InsaneJournal

Books, 2008
1. God's Secretaries, by Adam Nicholson

2. American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang

Excellent. Really, amazing and excellent and hugely moving.

I love the structure -- I like that kind of weaving, and I thought it worked amazingly well here. I love the tone of the stories, which is something that happens well in graphic novels but often less well in other sorts of novels.

And the art. I adore the art.

(Also: wanting to be a trans-fo-ma when you grow up? Best Thing Ever.)

The moral of the story isn't anything new, but the tri-fold way it's told is excellent, because it's a lesson everyone needs to remember and learn again, over and over.

I do have the feeling some of the particulars are a little specific to a community that isn't my own, but the generals are transcendent.

3. Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper

First, I loved the line about their mother, "She went out into the sunshine, her eyes already vague with the shape and colour of her painting." It's clearly the best line of the book. In fact, the only characters I'm at all interested in are the parents. (And Bill and Ms. Withers, but that should really be Bill/Ms. Withers.)

Second, when I was reading the Prydain books for the first time, I realized that I hate it when there's a wise old guy who already know all the answers and just exposits all over the place. Now it turns out I also hate it when there's a wise old guy who already knows all the answers and doles out information little by little, stringing the characters along. (Dumbledore didn't bother me much, because he often admits he is confused and is trying to figure things out himself, but when he does the doling of information thing, I get peeved.)

And I really hate the Deus ex Machina effect (and then I got so bored reading Over Sea, Under Stone that I skipped to the end, and the extraordinarily convenient coincidences got even worse. Not to mention Cooper clearly doesn't understand how museum acquisition works: either the grail was a gift to the museum and the children shouldn't have gotten any money, or they lent it to the museum and it still belongs to them, or they sold it to the museum for a lot more than £100).

Of course, I'm really not that interested in the Arthur myth, so. Perhaps this was to be expected.

4. The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

I told lunabee34 that I was bored reading Over Sea, Under Stone. Also, that I hate the Wise Old Guy, and I hate the Deus ex Machina effect. Well, The Dark Is Rising has all those things, and then some (including my boredom. And I can't even blame the AFC/NFC Championship games for my boredom, because the Chargers/Patriots game was boring, too, and the Giants/Packers game just looked cold).

So: Will Stanton has a big family. I think his brother Paul is gay. There is a lot of talk about high this, Dark and Light that, and being the Only One^TM.

This is not my kind of book.

Also, I can't stand her writing. lunabee34 thought it was nicely evocative in Over Sea, Under Stone, but I'm not getting that at all. (For comparison's sake, the other book I read today was American Born Chinese by Gene Yang, and yes, a graphic novel is going to have different atmospheric effects than a novel, but still: I actually got a sense of the characters in that book. I have no idea who Will Stanton is, really, much less where he lives. I had no idea who Simon, Jane, or Barney were, either.)

One of the reviews for the movie version, called The Seeker, says that, "Given superpowers, Will does approximately nothing with them." That's pretty much how the book goes, too: given an amazing mythology and powerful narrative, the book does approximately nothing with it.

I have no idea what the stakes are, either, except that I keep getting told they are tremendous; I have no idea who the characters are, except that I keep getting told they're important and they have different names, so they must be individuals; I have no idea why this is happening now instead of three hundred years ago or a thousand years in the future. There is no specificity at all, so there's no reason to care. And Will doesn't seem to know or to care, either.

The biggest problem is that no one has any agency. Not even Merriman Lyon. Perhaps even especially him. And I'm not enough of a fatalist to appreciate that kind of story. In fact, I'm not any kind of a fatalist.

Not to mention her grasp of history is--well, let's just pretend that Cooper's world is so clearly not our own that there is no point in comparing the two. And I have no idea how the magic works, because there are no rules or purpose or point or anything. Um. I may feel rather strongly about this point.

On the other hand, I actually do want to know what happens next, which I think means I'm going to have to rely on wikipedia, because the thought of reading the next three books with anything resembling attention is slightly terrifying. Of course, I hate leaving these sorts of things undone, so I might end up having to finish them anyway.

Wikipedia assures me that "The Light fights for freedom and free will, The Dark fights for chaos, confusion and the subversion of man's agency." Really? Since when? Is this part of the books at all, or is it just an encyclopedia's convenient ability to slip analysis into its encyclopedia-ing?

I can't even find anything to praise except for the verse, and that's just because I love that kind of repetition. (The best thing about Over Sea, Under Stone was the line about the children's mother: "She went out into the sunshine, her eyes already vague with the shape and colour of her painting." We are not hitting a very high percentage here.)

[On the plus side: reading several gazillion fanfics has allowed me to spot almost immediately what I like and don't like about any story, and to parse what works for me and what really, really doesn't. On the minus side, if this is Newberry award winning literature, perhaps adage show, don't tell isn't quite what fanfiction writers seem to think it is, because no one ever mentioned that little concept to Cooper.]