I haven't had much to say lately.

I'm in a kind of a reading slump, although I enjoyed


Spiral Hunt by Margaret Ronald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A thoroughly enjoyable urban fantasy.  I hadn't read any for a while and found this one a refreshing change.  No strange creatures, just Celtic magic and mythology and a heroine with a sense of smell like a hound.  Definitely a nice twist with no huge romances or wild sex.  Characters well rounded and real enough to keep my interest.  I found the beginning a little choppy and had some trouble getting into it, but after it hit its stride it was a definite page turner.  Looking forward to the next one.



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and

Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars






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And

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A charming tale of a girl talented in knotting and designing rugs in 17th century Isfahan, Iran.  Very enjoyable.



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and

One Good Dog by Susan  Wilson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars






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And

Burndive by Karin Lowachee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Outstanding.



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And I LOVED

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Beautifully readable, well drawn characters, well woven plot.  Loosely based on the old tale of the six brothers turned into swans by their evil step mother, Marillier enriches the tale with a likable heroine and six well defined brothers as well as other interesting people along the way.

Lyrical descriptions of the enchanted forest with its magical creatures enrich the tale, beautifully woven to draw us in and surround us with this world.


Straight forward without layers and hidden meanings, it is easy to read.  While some brutality is present, including a rape that had me heart sore, it is presented with authenticity and heart.

All in all a very good book.  After a certain point I couldn't put it down and stayed up way too late to finish it.

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And

With No One As Witness CD by Elizabeth  George

My rating: 5 of 5 stars






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And I HATED

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


OMG you say!  Where does she get the nerve to give this only two stars?  Well, I had to screw up all my courage to do so.  First, this is a group read for a group that I moderate, so I feel some obligation to read the books and give them a good try and the benefit of the doubt.  Also, one of my favorite reviewers, whose taste I admire, said one shouldn't give up on this series until reading to Memories of Ice, so I've hung in there through Book 1 (which I gave 3 stars) and more than halfway through this one.

Here are my status updates.   For some reason Goodreads lists them most recent first, but that one was the deciding factor:

04/10        page 451    
    64.0%     "The Toblakai bared his teeth, a hand plunging through the slit in the lizard's belly to re-emerge with slick entrails. I'm sorry, but this strikes me as something nine year old boys might enjoy. I try to avoid seeing things like that in my life. Why am I reading about it? I think I'm going to have to give up."
04/10     page 431   
    61.0%     "Two quotes: We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on. And: It's the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of siginificance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance...all the bastion of fools. Cheery stuff, eh?"
04/10     page 431   
    61.0%     "Having just finished Marillier's Daughter of the Forest, thought I'd head back into the blood, gore, and pure disgusting filth of Erikson, :)."
04/02     page 429   
    61.0%     "Well there was a great battle, but now it's gotten all weird again."
03/26     page 388   
    55.0%   
03/25     page 360   
    51.0%     "O M G. This is SO depressing."
03/24     page 321   
    46.0%     "Finished Part Two"
03/23     page 261   
    37.0%     "Chapter nine"
03/23     page 241   
    34.0%     "I found some good guys!"
03/22     page 222   
    32.0%     "Proceeding through the gore, hoping to get to the other side. :)"
03/21     page 195   
    28.0%     "Well, we've made it through blood, rape, slaughter, babies with crushed skulls, impaled on pikes, blood flies, wolves, demons, sand storms, and more."
03/20     page 155   
    22.0%     "Starting Book two. A whole lot of unrelenting violence and gore so far."
03/20     page 135   
    19.0%     ""Foul snot of rabid dogs! Anal crust of dysenteried goats!" - lol. A bit of creative cursing. Sounds Arabic." 2 comments
03/20     page 84   
    12.0%     "Felisin is nothing if not practical, eh?"
03/20     page 29   
    4.0%     "Good lord."

Call me squeamish, but a guy slitting open a lizard's belly and withdrawing slick entrails for a meal is just plain disgusting.  I think it's given me PTSD because I was having flashbacks this morning eating my eggs.

Fans of Erikson call it 'brillaint', 'layered with meaning', 'complex', 'tragic', 'funny', and on and on.  I have to grant them most of those accolades are true.  But there's only so much childish slime I can find my way through in order to enjoy it.  I understand some of the characters display courage in the face of adversity, honor among thieves, and so on and so forth, but there are many fine books I can read to find those characteristics.  And those are written by very fine writers indeed.  Cormack McCarthy, Dorothy Dunnett, Colum McCann, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Guy Gavriel Kay, Carol Berg, Janny Wurts to name only a few.

