Zeno's Library

The Green and the Gray, Timothy Zahn

This was a remainder-pile find, and almost certainly something I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't seen it on the B&N bargain table when I was using up a gift certificate (for one thing, I almost never go to bookstores at all; for another, when I do, it's usually Borders, for the Rewards).  I'd never read any non-Star-Wars Zahn, and rarely even have seen any.  Well, I'll be looking for it now.

This book was fast-paced, full of "huh"? moments, and just generally captivating.  I haven't been reading at my usual pace of late (I blame the 17-hour workdays, at a guess), but this weekend I tore through this one at quite a clip.  I kept thinking I should put it down and do something else, but somehow it didn't happen all that often.

The story opens with a brief POV from a twelve-year-old girl who is, we quickly learn, en route to her death.  This death, it is obvious, is meant to save her people, but the how of that is far from clear.  At the very last of moments, however, she is snatched away from the choking hands of an incredibly sinister character and whisked away to . . . well, to the apartment of a couple of bystanding New Yorkers, who are really quite baffled by the whole thing.

As becomes apparent, there are quite a few things going on in the city of which most people are entirely unaware (which is probably true, though I doubt many of them are like these), and there are a couple of mysterious groups of people who want this girl back - and, she says, want her dead.  The whys behind this and many other mysteries are really quite a joy to watch unfold, and I loved every minute of it.

I really am going to have to seek out more Zahn.

Black Powder War, Naomi Novik

Sometimes, I am an idiot.  I flatter myself that these times are passingly rare, but it does happen.  I'm not quite sure how this came about - I have some theories, but I shan't bore you with them - but apparently, by the time I finished Throne of Jade, I had come to believe that it was the third book in the Temeraire series, and that, therefore, I had obviously already read Black Powder War.  

I was wrong.

Oddly enough, even picking up Empire of Ivory to discover a whole bunch of references to things I hadn't read about didn't tip me off.  (I claim extreme weariness of brain for part of this.)  Nothing was impossible to pick up from back-references, and it's not unheard of for great swaths of action to take place off-screen between books, and I suppose I just assumed that was the case here.

I was wrong.

Well, in any case, when my husband blazed his way through the series, I quickly realized my error, and obviously set out to correct it soonest.  In fact, this may have been the first time I have been so happy to realize I have had an attack of the stupid, because it gave me an unexpected Novik book to read!  Which I did, fully anticipating to enjoy it every bit as thoroughly as I did the first, second, and fourth.

I was not wrong.

Plot-wise, the book is shaped around the return from China (that I had, obviously, thought had happened offscreen) and the mission to fetch three dragon eggs that the British had purchased from Istanbul.  Aside from anything else, I do enjoy seeing the different dragons from different locations, though I do wonder why their in-species variation is so much greater than pretty much any other species with which I am familiar.  Author's prerogative, I guess.

As an aside, alternate histories almost always gripe me when it's a systemic alternate-ness such as the existence of dragons, because I tend to assume introducing the difference so much earlier on would have warped history all out of recognizability by the time the set-period comes around.  I am absolutely certain that would have been the case here, too, but for some reason I don't care.  History is diverging during the books, but for some reason didn't do so earlier, and this story is so very very good that I'm not really bothered too much about how it came to be that way.

Anyway.  This book had more of everything I've loved about the rest of the series - more dragon-types, more examination of the effect of arial support on the Napoleonic Wars, more philosophical discussions with Temeraire . . . in short, every bit as excellent as the others, and in just this one case I'm not sorry to have had a temporary brain-lapse.

Elric of Melnibone, Michael Moorcock

In contrast to the last entry, this one was more of a chore than a much-deferred treat.  I knew I should read the Moorcock books, they being classics of the genre and all, but I had always had a sense of "enh" about them, which only grew stronger as I slogged my way through this omnibus of six of them.  I suspect I would have liked them if I'd read them in my teens.  I also suspect they were really really good in the seventies.  Neither of those things is enough to redeem the flaw of being very, very boring, however, which I found them to be.

Also, this omnibus has been reordered from publication order to internal chronology order, which means some stories that happen later have no memory of some of the prior events, while retaining the memory of others, which is just weird.  Also, I got the sense that (inevitably, I'd imagine) the author's concept of the character had changed somewhat over the 28-year span of writing all these, and jumping back and forth in time from one of these visionings to another was more than a little jarring.

Mostly, though, I just thought Elric was a dick, and didn't particular care what happened to him or anyone around him.

I suspect I'll make another try at the Moorcock oeuvre at some point, because they are classics of the genre, but I also suspect I'll find a dozen dozen excuses to put it off.

