Little Murmurings

Owlsight, by Mercedes Lackey

2009-11-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

Read
In small chunks as breaks between homework.

Bottom Line
As with Owlflight, not her best work. Worth reading if you've gotten through Owlflight and are curious to find out what happened to Darian.

Full Review
This books picks up about four years after Owlflight ends. Darian has spend the intervening years with the Hawkbrothers, learning a bit more about controlling his mage gift and growing from a constantly whining teenager into an only sometimes whining adult. Meanwhile, as Darian's been traipsing about the countryside, Keisha has stepped into the role of village healer. She's got the healing gift, but without training she's in danger of going nuts.

The main problem with this book is that it doesn't get going until about two-thirds of the way through. That's right. Most of this book is exposition - interesting exposition, to be sure, but nothing really happens until the same barbarian tribes that trashed the village the first time around are spotted coming back. Once Darian, Keisha, and the Hawkbrothers meet the barbarians, the story really starts to pick up. Unfortunately, all the action takes place in a few chapters at the end of the book.

At the end of the day, I find myself hoping that the last book in the trilogy is going to focus in on the interaction between these two different cultures. Otherwise, I'm afraid I may be in for another disappointment.

The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen, by Michael Ruhlman

2009-11-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

Read
This one took me a few weeks to get through. It's broken into multiple, easily digestible chunks, but for some reason I found myself waiting several days in between readings.

Bottom Line
A good read for anyone interested in the world of the kitchen.

Full Review
I picked this up because Kitchen Confidential was checked out and the copy on the front flap of the jacket looked interesting. Ruhlman is a professional food writer who's been to culinary school (the CIA, or Culinary Institute of America) and spends a great deal of time hobnobbing with some of the country's most famous celebrity chefs. There are a few points in the book where he belabors this point a little (do I really want or need to know about the night he spend drinking with Anthony Bourdain?), but on the whole he uses these connections to research and write what is really a great overview of where the chefs of America are today.

The book is a kind of follow up to his previous works; his goal is to see how the world of the professional chef had expanded since he started writing in the mid '90s. The book jumps a bit, first giving in depth character profiles of figures the author finds interesting, from the current head of the CIA to a chef in Chicago doing wild experiments with food to a chef in Maine serving more traditional fare straight from her garden. These profiles are interesting, giving the reader a cross section of what the work of a chef is really like, without any of the glamour or pizzaz that the Food Network specializes in.

Then he gets to the marketing stuff, the way a chef expands his reach. If you're not a chef interested in producing and marketing a brand, you can skim through this section. I did. I also found this to be the most disturbing part of the book, as it accentuates the current state of affairs in the culinary world, that is to say, the divorce of the chef and the kitchen. Although Ruhlman doesn't lay it out as clearly as he could, the bottom line is obvious: chefs don't make money. There's a great bit where he talks about profit margins in the restaurant industry, which are about as slim as you can get and still have a viable business. This is what drives chefs to expand - restaurants in New York, Vegas, Napa - not to mention the sauces, spices, kitchen knives, and dinnerware.

While I found this a bit slow to read - somewhat dense and ponderous at times - it was well worth the time invested.

B is for Burglar, by Sue Grafton

2009-11-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

Read
Mostly in one night.

Bottom Line
Light. Fun. Good for airplanes and waiting rooms.

Full Review
I started A is for Alibi intending to read through the series. I moved on to T is for Trespass (out of order, I know, but it was the next one I came across) and have now finished B is for Burglar. While I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to avoid Grafton's alphabet series, I don't think I'll be seeking them out, either.

She writes your basic mystery novel, a whodunnit filled with red herrings, plot twists and dead bodies. The book is narrated by Kinsey Millhone, a 30-something PI whose failures as a police officer and an insurance investigator have led her to open shop on her own. As far as fictional PIs go, she's amusing, narrating the story in a slightly sarcastic tone. It's good that these books are easy to read, because tone is pretty much all that keeps the novel going until the denouement in the final pages.

Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear

2009-11-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

Read
On BART, between school and home and back again.

Bottom Line
Hard core sci-fi at its best. Read it.

Full Review
The brilliance of good sci-fi, of course, is that despite a setting in a galaxy far, far away it manages to be completely and utterly relevant to the here and now, often in a way that most contemporary novels are not. This one is no exception. Anvil is in one sense an adventure story - the last citizens of a destroyed earth on a quest to hunt down their planet's killers. In another sense it is a story about the threads that hold society together, the ways in which we relate to each other, and the ultimately fragility of all human institutions.

