Scott Lynch

I obtained The Lies of Locke Lamora in a book swap with thistleingrey, after seeing friends talking about the book for the past three years. It took me a while to get into the flow—more to do with my inability to read a single book at a time than anything inherent to the book itself—but once I did, it was a fast read.

Lynch’s main weakness is infodumping. He begins by switching back and forth between the past and present—which worked fine for a while—but after he runs out of backstory, he starts switching to long passages of exposition instead and some of the transitions are a little too abrupt and awkward. Luckily, I enjoy reading infodump in general and was pretty fascinated by the worldbuilding of the novel, so I didn’t mind it at all. Worldbuilding is not entirely consistent in the way that it draws mostly on Italian setting and names but also uses Spanish names as well, but I shan’t nitpick too much.

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N.K. Jemisin

I finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in about a day after I bought it at the local SF/F bookstore (where I had it pre-ordered), and I promptly persuaded S. to read it too, despite his initial reluctance. After skimming the first two pages, he complained that there were too many names, but I inveigled him to finish the first chapter, which was enough to get him hooked. In fact, the main reason that I’ve been so excited and eager for this book is because I read the first chapter online a few months back and have been itching to find out the rest of the story ever since. Make that be a testament to the excellence of the book.

Minor spoilers below. (As usual, these posts are less review and more reaction.)

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Reading update

After finishing False Colours and The Final Solution, I did a quick reread of Hogfather, which I picked up at a Goodwill store. Then I sped through N.K. Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. Yesterday, I started reading It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten, which my friend C.(P.) lent to me, but abandoned it for Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, which I finished on the train. Probably not going to write about the last one, since all I have to say about it was that it was very entertaining and also very clearly compiled from blog posts.

Still in the middle of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.

Michael Chabon

Finished The Final Solution. I’ve refrained from trying out Chabon, even after my high school friend P. spent most of senior year raving about The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but repeated recommendations from all sides made me buckle down and buy one of his books. I chose The Final Solution because I’d heard it featured Sherlock Holmes, and it seemed like a good way to get a taste for Chabon’s prose before investing in his longer books.

I very much like Chabon’s style, which is, to me, the equivalent of a warm leather armchair. Vivid but not lush. The style was not so well suited to Holmes’ voice per se; Holmes requires a more minimalist touch. As a result, the best chapters were the ones narrated from other characters’ POV, the one with the parrot being my favorite. I was intensely skeptical when beginning that chapter since animal POVs are usually too anthropomorphic (and biologically implausible!) for my tastes, but I found it to be the most emotionally moving narrative perspective in the whole book. I still felt skeptical about Chabon’s choices—would a parrot really find chickens attractive, when we aren’t usually attracted to lemurs?—but I empathized with the parrot nonetheless.

Second favorite chapter was the inspector’s reaction to meeting Holmes in his old age. Also, despite my feeling that Holmes’ voice was a little off, Chabon drew a really compelling portrait of a brilliant mind growing old. Liked as well the inclusion of chromatic characters in the form of Mr. Panicker and his son Reggie, who were handled well in my opinion. Wished in fact that there was more about Mr. Panicker; I grew invested in his crisis of faith and family problems, neither of which is resolved.

The ending was handled perfectly; it could easily have been spoiled by a too-unsubtle approach. The title gave away the answer to the mystery in any case; I figured out the meaning of the numbers almost immediately. (I do wonder if in a hundred years, this book will need to be annotated in order for the meaning to be understood completely. The ending image is striking and resonant for us now, but will it remain so?)

Question: isn’t “flash” a bit of an anachronism? Thought that it didn’t come into usage until later. Not that I know anything about the history of British slang.

Kept thinking about whether this book succeeded as fanfiction or not. Obviously, a large part of the appeal rests on knowing the character of Holmes, but the whole construction is overwritten with Chabon’s style and thematic concerns that even the incarnation of Holmes in the book belongs more to Chabon than to Doyle.

Georgette Heyer

I don’t actually have much to say about False Colours, other than that I quite liked Kit Fancot, who is not a rake. I went on a binge of Heyer’s Regency novels last year, and I grew quite sick of rakes and Cornithians. Freddy from Cotillion still has first place in my heart, but I liked Kit for being mostly sensible, not too fashionable or sporting, but intelligent and still interesting. (It is still possible to be interesting while also being more or less respectable! And no, I don’t mean being reformed after a disreputable past either.)

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi

Electra’s review: White is for Witching

The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi

Ending the reading jag

Finished Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Jeeves in the Offing, which means I’ve finished all bought and borrowed Wodehouse books in my possession.

Also acquired False Colours, a Heyer novel, from C., which I’ve already zipped halfway through. Will probably finish tonight, if possible, and move onto finishing A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and The Final Solution.

