Archives - September 2006

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I spent most of this month reading Patrick O'Brian, all twenty of the Aubrey-Maturin novels (with brief pauses after The Surgeon's Mate and The Commodore, just to catch up on library books). They are wonderful, truly an amazing achievement: the complexity of the plot threads and of the characterization, the marvelous language and period feeling, the humor (and not just of the "lesser of two weevils" variety, though I love that joke and the other puns), the music and natural history. Just wow. I think I wasn't quite in the right headspace for them the first time I tried them (Liam was just a baby and I didn't have a lot of free time), which is why I stopped after six books, but this time, I enjoyed them immensely.

I did manage to fit in a few other books:

Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, Agnes and the Hitman: When someone breaks into Agnes Crandall's kitchen and tries to steal her dog, Cranky Agnes (of newspaper food column fame) fights him off, but it's only the beginning of a caper that involves a hunky hitman named Shane, the Mob, murder, theft, fraud, and lots of yummy-sounding food. Although the plot is a little over-complicated, Crusie and Mayer keep it going with a lot of action and humor; they've managed to meld their styles together better than in their previous book, Don't Look Down. Agnes and the Hitman is maybe a little violent for my usual tastes, and I'd still rather have Crusie on her own, but it's definitely an improvement over her last two collaborations.
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943: Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew from Amsterdam; she studied Russian, gave Russian lessons, and kept a diary, focusing mainly on her love affair with psychologist Julius Spier and her efforts to deal personally with the effects of the Nazis taking control of the Netherlands. In 1942, she went to Westerbork, the camp where Dutch Jews were assembled for deportation to other concentration camps; she wrote letters to friends back in Amsterdam, before she was eventually sent to Auschwitz, where she died. She was a natural writer, and her diaries and letters are very vivid (particularly the letters, when she describes Westerbork in great detail) and moving, often almost unbearably so. She had a great gift for self-analysis, and her writings show the remarkable emotional journey she made in the course of mastering her own unruly emotions, coming to a point of equilibrium which allowed her to face the destruction of her friends, her family, and her own life with calm resolve.
Gillian Bradshaw, Dark North: Thankfully, this was very good; I haven't much liked any of her science fiction and thought her last historical, Alchemy of Fire, was below her usual standards, so it was a relief to enjoy this one. Memnon is an African scout serving with the Aurelian Moors in Roman Britain in 208 AD. When he rescues two of the Emperor's servants from a British tribe, he's unwillingly pulled into imperial intrigue around the Emperor, Septimius Severus, the Empress Julia Domna, and their two sons, fighting over who will hold power. The characterization is excellent, particularly of the intelligent, mischievous honest Memnon, whom I loved, and the historical background is of course very good, as Bradshaw's always is. I especially liked her examination of the clashing of the various cultures: the civilized Romans, the barbaric British tribes of various stripes, and Memnon's Ethiopian culture.
R.A. MacAvoy, Tea with the Black Dragon: Here's one of those times when you read a book that everyone seems to love, and it just doesn't do a lot for you -- or it didn't for me, anyway, which makes me wonder what I'm missing. Martha MacNamara has come to San Francisco in response to a frantic request for help from her daughter Liz, a computer programmer; here Martha meets the mysterious Maynard Long, who agrees to help her find Liz. I liked the often elegant writing and the interesting characters but would have liked much more exploration of the latter than the length of the book and the quickness of the plot allowed. Also, yes, there are two important female characters, but everyone else is male, and almost all the action of the plot comes from the male characters, which bothered me.
Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels: Fourteen years after the events of Something Rotten, Thursday Next's life is still complicated. Unbeknownst to her husband, she's still working for SpecOps and in the BookWorld, where she's training two fictional versions of herself as JurisFiction apprentices, while reading rates are dropping so low that the powers that be want to make Pride and Prejudice into a reality show. In the non-fictional world, the government is trying to solve the Stupidity Surplus, and Thursday and her husband are trying to solve their son Friday, who should be joining the time-traveling ChronoGuard and instead barely gets out of bed. The books are always packed full of action and plot; this one, I think, is packed a little too full -- I'd have preferred focusing on the BookWorld, which I find more interesting anyway -- but it's darned fun anyway. It ends on a cliffhanger, so I guess there's to be at least one more.


Last updated 11 November 2007. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.