The children of the ship have been given a single mission: to enact the Law, which requires that all civilizations which make self aware, planet killing machines be destroyed. Children, to anyone familiar with Orson Scott Card's Ender series, will conjure up images of ten year olds in space suits. Bear's children are older, in their early twenties, but no less childlike and unaware than Card's. This, then, presents one of the central tensions in the novel: whether these children, with such a small experience of actually living, will be the ones to decide the fate of another alien race.

I suspect that I have done this rather backwards in reading Anvil of Stars before Forge of God, which lays out the story of the destruction of the earth and the salvation of humankind by an advanced civilization known as the Benefactors. On the other hand, there was nothing missing in Anvil, no references to the past work that obscured the text or dropped me from my journey thousands of light years from the earth back into my seat at the BART station.

A brief note on post modernism. In most situations, I wholeheartedly agree with whomever coined the phrase "No mo' po' mo'." Quite often, authors use this as a crutch, frantically borrowing ideas and threads and even whole scenes from others in an attempt to disguise their complete inability to spin a world on their own. Not so in this case. Bear takes the best of the post-modernist movement - the ability to take allusion and turn it into something else. The children of the ship become "Wendys" and "Lost Boys", their leader is the "Pan" and the second in command is the "Christopher Robin." These fragments represent the children's grasping at the now lost culture of earth much in the way the novelist grasps for fragments of meaning in this age of instant and universal culture.

Arrows Fall, by Mercedes Lackey

2009-11-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Read
Half-Price. A late Monday and Tuesday combo kept me in the store until they kicked me out at close.

Bottom Line
Enjoyable, if not intellectually stimulating.

Full Review
This wraps up Talia's adventures, neatly tying up all the loose ends left dangling by the previous two books. The proverbial gun placed on the table in the first act was duly fired, lingering suspicions were resolved, and the star-crossed lovers finally found happiness in each other's arms.

The YA label, which you will remember I had my doubts about in the first Arrows book, has been removed due to a significant escalation in violence. I've also skipped a book - look for the middle in the series whenever Half Price gets it back on the shelf.

I won't rehash the previous Arrows review. Suffice it to say, that Lackey at her earliest gives a frolicking read.

Owlflight, by Mercedes Lackey

2009-11-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

Read
Mostly on BART

Bottom Line
Quite frankly, not one of her best. I'll probably end up reading the rest of the series simply to finish it up, but as of right now I'd advise you to skip it.

Full Review
Chronologically, it follows the events in the Mage Storms series. It's billed as a stand alone, but I think that without having read some of the other Valdemar books it would be a bit confusing. The story is classic Lackey and follows a teenage protagonist on a journey of self discovery. That's pretty much it in terms of plot - definitely not as much of a page turner as some of her earlier novels.

The first half of the book is spent in teenage misery, which tends to be reflected in long rants and whines by the main character. It's a rather long set up for what happens in the rest of the book (and in the following two books) that could probably been cut to a rather short chapter or prologue. Once Darian's village is burned and he's rescued by the Hawkbrothers things get a bit more interesting, although the whining continues. All of which means that the readable parts of the book are rather slim, especially if you do like me and start flipping pages when Darian starts in on one of his self pitying inner monologues.

My guess is that she's simply running out of material for the Valdemar novels. I think this is borne out by the fact that she hasn't written a Valdemar book in a while - the newest ones have focused on the Elemental Mages series as well as the rather fun Obsidian Trillogy with James Mallory.

Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey

2009-11-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

Read
Another Half Price Special (although I have vague recollections of having read it several years ago).

Bottom Line
A great deal of fun, even if there's not much substantive weight to it. A great book for an airplane ride. I'm labeling it YA with some hesitation, because it was obviously meant for an adult audience. The protagonist, however, is someone that the YA audience will identify and sympathize with.

Full Review
Mercedes Lackey has created the quintessential fantasy novel universe in the imagined kingdom of Valdemar. Complete with magic, a kingdom perpetually on the edge of disaster, and an intrepid band of (sometimes) unlikely heroes, the Valdemar novels draw the reader in with their fast paced plots and strongly determined characters.

Arrows of the Queen is, I believe, one of the earlier novels. As such, it not only makes a great introductory read to the world of the author but also provides a stand-alone experience that the later novels lack. [Note that this is the first of a three-part series, and while the other novels in the series have prologues that attempt to catch the reader up on the action, the entire series is best read in order.]

