I Have Moved to WordPress!

 I will see if I can update my links for FrightFall #Readathon and I think I might leave the blog up (why not?) but future posts will be at WordPress! Please come find me & comment there!

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Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (2014)

A man visits his childhood home after many years away. His old house is gone but the farm at the end of the road is still there along with its pond. He remembers an eleven year old girl named Lettie Hempstock who lived there, and who had claimed that the pond behind her house was an ocean. He met her when he was seven years old and had since forgotten how they met and what happened when a sinister woman named Ursula Monkton came to look after him and his sister while their parents were away. Everything he has forgotten starts to come back to him.

I listened to the audio this time (read by the author) and really loved the narration. I ended up listening to it twice. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”

“Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.”


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Review: Four Weird Tales

Four Weird Tales by Algernon Blackwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Algernon Blackwood (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English novelist and short-story writer best known for his stories of the supernatural. Many of his stories are in the public domain and online. I have previously read The Willows and The Man Whom the Trees Loved (online and as Librivox audio recordings). This is another Librivox recording: https://librivox.org/four-weird-tales... I started the collection John Silence but decided not to finish it at least for now; maybe I will try it some other time.) The readers are pretty much professional quality and I highly recommend it. All four stories are variations on a theme: the protagonist sets out to discover the secrets of the universe.

The Insanity of Jones -- A man seeks revenge for injustices suffered in a past life. Or maybe he's just crazy; take your pick.

The Glamour of the Snow -- My favorite! A fine ghost story. Like The Willows this story deals with the terror and awe of the natural world. one of my favorite bits:
The world lay smothered in snow. The châlet roofs shone white beneath the moon, and pitch-black shadows gathered against the walls of the church. His eye rested a moment on the square stone tower with its frosted cross that pointed to the sky: then travelled with a leap of many thousand feet to the enormous mountains that brushed the brilliant stars. Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and the silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart—and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him...

The Man Who Found Out -- A man discovers the secrets of the universe and then wishes he hadn't. This one fell a bit flat for me. But there's a good post about it as part of The Lovecraft Reread, a project at Tor.com about HP Lovecraft, writers (like Blackwood) who inspired him, and writers who were inspired by him.

https://www.tor.com/2018/02/21/you-wi...

Sand -- The protagonist travels to Egypt and joins two other travelers exploring the desert. This is the longest story in the collection. I liked the beginning, but I think this one is a bit too long and slow. It drags a bit.

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Review: The Stone Sky (reread from 2018)

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

**reread 9/5/2020** Hmm. . . I thought I would have more to say about this conclusion to the trilogy when I reread the series. It was definitely worth rereading, and The Stone Sky certainly makes up for my slight disappointment with The Obelisk Gate. But contrary to what I was hoping for when I started this reread (June), I don't have much to add. I was more emotionally invested this time because keeping track of the plot didn't take up so much of my attention, so that was satisfying.  

Here are some of the highlights:
"Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place."

"What he offers, and what she has finally realized she needs, is purpose. Not even Schaffa has given her that, but that's because Schaffa loves her unconditionally. She needs that love, too, oh how she needs it, but in this moment, when her heart has been most thoroughly broken, when her thoughts are at their least focused, she craves something more... solid.

She will have the solidity that she wants. She will fight for it and kill for it, because she’s had to do that again and again and it is habit now, and if she is successful she will die for it. After all, she is her mother’s daughter—and only people who think they have a future fear death."

"There isn’t a single evil to point to, a single moment when everything changed. Things were bad and then terrible and then better and then bad again, and then they happened again, and again, because no one stopped it."

"But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them – even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky."

**review 9/19/2018** I suspect these books would benefit from rereading. It would be interesting to read them again knowing what's going on and how things resolve, but at the same time I don't know if I loved these books quite enough to want to reread them. Now that I've finished the trilogy I think The Fifth Season is probably the best of the three. There’s just a lot going on in these books, and the first book is the one that does the best job of balancing the focus on the characters with other aspects of the story, I think. In the other two I felt less connected to the characters, but I still definitely recommend reading the whole thing. I don't read very many series, but this barely feels like a series to me because the books are so closely connected.

So I'm left a tiny bit unsatisfied, but still — as someone who rarely reads epic fantasy (or post apocalyptic sf — and these books are a little of both) I am very impressed. I haven't read anything else quite like this.

I'm having a hard time writing a real review for this one, but here are some longer reviews that I thought were insightful.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/19/542469... (a very good discussion with only minor spoilers)

http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/20... (major spoilers, don't read if you haven't read the book)

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15 Books of Summer update

 

I read: 

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller 

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner I may not get around to reviewing these sorry 

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (reread) review

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell  finished this in August still need to review it

The Lais of Marie de France review

The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin (reread) review

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie review

Hyperion by Dan Simmons review

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers review

The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean (reread) I'm not sure if I will review this one but it will get a review eventually - maybe next time I read it

Bartleby the Scrivener  by Herman Melville - I still need to review this

The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany review

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson review upcoming

13 of 15 books read

Review: The Lays of Marie de France

The Lays of Marie de France by Marie de France
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lays of Marie de France are a series of twelve short lays (narrative poems) in Old French. I read this translation as a library ebook, but it turns out that it is also available under a Creative Commons license:
https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/12...

The translator, David R Slavitt, writes:
Marie who? A number of suggestions have been proposed for the identity of this wonderful twelfth-century poet. Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and half-sister to Henry II, King of England, is a plausible
candidate, but Marie, Abbess of Reading, Marie I of Boulogne, Marie, Abbess of Barking, and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot, are all possibilities. There were a lot of Maries, after all, but only a few who could read and write in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French. It is not inappropriate, however, for her to be a bit mysterious and even emblematic as the author of these strange, suggestive, and intriguing poems. One important thing we do know about her is that she also translated the Ysopet, a collection of 103 Aesopic fables, which could have influenced the
Lais but at least suggest something about her taste in literature. There is a fabulous quality to these poems, which are at one and the same time childish and very knowing, innocent and sophisticated.

From the first tale:
A good story deserves to be
well told. My gracious lords, Marie
understands her obligation
on such a fortunate occasion
when an interesting story
presents itself. And yet I worry
that any show of excellence
invites envy of women’s or men’s
achievements. Slanders, insults, and lies
attend me. Everybody tries
to sneer at whatever one composes —
they joke and even thumb their noses.
They are cowardly dogs that bite,
mean, malicious, and full of spite.
But I refuse to be deterred
as, line by line and word by word,
I do my best to compose my lay,
whatever the jealous critics say.
I shall relate some tales to you
from Brittany that I know are true
and worthy of your attention. In
a friendly spirit, let us begin.


The highlights for me were Bisclavret (one of the earliest werewolf stories!) and Lanval. Lanval is (I think) the only one set in king Arthur's court and I think I will want to come back to it after I have read Malory. Arthur holds a feast for the knights where he gives them all rewards for their great deeds but he forgets about Lanval who later sets out on a journey. He is wooed by a fairy lady who makes him rich, and must promise not to reveal her existence. I'm sure you can guess that a promise like that is going to cause problems for him down the road, but that would be telling! Ultimately it's a fun reversal of the traditional damsel in distress tale where a knight rescues a lady, but I'm not saying any more than that. Just read it.

There's also a very short lai concerning the romance of Tristan and Iseult. This one is so short that it was a little unsatisfying, but it made me want to read the longer version/s. I'm not sure when I will get around to it.



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#Frightfall Readathon Sign-up

 

#FrightFall Readathon is all about scary books! Looking forward to it!