State of the reading

Recently finished several Wodehouse books: Very Good, Jeeves (from the library), The Adventures of Sally (bought at Pegasus), and The Heart of a Goof (ditto). I’ve been collecting the Arrow Books editions as they show up on the sales shelf at the local bookstores; at this rate, I’m well on my way to building up a matched set.

Currently reading Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. S. read it first and said it was good but depressing; I’m on the second chapter now and don’t find it especially depressing, at least not unusually so, but my emotional meter has been so screwed up lately that I may be quite unable to tell. (Also, it is not as depressing as Tongue, which I can say with some subjective certainty.) I really like Barnes’ prose: it is extremely readable without being utilitarian and without being too excessively absorbed in itself. It’s the same lucid quality that I liked about Flaubert’s Parrot, though lucid sounds like an odd adjective to apply when the whole theme of that book was about obscuring the narrator, but I mean it strictly in terms of the prose style.

Kyung Ran Jo

You know, even though the summary for this book mentioned “vengeance”, I completely did not expect the ending, which was somewhat disturbing. I mean, in retrospect, everything in the book led up to it—nothing came out of the blue—but I was still surprised and little shocked.

The highlight of this book are the long, loving descriptions of food and cooking. The main character and narrator, Jeong Ji-won, is a chef who specializes in Italian cuisine, and the extended food-based metaphors that recur throughout the book are not just imagery—she truly perceives her reality/existence through the lens of food. I suspect I could even use some of the scenes in the book as rough recipes, and there even is an exact recipe written before the last chapter.

Now for the more difficult, still half-formed thoughts. This book was written by a Korean author—one of my motivations in picking it off the shelf—and translated into English. The characters are intrinsically Westernized—Ji-won cooks Italian food and is clearly upper-class—and aside from a few character and place names (themselves rare in the narration, since Ji-weon refers to other people by their titles or their initials), there are no Korean words in the translation. The few times a Korean food is mentioned (e.g. 고추장), it’s described in English terms (e.g. spicy red pepper sauce). Ji-won mentions her grandmother’s cooking and occasionally will describe dishes that I recognize as Korean, but these are presented as “traditional” cooking, rather than Korean, non-Western cooking. Which in and of itself is a legitimate choice: the decision to present to the reader a cultural insider’s perspective. Yet a Korean would make an explicit distinction between Korean and Western food, in my mind; “traditional” food is not necessarily just Korean food because there is “traditional” Korean food and “modern” Korean food. And to a Korean, 고추장 is just 고추장, without meriting a detailed description, while it would be the Italian dishes that would require some explanation. (Particularly since she cooks gourmet food that the average Korean would not be familiar with.)

I’m sort of talking around the subject here, but really, my main impression from this book was that without the few Korean names, without knowing the identity of the author, the average English-language reader would not recognize that the story was set in Korea and about Korean characters at all. Is that a bad or good thing? On the one hand, no exoticization. On the other hand, erasure. I don’t blame the author for writing a story about characters who are on the Westernized end of Korean society, because such people do exist, and she is only writing one of thousands, if not millions, of stories in Korean. But given how few Korean authors are available in English translation to begin with, it says something about the American publishing industry that it’s this sort of story that gets translated and made available, to then subsequently become a representative of Korean fiction as a whole to the English-reading world.

And yet, there’s the part of me that says that some translation is better than no translation and how difficult it is to find any Korean fiction translated into English. That part of me is still grateful that the publisher chose to make this translation available in the first place.

I want to read the novel in its original Korean and see how much cultural context was deliberately lost in translation and how much is simply due to the content of the story.

For what it’s worth, it was easy for me to “reverse-translate” as I read the book, i.e. it was not difficult to speculate how a certain sentence/dialogue/paragraph would have sounded in Korean. Also, the way each chapter began and ended with pseudophilosophical musing on life/love/the past/etc. rather reminded me of the memoir-style essays that my mother liked to read out loud to me or the voiceover narration that one gets on a certain style of TV show—except of course, Ji-won’s stream of thought is usually morbid and somewhat obsessive rather than saccharine or nostalgic. Of course, it’s in no way “unique” to Korean, and probably I would not have registered it if I wasn’t looking for it to begin with.

Malinda Lo

Writing up Ash first because my thoughts about it are a lot less complicated.

It’s been on my to-read list for a while, but what spurred me to buy the ebook rather than wait to find it in a bookstore was the realization that I’ve read a fair amount of fiction (both fan and original) featuring male same-sex relationships but almost no fiction (again, fan or original) with female same-sex relationships, not even in the background. Ash is described in most reviews as a “lesbian retelling of Cinderella”, and since it had been lauded by several of my friends, I decided it would be a good place to start remedying the imbalance.

