki Takaya (manga: heartwarming)



July Total = 39 books (plus a lot of fanfiction, a couple newspapers, and several magazines)

Year to Date = 180 books (132 new, 48 old)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You know, I don't have access to a lot of this books, though now you've got me wanting to read most of them - but one book I did read was Artemis Fowl. I'm not very good at world-building details, you see. So when you said "the fairy society would never work", I went "oh, well, all right", and two seconds later, "...but why not?" And now I'm curious. *and sheepish*
Would you mind elaborating, please?

[edenfalling]

Sure! I will do this tomorrow, when I have time to put my thoughts in order.

[edenfalling]

Okay.

What I mean by 'would never work' isn't that the individual pieces of the society are impossible in and of themselves, or that it doesn't work within the story. What I mean is that it doesn't make sense on its own terms. The fairy society only makes sense when viewed as, essentially, a collection of plot devices.

First of all, no fairy in the book acts like a real adult, even though some of them are supposed to be in positions of authority. This makes perfect sense for the universe of a children's book, but does not speak well of a culture's ability to keep order and maintain itself.

Second, the combination of magic and super-advanced science is not organic. That is, there's really no explanation of how and why those two things fit together. Fairies are magical because they're fairies, and they have sci-fi technology because it looks 'cool' on the page and allows Colfer's plot to work.

Third, there are a lot of little internal contradictions, like the way the LEP forces go on and on about whether various phrasings are or are not invitations... when it's revealed, at the end of the story, that if they're not invited into a building, they vomit. So why would they have to argue over whether Holly was actually invited into that Italian town to stop the troll? She didn't vomit; therefore, the cry for help was an invitation, right? Little inconsistencies like that bug me.

Finally, the fairy society is clearly set up to mirror and mock bits and pieces of modern Western societies. They talk about environmentalism and decry human pollution, but they also have fairy 'hippies' and so on. They are only recently integrating women into their crack police force, which mirrors the feminist movement in the past fifty or so years. It's perfectly rational for the fairies to be influenced by human societies, but given that Colfer says at the start of the story that fairies have lived all over the world, why are they only mirroring Europe and North America?

You see? Colfer seems to have decided that he wanted his fairies to have certain characteristics, and certain abilities and faults, and he designed a society to produce them without really paying any attention to internal coherence or to whether such a society would actually come to exist on its own. This is fine -- he doesn't need an internally consistent fairy society for a light adventure/caper story -- but it does mean that the book lacks a certain depth.

Hmm. Also, he mentions inter-species conflicts within the fairy world, but doesn't really explain how the society is governed, nor when they moved from royalty to (apparently) some sort of Council-based government. And the Lower Elements Police (LEP) is a name created to support a joke; I rather doubt that, left to their own devices, the fairies would call themselves 'lower elements.' I bet they'd just call such things 'the police,' 'the army,' and so on.

I hope that helps!

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, when you put it like that, such a society isn't very plausible... Your comments were very helpful (and I love how your reviews always seem to make sense. I think I get it now ^^ . Thank you very much for your time and attention.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and a ")" was supposed to be between the "sense" and the dot. Sorry about that!