The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay: About two years ago, Sai compiled a beautiful, haunting fan soundtrack for this book, and to this day, it’s probably the second most-played playlist on my iPod. I’d been meaning to pick up this book ever since, although I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had mixed feelings about the Fionavar Tapestry (Kay’s four-volume, classic high fantasy series), which I thought had excellent prose, interesting plot points, and really boring characters.

Well, I finally got around to reading The Lions of Al-Rassan, after buying a used copy at a local bookstore, and I can attest that it most definitely does not have boring characters. Granted, the main female protagonist, Jehane, isn’t particularly compelling (I mostly ignored her except for the moments when her know-it-all attitude grated on my nerves), but the story isn’t really about Jehane at all. She just happens to be the principal witness, so to speak, of the momentous meeting between Ammar ibn Khairan (”the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan”) and Rodrigo Belmonte (”Scourge of Al-Rassan”). Although they come from opposing kingdoms and belong to different faiths, their friendship becomes the stuff of legends and ultimately, of tragedy. I kept going back and reading the scenes about the two of them together.

“Are you in love with this man?” she’d asked her husband once in Fezana that winter—more than half jealous, if truth were told.

“I suppose I am, in a way,” Rodrigo had replied after a moment. “Isn’t it odd?”

The line seems a little trivial out of context, but what does it mean, after all, to be in love? Ammar and Rodrigo are both great men, but they discover, probably for the first time, their only true equal in each other. Kay describes them as fighting together as fluidly as if they were two bodies controlled by one mind. How bewildering, how amazing to realize that you are not alone but have a counterpart in another human being…and how tragic to know that this one person—perhaps the only person—capable of knowing you entirely must inevitably end up as your enemy. For this book is tragic and ended up breaking my heart as surely as the music originally did. Perhaps it’s the theme common to so many great fantasy novels: the ending of an age, the passing of the ephemeral present into history. This book is about the fall of Al-Rassan, which will never live again except in memory, and I think it’s that awareness that makes Ammar’s poetry so compelling. Another layer of tragedy right there: after all, one could say that the decline of Al-Rassan began with Ammar’s assassination of the khalif and continued with his assassination of Almalik.

What Ammar says to Rodrigo who asks him to join the Jaddites in their Reconquest of the peninsula:

“What would I have you do? What you cannot do, I suppose. Go home. Breed horses, raise your sons, love your wife. [...] Teach your people to…understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music.”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl: My college roommate recommended this book to me because she knew I was fond of intertextual references and allusions in my fiction. (I usually like clever books, even when they are too clever.) Anyway, the New York Times review made the character sound a little like Nancy Drew (perky, too smart for her own good, crime-solving, with gang of less-clever sidekicks who willingly tag along—please note that I’ve never actually read Nancy Drew and am stereotyping). But I started reading the book anyway since I generally trust my roommate’s judgment, and much to my surprise, Blue van Meer (the book is written from her first-person perspective) is actually very morose and is prone to overextended analogies and theorizing. A voice that I could very much sympathize with. The textual references were not nearly as impressive as I’d been led to believe. Every chapter is titled after a literary work, and Blue obsessively uses parenthetical citations for nearly any assertion she presents (very good academic habit, in my opinion), but the actual references themselves are mostly incidental and not necessary to understanding the book itself. They’re more to convey character than actual thematic meaning, i.e. not meant to be intimidating.

As much as I liked Blue herself, I found myself getting increasingly irritated with her in the latter half of the book. Why on earth did she continue hanging out with the Bluebloods when it was clear that she didn’t fit in with them and that they didn’t like her? The fascination of Hannah Schneider is one excuse, but Blue spends so much time analyzing how fake Hannah was, for all her fascinating ways, so I kept wondering why did Blue continue even when she knew better. Actually, that’s my problem with the whole book: Blue knew better, admitted she knew better, and yet still wound up in a situation that could only make her unhappy. (Was it just hindsight that made it seem that she should have known better? Was it adolescence?) In any case, the Bluebloods were intolerable. As for the explanation that Blue arrives at…well, it felt too overblown to be believable. Oh, it holds together very well because Pessl carefully sets up clues throughout the book to make the Nightwatchmen conspiracy theory watertight. But the tone of the book was so much about, well, ordinary high school life with an idiosyncratic twist on all the usual conventions, so the whole political radicalism kind of hit me from left field. Perhaps it was meant to leave that impression; maybe you weren’t supposed to completely believe Blue. But I closed the book feeling really dissatisfied, although I’d quite enjoyed the first half of the book, especially when it focused on her relationship with her father. Anyway, that general dissatisfaction also may be why I completely failed to sympathize with Blue over the clear psychological trauma that she must have received on discovering Hannah’s corpse.