The main character of Arrows is Talia, a plucky thirteen year old girl who'd rather be reading or running around outdoors than staying inside and behaving like a properly subordinate female. This attitude gets her in frequent trouble with her family; luckily for Talia (and in the deus ex machina fashion so common to novels of the genre) she is whisked away in an unlikely rescue and brought to the capital of Valdemar. There, she is surprised and somewhat shocked to find her curiosity and intelligence are considered a boon rather than a problem.

Of course, it's a good thing that she's a bright child, because she's soon thrown into all sorts of problems that, quite frankly, a thirteen year old, even this precocious thirteen year old, would be rather ill-equipped to handle. The brilliance of the book is that the character is so well written that most readers won't stop to question how Talia is managing all these problems because they're frantically flipping pages to discover what happens.

The ability to tell a compelling story is what really sets a Mercedes Lackey book apart from much of the fantasy fiction currently on the shelves. I'll admit that sometimes the teenage angst/self reflection got to be a bit much at times (another reason I'm giving this the YA label), but the well written plot more than makes up for it.

The Rolling Stones, by Robert Heinlein

2009-10-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Read
In Half-Price, over the course of several Mondays.

Bottom Line
Very definitely young Heinlein, but fun to read nevertheless. While this one doesn't contain any of the great leaps of imagination found in his later books, it plants the seeds for later novels (think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). Furthermore, although it's billed as juvenalia, there's no reason why adults wouldn't enjoy sitting down with this one.

Full Review
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I'm somewhat of a rabid Heinlein fan. My introduction to his fiction came in the form of The Cat Who Walked through Walls. Despite the fact that I was miffed by the ending (ending? there's no ending to that darn book!), I kept reading.

Stones, unlike some of Heinlein's later work, stands fully on its own. It requires no familiarity with the "Future History" novels, although readers familiar with them will be pleased to find the indomitable Hazel Stone as well as those mischievous twins Castor and Pollux.

Heinlein described the novel as about a pair of entrepreneurial twins who are always getting into trouble and whose grandmother is always getting them out. This is accurate, so far as back cover descriptions go, but it fails to convey the core of the novel. This is, at heart, a book about frontiers, about civilization, and about the choices between the two. The Stones set off from Luna City - that once wild outpost, now safely tamed and therefore no fun at all - to Mars, intending to satisfy the familial wanderlust. Once at Mars, however, they discover that it, like Luna City, has been taken over by the bureaucrats. Off again, this time to the asteroid belt, where at last they find the wild frontier town they've been looking for. When we leave the Stones, they are setting off again, this time for Venus. The implication, of course, is that there will always be one more outpost of civilization in the wilderness, one more frontier to explore. The excitement, of course, lies in the adventures the family finds along the way - everything from a nasty outbreak of space measles to a run-in with the long arm of the law.

Structurally speaking, there's more going on here than a rip-roaring plot and a rambunctious bunch of characters. The plot, which has enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages as quickly as she can read them, flows naturally from the characters rather than attempting to push them around. This is intended for a middle grade audience, so there's nothing very heavy here - a far cry from the almost existential questioning of Stranger or the philosophical mutterings of Lazarus Long. Even so, it previews the question of when too much civilization becomes a bad thing.

Finally, keep an eye out for the technology. Heinlein's predictions, while a bit off the wall in terms of Mars and Venus, are surprisingly accurate on just about everything else.

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet

2009-10-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

Ken Follet writes spy novels. The introduction to the book speaks of some nervousness on the part of his publishers that a book by Follet about a cathedral would be too far out of genre and wouldn't sell. Follet needn't have worried. The Pillars of the Earth, nominally a book about the building of a great cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England, has little to do with architecture. Instead it is a thriller, a classic plot driven novel that twists and turns according to the author's master plan.

Had the book been half its size, I probably would have enjoyed it. Toward the end, Follet began summing up the action from the beginning of the book in the form of reflections on the part of the main characters. This is always a sign that a heavier hand is needed in the editing process. Furthermore, for all the action in the novel, nothing really happened. The cathedral, after much delay and frustration, was finally built (no spoiler there, I'm sure).

The minor characters lived quiet lives of unimportance, fading in and out of the action by way of barely believable plot devices. The major characters were remarkably one-dimensional - the villain of the piece so incredibly evil that his machinations became comical rather than infuriating. The heroine was rewarded, after a life of patient if not especially pious sacrifice, with everything she had ever wanted. Ditto the hero.

Bottom line: props to Follet for writing it - from the introduction, I gather that this was his dream book. Unless you're going to be stuck on an airplane, a hospital waiting room, or somewhere else you're in need of reading material that doesn't require any thought to process, I'd skip this one.