One of my main objections while reading these books is that few react to what would be horrific trauma if experienced in real life.  True, soldiers in battle numb out emotionally in order to go on.  Most of them pay a huge price later.  This is pointed out here and there, but I don't see much of it in action.  Perhaps it's not necessary in this world, as people's wounds are instantly healed by mages, people die only to come back to life.  I guess I wouldn't mind seeing my friend's head chopped up by a propellor blade if all the pieces could be put back together by magic.  In real life people who suffer this trauma sit in my office and bleed.  And patch themselves back up with cocaine or by abusing their loves or by going crazy.

So, sorry to be such a wimp, but I'm letting this series go.  I'm old and semi-retired.  I want to enjoy life in my leisure time.  Or if I read about tragedy I want the author to show me it's authentic with more than endless images of horror and gore.


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LOVED

Betrayer by C.J. Cherryh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Unputdownable!  Non-stop action, political tension, all out war, and suspense.  I just love this series.  No one does political suspense or weaves a plot like Cherryh.

This series has to be read from the beginning.  And it's worth it.  In each book we learn more about the atevi world, about their thinking, their customs.  And Bren Cameron, the human negotiator/ambassador sticks out harrowing situations and broadens his own understanding of atevi politics and increases his value to atevi leaders.  Most engrossing and gratifying.

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So there you have something of a summary of my recent reading.  I'm taking a long vacation from Black Sun Rising and am attempting to get into Carol Berg's The Spirit Lens.  Listening to Dragonfly in Amber as it was on sale at Audible.com.  It's about 100 years long, though.  Maybe my indifference about the Friedman is due to burnout on ugly monsters in Deadhouse Gates, I don't know.  Maybe I'll get back to it later and love it, but I doubt it.  Maybe I'm too old to be scared by scary monsters.

A friend has a mom and an uncle in hospital so I guess I'm lucky.  Am meeting eldest daughter et al in Sturbridge, MA for Easter dinner Sunday.  An advantage of working for a Catholic hospital is Good Friday off, so am piddling around today.  Am on vacation officially until May 3!  Hope I have fun.  Am going to Sarasota, FL to visit a friend, so it should be very good.

Last night I dreamed I joined 'Inda Readers' on Facebook!

Now what do you suppose that means?  I started Inda yesterday after finishing C. J. Cherryh's Betrayer and Martin O'Brien's Jacquot and the Waterman.  After finally deciding, on p. 380-something of Deadhouse Gates truly means 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'  What a bunch of tripe.


Here is some stuff I wrote to a friend about that sad and sorry series: 


Erikson - you can skim, as none of it makes sense anyway. I've now read a lot of reviews and two things are fairly remarkable: 1)everyone says it's too jumbled to follow, has too many characters - who can remember 3 books later who is a character he spent a paragraph on in book 1? A couple said his magic systems are arbitrary (one called them deus ex machina) and contradict each other. And 2) NO ONE MENTIONS the APPALLING violence.

A few things that I found 'memorable' -

A god that giggles as he takes possession of a young girl and turns her into an assassin.

The endless battlefields with blood, body parts, skulls, and one that was the remains of people eaten by the huge hounds of hell? Hounds of something. Earth roiling to spit out thousands on thousands of dead. Apparently this fighting has been going on for eons.

A ritual for Hood (god of death) that involved a priest covering himself with the blood of murderers that was collected in amphora so that huge swarms of flies covered him, and then all flew away revealing - ta da! - nothing. The priest had disappeared.

A young girl being raped over and over.

And a battlefield with corpses of men who'd been gutted, their women raped and then strangled with their entrails and babies with crushed skulls or impaled on spears.

And this goes on and on and on and on. Bah.

One reviewer said, "This was written for a certain audience and it's not me."

Well said, well said.

The complexity is in the gazillions of people you have to keep track of and don't give a fig about. Intellectually complex? A reviewer of a later book complained about Erikson's 'preaching'. Maybe that's what they mean? Maybe there's some vague intellectual conceit behind all this? But in the end who cares?

One reviewer of The Crippled God said Huh? That's it? And seemingly this is a reviewer for some website or other who's been following the series.