(Oh, and Blue might be attending Harvard, but Pessl clearly has never gone to school there. Wish she bothered to do a little more research on that aspect of the book, since she clearly did a lot of research on everything else.)

Criticisms aside, I still think it’s an impressive first novel, and I liked Blue, even if I got frustrated by her. Which in itself is probably a testament to how much the novel engaged me.

Three Kingdoms, vol 1, by Luo Guanzhong (trans. Moss Roberts): Almost six years ago, I read the abridged one-volume translation by Moss Roberts and thought it was the most amazing epic I’d ever read. I finally got around to purchasing the full four-volume translation, by the same translator, and finished the first volume this summer. Many of the chapters that had been skipped in the abridged version were in this first volume, it seems, since I remember the scene where Cao Cao and Liu Bei drink tea together in the capital (Cao Cao makes his little speech about the heroes of the age) happening fairly “quickly” after Liu Bei gains renown in helping quell the Yellow Turban rebellion, while here, there are chapters and chapters of constant political and military maneuvering, as alliances are made and broken every ten pages. Hard to keep track of, but fun to read about. I was surprised to find how often Liu Bei runs away or pragmatically switches sides because the author of Three Kingdoms is supposed to be biased in favor of Shu but despite this bias, Liu Bei comes off as no more virtuous than Cao Cao. I mean, the author does insert moralizing statements on why Liu Bei is good and Cao Cao isn’t, but when it comes to actual actions, the bias is not apparent at all. Actually, more of the moralizing statements (and awkward justifications for why Liu Bei is a paragon of all Confucian virtues) come from later commentators, who are mentioned in the footnotes, rather than from the author himself. The footnotes are worth reading; Moss Roberts often includes some of the more elaborate interpretations from well-known commentaries, which I found very entertaining.

Zhuge Liang doesn’t appear in this volume at all; he’s introduced early on in the next volume. But despite his absence, there’s a lot of excitement in this first volume. Since the three kingdoms haven’t been established yet, there’s a lot of backstabbing going on. Plus, it’s nice to get more backstory for all of the characters; I didn’t pay that much attention to Wu when reading the abridged volume (being too enamored of Zhuge Liang, of course), so this time, I’m doing a more careful job of keeping track of all the characters.

The Deer and the Cauldron, vol. 1, by Louis Cha (trans. John Minford): Louis Cha is the English pseudonym of the popular wu xia novelist Jin Yong. The Deer and the Cauldron is one of his works that is available in English. The translation is most definitely for people who don’t know anything about the Chinese language, and considering this audience, I’d have to say that the translator did a good job. Of course, one might be annoyed by the fact that several characters’ names are translated literally (for example, Xiaobao becomes Trinket) but I think that it does convey a nuance that English readers might otherwise miss. Also, the translator takes pains to explain every possible reference, even at the cost of interrupting the story, and there’s a very comprehensive glossary at the beginning that explains nearly everything else. The story itself is very humorous, detailing the adventures of Trinket, a young rascal who was born in a brothel and (at the moment) ends up masquerading as a eunuch in the palace. The setting is early Qing dynasty, when the Han Chinese, especially in the South, were still feeling resentful and rebellious toward their Manchu conquerors. (Trinket hails from such a Southern province.) In the Brotherhood of River and Lake, the underworld in which so many wu xia stories take place, the Triad Society (or more accurately the Society of Heaven and Earth) are among many who conspire to overthrow the Manchus and restore the Ming. Trinket makes for an unexpected hero, although well within the Chinese storytelling tradition (I suppose one could compare him to the monkey king in Journey to the West?), and he’s hilariously foulmouthed, tactless and yet somehow compelling. I hesitate to draw any larger conclusions at the moment, since there are two more volumes to the work, but it’s definitely a lot of fun to read.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by G.K. Chesterton: In a sense, this book is not simply a hagiography of Thomas Aquinas, but rather Chesterton’s reaction to “modernism”: his explanation of why he turns to Catholicism to find answers that modern philosophy cannot provide. Very gently done of course because Chesterton never quite preaches at the reader; instead he presents his opinions in a delightfully subversive way, overturning the usual stereotypes about Christian religion and Catholicism in particular. One of his points, which struck me as particularly important, is that Christianity is essentially a religion that celebrates life. It is easy to forget this fact considering tendencies within the Church to emphasize asceticism and original sin, but Chesterton argues that asceticism is in many ways a natural emotional impulse, which the structure and dogma of the Church holds in check. He writes that the Church’s traditionalism is what prevents it from embracing extremes, that keeps it professing the innate goodness of all creation. Faith is complex and shifting, but religion provides a structure in which it can remain healthy instead of stagnant. Chesterton’s perspective is clearly far from conventional, but I felt that he articulated what it means to be Catholic.