The Sorcerer's Lady, Paula Volsky

This is in the category of "Books I knew I'd want to read which got picked up and then subsumed into the greater mass of books until happening to catch my eye one day", which is a pretty large category for something with such a long and drawn-out name.  In any case, I've enjoyed everything by Volsky I've ever read, so finding this in a used bookstore one day was a pleasant surprise . . . some four or five years ago or so.  But, hey, I've read it now, which is what counts!

Beginning with a reluctant bride trying to escape her fate, the book quickly shifts into a dutiful wife coming to terms with her new situation, and finding that things are perhaps not as they appeared from outside.

Honestly, I'm not sure I either can or need to come up with more of a plot summary than that.  The book is thoroughly enjoyable, as have been all of her books I've read, but summarizing the plot would in no way do it justice.  It does have a bit of a feel of being an earlier work than some others I've read - a bit less polished, perhaps? - but is an excellent use of an afternoon, or equivalent length of time.  I gather it has sequels, which I hope to find at some point.

The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket

When I worked at a used bookstore, I hated these books.  Actually, I hated very nearly all books that were popular, especially with children.  There would be twenty potential buyers for every copy that came in, which since pricing had a strict ceiling (1/2 cover for anything not exceptional), mostly just ended up meaning that the ratio of pissed-off customers to satisfied customers was in no way a favorable one.  "Have you got any Lemony Snicket books" still has the ability to make a blood vessel in my temple throb in sympathy.  I think I may have bought the ones I have simply out of some childish need to get them before someone else did.

Given all that, it's probably not surprising that it took me four years to get around to picking one up, no?  And judging by the "used and new" prices at Amazon, the craze has gone down since then.

This book is, incidentally, one of the few works for which I have seen a movie before reading the book.  Though, judging by all the unfortunate events they managed to cram into the movie, that was intended to cover several volumes, not just this first one.  Still, though, I liked it - it's one of a very short list indeed of films in which Jim Carrey did not make me wish to pry out my eyes with a crochet hook.  Which is, I suppose, not exactly a ringing endorsement, but hey, trust me, it's saying a lot, given my standard Jim Carrey reaction.

Right.  The book, I am supposed to be discussing, not my taste in comic actors.  This first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events deals with the orphaning of the Baudelaire children and their subsequent wardship by Count Olaf, a most distasteful man indeed.  Bad things happen, one after another, which makes it, I suppose, a most well-named series.  The children forbear, however, and are seen at the end of the book heading off for their next misadventure.  I think it's probably a great book for kids, who, by and large, love stories about bad things happening.  It also uses many words well above its reading level, and defines them in a very difficult-to-miss way (the last sentence of the book ends "...and it seemed to the children that they were moving in an aberrant - the word 'aberrant' here means 'very, very wrong, and causing much grief' - direction."), which is a nice feature in a children's book, I suppose.  Goodness knows in my early reading days I went running to my mother many a time with a request for a definition!

Anyway.  It's a fun book, and not at all as depressing as it should be, which is a little disturbing, actually.  I shall definitely be carrying on with these.

Bloodlist, P.N. Elrod

Sorry that link off to the right there is so ugly.  Amazon is apparently lame when it comes to out-of-print books.  Anyway, it's been omnibus-ized, so I'll probably link to that one when I've finished all the books in the first volume.

Anyway.  Hallowe'en was coming up when I grabbed this off the shelf, so I figured it was time for some vampire fiction.  Actually, that was just an excuse - from time to time, I'm just in the mood for vampires.  I'd blame Buffy, but really, it predates my watching of that show by quite a bit.  I think it's part of the same thing that makes me enjoy re-told fairy tales - I like seeing what various authors do with the assorted vampire legends out there, taking the bits and pieces they like and discarding the rest.

This one is a little less exploratory than some I've read.  Crosses and garlic are out, but pretty much the gamut of Other Vampire Schtick is in.  Which was actually kind of nice - it's been a long time since I've read about a vampire with the running-water aversion and ability to discorporate.  Kind of quaint.

But enough meta-talk.  The basic plot here is that our protagonist wakes up dead one evening, with no memory of how he got that way, and a driving need to hunt down his killer and return the favor.  Which is a neat twist, really.  It's mostly a detective story with a vampire in it, which I suppose I expected, given the PI hat the guy on the cover is wearing (the fact that it's set in 1930s Chicago is a bit of a tip, too).  I'm not, by and large, a fan of detective stories, but I suspect I'll pick up the next one of these at some future point, at least until I run out of the ones I already own (six of them, Librarything tells me, though I can't be bothered at the moment to find out if they're consecutive).  We shall see at that point if I'm hooked enough to keep going.