Lovely quotes from Checkmate

I just finished listening to it again and am moved to write down these quotes:


"I shall send gems of lapis lazuli: I shall make her fields into vineyards, and the fruit of her love into orchards.  Philippa."


"When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
and she me caught in her arms, long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, 'Dear heart'..."


And then Jerott: "My beloved is unto me as a cluster of campfires in the vineyards of Engedi."  My beloved is dead.


And Lymond, at last, to Philippa, "Qedeshet, Mistress of all the Gods, Eye of Ra, who has none like her....Come and let us beget all kinds of living things."


And then, "I have begun to eat," said Francis Crawford.  "And I have begun to slake my thirst.  But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me forever."

I confess to indulging my addiction - am reading Checkmate again!

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However 'reading' is really 'listening'.  I finally got the tapes from Recorded Books.  Sure do wish they were available to buy!  Easily converted to digital.

Meanwhile, I finished a second listen to Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien.  Here's my review:

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've listened to it before. It's ok. Very male. A lot about sailing vessels. Not much about the sea. Seems historically accurate.


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AND the most exciting news is that I am making serious arrangements to go to Florida to visit Janny Wurts.  She's lured me down there with an offer to read Initiate's Trial, the next volume of The Wars of Light and Shadow, my other favorite series besides Dunnett!

Got my used hard cover volume of King Hereafter yesterday.  The paper cover isn't quite pristine, but the book itself is.

Started Magician: Master to read with the Fantasy Book Club Series club, and am continuing in Gardens of the Moon, which is not compelling, but I am enjoying it more than I expected.  There are people who are FANATIC about the Steven Erikson series, Malazan, Book of the Fallen.  Also being read by the series club.

Meanwhile, my knee is much better.  Do need to exercise to keep it that way.  I need to say that as a mantra! Har.  My natural resistance to exercise is a fierce thing.

My son-in-law's birthday is this weekend and we're taking him out to eat at some fancy Mexican restaurant at Blue Back Square.  Yum.

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                  Fantasy Book Club        

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February
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                Griffin's Daughter

                by Leslie Ann Moore

                                             Start date: January  1, 2009
              
                  

                   

                                      

                                      
                The Princess Bride

                by William Goldman

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And here's King Hereafter

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Suddenly I knew what I wanted to say.

King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4.5 stars.  The longer I sit with it, the better it gets.



I started reading this book with a Dunnett group on Yahoo, but shortly got frustrated because it went so slow and there was virtually no discussion as many (including me) were first time readers and they're Nazis about spoilers.  Personally, I don't mind spoilers and sometimes even seek them out.  'Spoilers' implies that all there is to a book is the plot and what happens, and if I know that then the whole book is spoiled.  Since this is the story of the life of a king of Alba, as Scotland was called at that time, it's hardly a spoiler to know that he dies in the end.  It doesn't take the sadness away.  At least not for me.  To say that is to say that I don't want to know about the life of the people I love because I know they are going to die in the end.  What poppycock.  And after a month and a half, I got impatient and just read to the end.

For me, a lot of the enjoyment of a book is in the reading, the way it's written, the characters, the setting, the twists and turns along the way.  And this one, being a Dunnett book, has plenty of wealth in all of those story elements.

I never read or studied Shakespeare beyond what I had to in high school, so wasn't familiar with the plot of Macbeth, the Shakespearean play.  I just read a summary on Wikipedia and this story is nothing like that.  The fictional king, Thorfinn (his Viking name) who later is called Macbeth (his baptismal name) is loosely based on a real king of Scotland who ruled Scotland, then called Alba, from 1040 to 1057.  Dunnett's story is a more accurate portrayal of what we know of his life than the famous play, at least according to the Wikipedia article on him.  Wikipedia on Macbeth, King of Scotland.

No one matches Dunnett in creating characters.  Thorfinn, a tall, gangly, ugly, black haired Viking becomes a hero along the way.  Typical Dunnett style, we only see him at first through the eyes of others who may or may not know what is really going on in Thorfinn's head.  It becomes clear fairly rapidly that he is a great fighter and smart ... very smart.  He's also an independent thinker and this is totally frustrating to his foster father, Thorkel Fostri, a peripheral character who is funny, fierce, loyal and finally lovable.  One can only imagine his sorrow after Thorfinn is killed.  Thorfinn's wife, Groa, is also a memorable character and is left to finish his work at his death.  The love between them is vividly and poignantly written.