Chesterton also does an excellent job, by the way, of putting Aquinas in a historical context: the renewal taking place within the Church, the rise of new monastic orders (the Dominican and Franciscan friars), the Manichaean heresy, Albertus Magnus, the revival of Greek classics via the Muslims in the East, Aristotelianism and Church theology. I appreciated the originality of his interpretations—he really has a way of turning one’s view of history topsy-turvy—although I will say that Chesterton has a tendency to generalize in order to fit things into a clear pattern (dialectic?—although he himself would deny that he poses any dialectics). He makes an interesting comparison between Buddhism and Christianity, saying that the two are similar precisely because their philosophies are exact complements: they describe the same contours so to speak but are nonoverlapping. In other words, where Buddhism ends with Self, Christianity posits a Creator, although that sounds a bit too glib. Not exactly a groundbreaking insight in itself, since the grandmothers at my church say essentially the same thing (our parish, being Korean-American, has a unique relationship with Buddhist tradition), but nonetheless meaningful. I don’t quite agree with the way Chesterton draws sweeping conclusions about the East—particularly since I’m Asian myself—but other than that, I must say that his conception of spirituality is very much my own. I really do recommend the book, if only to get a better understanding of theology. It’s very easy to read one or two books, or even worse, listen to one or two people, and believe you know what Christianity is about, but I find that everyone complicates the issue with their own personal psychologies (and no one less than Catholics themselves) and forgets the simplicity of the message underneath. Chesterton returns to that simplicity and explains the exterior complications with remarkable lucidity. His explanation of Augustine, or rather Augustinianism and its influence on Church theology, was eye-opening for me.

I find it very difficult to discuss religion directly—it is, after all, intensely personal, not to mention difficult to verbalize—but I think the following quote explains best my own reason for theism:

“Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God.”

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde: I read the sequel Lost in a Good Book first, so I had the disadvantage of already knowing, in a loose sense, what was going to happen in this book. This may have biased my reaction to it, of course. I think I enjoyed the sequel more, although I’m not sure if that’s because Fforde’s writing has improved since his first novel, because I dislike Jane Eyre more than Great Expectations or because Fforde’s cleverness can only last for the duration of a book and a half before growing tiresome. The uncharitable part of me would say it’s the last. I do appreciate the whole setup with all the details of this alternate world from the obsession with literature to the not-so-secret tyranny of the Goliath Corporation, and I didn’t even mind the worst of the puns, but at a certain point, I felt that Fforde was just throwing clever idea after idea at me without much substance to back it up. Frankly, his writing at its best is only average. There were a few moments when I was quite appalled at how awful the dialogue was and wondered what sort of editor would let him get away with that. Also, the characters are amusing as flat caricatures but there is absolutely no development whatsoever. One might ask, is there supposed to be, but when Acheron Hades utterly fails to come across as particularly evil other than Fforde’s insistence that he is, the story falls flat. I do acknowledge that Fforde is parodying certain literary stereotypes, but in Acheron’s case, he failed to make it amusing. Thursday also doesn’t work as a character for the simple reason that she isn’t one person, but ten. She keeps changing her personality to suit the situation—hardened veteran at one point, rejected lover at another—but she becomes completely amorphous as a result. Again, I suspect that this lack of effective character development is at least partly intentional, but I’m still left with the impression that Thursday is a badly executed Mary Sue that takes itself a little too seriously to be funny. Oh, I adore all of Fforde’s ideas, and I’ll freely admit that he’s clever beyond belief, but there’s still something missing. I can’t remember if Lost in a Good Book managed to acquire that something or not, but nonetheless I’ve lost all desire to track down the sequels.