At just past 300 pages, I’m giving up on The Once and Future Queen. I was hoping it would be a time travel book, or a historical novel, or a fantasy, but more than anything else it’s a romance. Also, there’s none of the detail needed to give it a sense of place: it’s happening at Camelot, but it could be at summer camp or something. Too bad, they put a lot of care into the aesthetics of this book.
Finished Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris. The title refers to England’s Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy. It was a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and subsequent Commonwealth period, with the exception of certain crimes such as murder (without a license granted by King or Parliament), piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft. It also excluded all those deemed responsible for the execution of King Charles I in 1649 – the trial judges, prosecutors and signers of the king’s death warrant. Two of the signers – Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe – manage to escape from England and flee to the New World, where the close-knit Puritan community renders assistance. But Privy Council Clerk Richard Nayler is in hot pursuit. Very good. Recommended.
Next up is another Harris, his latest: Precipice.
Finished The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship, by Chaney Kwak. It’s excellent, and I strongly recommend it unless you’re planning to take a cruise anytime soon. Also finished Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History, by Anika Burgess, which is interesting.
Next up: How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories, by Holly Black; and Stormy, by Jim Kjelgaard.
I finished Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel and this lands as a solid Meh. It’s not a bad book, the characters, for the most part, are decently well drawn, the pacing ambles along at a steady pace, the plot is twisty but not confusing, but it just never once creates any anticipation or feeling of… really any sort at all. Just “yep that happened.”
Something I realized while listening to the audiobook version of A Connecticut Yankee on King Arthur’s Court is that it contains an early example of MST3K’ing.
I have to back up here a bit and explain. If you’re a big science fiction fan, especially one who goes to conventions, you’ll be familiar with The Eye of Argon, a Conan the Barbarian-esque pastiche written by one Jim Theis and published ina fanzine circa 1970. The piece has achieved notoriety as an especially bad piece of writing that’s not entirely deserved – Jim could come up with interesting scenes, a plot, and had a sense of pacing. But his choice of words and phrasing left much to be desired. Also whoever typeset his work added errors of their own. I’m not sure who gets the blame for poor spelling and inconsistencies. But reading “The Eye of Argon” without breaking up in laughter has become a challenge.
Twenty five years afterwards one Adam Cadre gave the story the MST3K treatment, interspersing comments from Mike Nelson and the bots between snippets from the story, “riffing” it in the style of the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s pretty good, and includes short interludes that capture the spirit of the show quite well. If you haven’t got a roomful of SF convention-goers handy, this is a great way to get a laugh. Other people through the years have tried “MST3K’ing” other works, but I find most of these efforts unsatisfying.
(You can find it here: The Eye of Argon )
But, listening to the audiobook of Connecticut Yankee, I realized that Mark Twain had done the same thing long before Adam Cadre or even MST3K ever existed. Twain frequently quotes long excerpts from Thomas Mallory’s le Morte d/Arthur, which was his source for the King Arthur legends (also .H. White’s inspiration, and, by extension, the source for Disney’s The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot). Mallory is, to the modern ear, long-winded, archaic, and boring. Also, as Twain points out, the actions of the characters is frequently illogical or absurd. His book is a very long critique of this seminal text. But when his hero, Hank Morgan (the titular Yankee) is riding on his imposed Quest in the company of Demoiselle Alisande la Corteloise (whom he sensibly calls “Sandy”) she recites long portions of this work, apparently from memory. Morgan then comments on them in his 19th century American slang and with his modern view of the thing. Then we revert to Sandy’s tale, then back to Hank’s riffing on it. It’s exactly like what Cadre did to The Eye of Argon.
But it doesn’t last all that long. Fortunately, probably, because the quotations from Mallory are the most boring stretches in the book.
Currently reading Collected Short Stories: volume 1 by W. Somerset Maugham. Pleasant writing, and of course lots of sexism and racism, as you would expect.
Definitely my feeling. The writing is lovely, but the POV character who was an author who hated doing a book tour after writing a book about a pandemic apocalypse–that felt really self-indulgent and unnecessary. The central plot depended on a twist that occurs in just about every novel in the subgenre, and it came across like a magician who pulls a coin from behind your ear and says, “Oooh! Ahhh! Alakazam! Magic!!!” And the most interesting bit of philosophical questioning in the book was resolved by the characters saying, “Huh, oh well.”
Finished How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories, by Holly Black. There were three versions of one story in the book, and there were very good. The frame story? Not so much. Also finished Stormy, by Jim Kjelgaard. It’s one of his dog books, and I enjoyed it. Wish I’d gotten to read it as a kid, when I would have liked it even more.
Next up: Into Unknown Skies: An Unlikely Team, A Daring Race, and the First Flight Around the World, by David K. Randall; and Janissaries, by Jerry Pournelle.
I would totally agree. I thought Edwin was the most interesting character and his story the most readable. Gaspery-Jaques was just plain obnoxious, some of that due to the awful read in audio.