The only thing that makes me lower my rating from 5 stars is that there is a lot of time spent talking about the people, the family lines, the political machinations, and so forth.  I got lost as I could not follow who was related to who and why unless they were main characters.  And since we follow Thorfinn/Macbeth's life from around the time he was 5 until his death in his 40's, there are a LOT of people.  Fortunately I'm pretty good at picking out the significant people along the way, so was able to keep track of most of what was going on.

Well worth reading, if a significant investment in time.  I read the ebook which was 902 pages.


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It's the last day of February

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Apparently I haven't had anything to say for the whole month.  My knee has been killing me and it's better now, so maybe it loosened my tongue.  Or my fingers.  Or my thoughts.

I watched the Egyptians and now the Libyans fight for their freedom.  I'm disgusted with the US for shoring up these despicable dictators.

I've read, but nothing memorable.  It took me from January 6 to finish King Hereafter, late last night.  First, I was trying to read with the DDANZ group  over on Yahoo, but got frustrated with the slowness and the lack of discussion so finally tore off on my own.  It's still making me tear up with its heart breaking ending.  I knew it was coming, had to come, but still.  Broke my heart.  Thorfinn/Macbeth is the hero - an ancient King of Scotland - and I fell in love with him.  Dorothy Dunnett does create the most wonderful heroes.

I am reading Erikson's Gardens of the Moon with the Fantasy Book Club Series group.  It's confusing, filled with unfathomable magic, slaughter, gore.  But everyone raves about the series, so I'm giving it a shot.  Of course, everyone raves about the Wheel of Time series as well, and I quit after the first book because the characters are too dumb to live, which makes me not care what happens to them.  Gah!


I've written a brief review of KH, will post when I'm done.  Other than that, the best book I read all month was Death Without Company by Craig Johnson - #2 in a series about Walt Longmire, a sheriff in the Powder River country of Wyoming.  His wry sense of humor, his dog - named Dog - and his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear - all make them wonderful.  Actually, I listened to it, and George Guidall does a wonderful job of narrating.  I've got the first - The Cold Dish - in my Nook, but I'd almost rather listen to it than read it.


Oh!  I forgot I read Warchild by Karin Lowachee, which was powerful good!  Here's my review:
Warchild by Karin Lowachee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The book starts with the hero, eight year old Jos, huddled in a hiding place on the space ship he and his parents call home, listening to a battle rage outside.  It proceeds through his capture by the pirate captain, his escape, his rescue by a man sympathetic to the alien race that Earth Hub is trying to eradicate, and his eventual growth into manhood.  This is a character driven story that takes place in a future universe that is well developed and real -- my favorite kind of read.

It starts in the second person, creating some needed emotional distance from the terror stricken boy, but morphs into first person fairly quickly.  I'm not even sure when it happened.


Lowachee creates such emotional reality with so few words and without the graphic violence of so many books, that I found my heart gripped with the emotions Jos was experiencing - his loneliness, the frozen emptiness of abandonment, the avoidance of the real traumas of murder, dismemberment, rape and child abuse.

The alien planet where Jos learns his skills in fighting, computer hacking (or Burn Diving as they call it) is a place of beauty and peace modeled on the oriental.  The giant space ships are felt and imagined.  The torn loyalties between Earth and the aliens are wrenching.  The connection between Jos and Niko, his rescuer, is real and moving and we sense Jos' need to be loved and valued.

I didn't want it to end.  I'm glad there are two more books.


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This one was pretty good as well:
The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Very complex, densely woven story of Nicholas Valiarde and his attempt to exact revenge on the man he holds responsible for his foster father's unjust conviction and execution for necromancy ten years earlier.

Great characters, fascinating world, very interesting magic, and some truly scary moments made it a great read.

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And here's my review of the Craig Johnson:
Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Another delightful episode with Walt Longmire, brilliantly narrated by George Guidall.  The wry humor, the characters, the setting in the Powder River country of Wyoming, all combine to make a thoroughly enjoyable listen.


In this story, Walt struggles to uncover the twisted family secrets of an elderly woman who dies in a nursing home.  He shortly discovers she was murdered, and then follows a convoluted story of her life... His Indian buddy, Henry, provides endless entertainment with his dry wit, his brilliant understatements, and his knowledge of Indian language and custom.

I have a couple of the titles on my Nook, but kind of wish I'd bought the audio versions instead, as Walt is a perfect foil for George Guidall's narration.

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