The worldbuilding is not terribly original, but the descriptions are beautiful and vivid, and Ash herself is a compelling character. I really liked Lo’s portrayal of her falling in love with Kaisa; while I do identify as mostly straight, I’ve experienced enough “girl crushes” to relate to Ash. I also thought that Ash’s somewhat self-destructive response to her mother’s death and the way that her longing to escape turned into an obsessive fascination with the fairies were realistic. (Ash’s favorite fairy tale, where a girl burns three leaves of mugwort—쑥 in Korean—every night to see the fairy prince, was rather cleverly devised, I thought, since mugwort does have hallucinogenic properties when smoked. Which I would not have known were it not for S. who knows a fair bit about psychopharmacology.)

The, hm, amoral (rather than immoral) behavior of the fairies reminded me a bit of Susanna Clarke. That being said, I was quite afraid for Ash when she was in Sidhean’s company at times; not sure if I would have felt the same if I were reading as a teenager rather than as an adult.

I said the descriptions were beautiful, but I can’t quite say that Lo’s writing itself is beautiful. It definitely has great potential, but I rather felt throughout the entire book that she hadn’t quite settled into a voice of her own. The pitfall in most fairy tale retellings is adopting the traditional storytelling voice, which can end up sounding a little dull; Lo almost escapes this trap but doesn’t quite. The story as a whole was well-constructed but felt a little thin. Perhaps it’s a common pitfall of contemporary debut YA novels? I felt the same way to differing degrees about both Silver Phoenix and The Demon’s Lexicon but generally don’t feel that way about YA novels from more established authors, like Diana Wynne Jones. Part of the problem was that it was hard to believe that something truly was at stake; I said I felt afraid for Ash but I never doubted that she would succeed, and I think the book would have been stronger if it had driven me to doubt.

Looking forward to Lo’s second novel, since I think my main two criticisms of the writing tend to get worked out as the writer gains experience.

Finished and in progress

Just quickly noting that I’ve recently finished reading Tongue by Kyung Ran Jo, Ash by Malinda Lo, and Blandings Castle by P.G. Wodehouse. Almost all the stories in the last one were completely new to me, since I’ve mostly kept to reading the stories with Jeeves or Psmith.

Tongue was a fairly thought-provoking read (not so much concerning its content but its translation), so hopefully I’ll get around to blogging it in more detail.

I bought Ash as an ebook from Barnes & Noble online, using their ebook reader application for Mac. More and more inclined to invest in a Nook, especially after seeing one in action yesterday at C.’s place. Of course, I also want to invest in an iPod Touch and an Android cell phone, and an ebook reader doesn’t have very much priority given that I am already in the bad habit of impulse-buying paper-based books at the indie bookstore across the street…

Currently in the middle of Very Good, Jeeves, which has mostly been a reread so far.

Silencing the Past, by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Sai’s review: Trouillot, Silencing the Past

"The question of why I became a cook is almost unanswerable. It’s the same thing as asking, Why did you fall in love with that man instead of all these other men? Of course you can’t give a clear reason. This is unexplainable even to the person you’ve fallen in love with. I can give an example. Let’s say you’re the sun. The sun takes the purest and lightest particles of seawater and lifts them into the air. Salt is left behind because of its weight and heft, a product of these solar movements. If this is to be an adequate example, I have to talk about the sun’s passion and motive in making salt. Creating salt is sort of the ultimate fate for the sun. The importance of salt naturally elevates the sun’s value in the world of gourmandism. Every human act is only a dream at first. That dream comes to you sometimes like fate, other times like coincidence, and it can be achieved in unbelievable ways. […] The crucial question isn’t why I became a cook. Going back to the example of the sun: To get to the point where a lot of salt is created, the solar rays have to penetrate deeper, to the core. You can’t lose your passionate curiosity toward the man you love, and you have to go to him with your entire being, recklessly and passionately. RIght now, what I must question and doubt is: Is this true love? And does he love me? And this is the only question that will never be answered."

Kyung Ran Jo, Tongue

"If loneliness or sadness or happiness could be expressed through food, loneliness would be basil. It’s not good for your stomach, dims your eyes, and turns your mind murky. If you pound basil and place a stone over it, scorpions swarm toward it. Happiness is saffron, from the crocus that blooms in the spring. Even if you add just a pinch to a dish, it adds an intense taste and a lingering scent. You can find it anywhere but you can’t get it at any time of the year. It’s good for your heart, and if you drop a little bit in your wine, you instantly become drunk from its heady perfume. The best saffron crumbles at the touch and instantaneously emits its fragrance. Sadness is a knobby cucumber, whose aroma you can detect from far away. It’s tough and hard to digest and makes you fall ill with a high fever. It’s porous, excellent at absorption, and sponges up spices, guaranteeing a lengthy period of preservation."

Kyung Ran Jo, Tongue