I was surprised to see The Scar being recommended as a book about “love overcoming obstacles”. Well, to be sure, almost any story involves or mentions love, but I’ve always heard of Miéville as writing dark, gritty, political stories. Still, it meant that I kept a particular eye out for the love story hidden in the plot, and I was rather fascinated by the two characters he created. They weren’t the protagonists of the story by any means, but their dynamic was incredibly interesting.

A quick summary: Terpsichoria, a ship carrying prisoners from New Crobuzon (city-state and major mercantile power in Miéville’s world of Bas-Lag) to the colony of Nova Esperium, gets taken over by pirates, who turn out to belong to the floating city of Armada. Armada is built from stolen ships and boats lashed together and survives by, yes, piracy, while keeping its identity and location hidden by press-ganging the sailors and passengers. These eventually become the new citizens of Armada; the city is a diverse throng of people from every country in Bas-Lag. Many of them are former prisoners who have been Remade, that is, their bodies have been surgically and magically altered with grafted mechanical or biological parts. One of the prisoners on the Terpsichoria for example has two tentacle limbs grafted onto his abdomen. The Remade are former criminals and slaves in New Crobuzon, but in Armada, they are equal citizens. So are other humanoid species, such as the cactaceae, who are pretty much like human cactuses, and vampir, who are “photophobic haemophages”: they can all live openly in Armada where they can’t anywhere else. A city of outcasts, misfits, deserters, criminals…Miéville does a fantastic job with worldbuilding and describes the landscape and cultures of the city.

The novel feels rather steampunkish in that it combines magic with an industrial setting: New Crobuzon seems rather reminiscent of Victorian England, with names like Johannes Tearfly and Bellis Coldwine. The latter is the principal point-of-view character, though we get interludes from other characters as well. She left New Crobuzon unwillingly and out of necessity, and she is horrified to find herself trapped in Armada, from which she will never be allowed to escape. Her love and loyalty to New Crobuzon resonated with me—in her initial depression, she refuses to get to know Armada and believes that it can never compare to her city—since I feel much the same way about my own home city. But she eventually gets caught up in the political changes that are sweeping through Armada, and that’s where the Lovers enter.

Bellis never learns their real names, and neither does the reader, but they are the rulers of Garwater, the largest and most powerful district in Armada. They are always referred to as the Lovers, and they have mirror-image scars covering their faces and bodies. They are always in agreement and continue each other’s sentences as if they were in fact one identical person. The Lovers are ambitious: they have plans to trap an enormous beast, called the avanc, and harness it to make the city mobile. (And it turns out, over the course of the novel, that it’s merely the beginning.)

Bellis becomes involved in the project to summon the avanc, since she is a linguist who specializes in High Kettai, the language used by the only living person to summon one. She ends up learning the meaning behind the Lovers’ scars: initially, the Lover (male) had intended it as a mark of possession, since it was used in his original culture as a way to prevent other men from desiring one’s wife. She however, surprised him by cutting an identical mark on his face, and since then, it has become their ritual of lovemaking. Bellis overhears the Lover (female) at one point cutting herself while she is separated from her Lover. When they reunite, the Lover (male) has an identical fresh cut on his face. As if they were trying to “bleed into each other” to become the same person.

Against all odds, the Lovers succeed in all their plans, but uneasiness grows in the city, and at the moment when the city turns against them, the Lovers’ connection to one another snaps. As one leaves, with a new cut on her face that now marks her as different from the other, it becomes apparent that the illusion of identity was indeed a delusion. The one left behind on Armada continues to rule but remains broken.

I’ve completely glossed over the meat of the storyline here: I haven’t mentioned, for example, how Bellis for all her guarded detachment and defensive walls ends up being manipulated by others, or the still-mysterious character of Uther Doul, who is the Lovers’ bodyguard and was born in a near-mythical zombie city. I haven’t said more about Tanner Sack either, who is the other principal protagonist, although he doesn’t interact very much with Bellis at all, and how he embraces life on Armada by becoming amphibious. I doubt that any review can really cover the richness of details that Miéville embeds in his world—without infodumping either, which means the reader has to work to piece together the picture—or the extensive cast of characters or for that matter, the suspense of the plot, which involves at turns political intrigue and at others high seas adventure. Nor all the allusions and references built into the names, e.g. one ship named the Aronnax, after the captain of the submarine in Jules Verne’s 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea.

It’s an epic book but without the trappings of your typical fantasy epic. I saw a lot of elements of horror fiction as well: Miéville apparently loves inventing monsters, although he doesn’t make any of them really monstrous. (That being said, I did find the descriptions of anophelii women—basically mosquito humanoids—really repelling.) Miéville also experiments a lot with different narrative techniques: he interrupts his limited third-person narrative with first-person “stream of consciousness” and epistolary excerpts. I think he’s better at some than others (I thought the grindylow passages were a little overdone and the first-person interlude from the perspective of the Brucolac read as unnecessarily melodramatic), but I do find it impressive how he manages to supply us with all this information and multiple perspectives but still keep the plot exciting and surprising. The pace took a little time to gain some momentum, but once it did, I couldn’t put the book down at all until I finished.

I’m definitely going to go find Perdido Street Station at the bookstore.

Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes: My first exposure to Julian Barnes, and I’m completely smitten. Initially, the book sounds like the sort of narrative nonfiction that I enjoy reading; the first-person narrator being a sort of companion in the exploration of the life of Flaubert, masquerading as an observer but not as a character or subject of the novel. But of course, Geoffrey Braithwaite is a character in his own right, though he tries to avoid it, and we see him let slip maddening little details, which don’t fully cohere into a complete picture even when he gets drunk and grows unusually candid with the reader. We do piece together the story, Braithwaite’s story, in between his recounting and retelling of Flaubert’s life, but there’s always that lingering uncertainty from receiving a story through apocrypha. Of course, there’s also a peculiar sense of satisfaction in it as well—like constructing an image glimpsed through the cracks or between the bars—which appeals to the postmodernist within me.

It soon becomes clear that Braithwaite’s fascination with Flaubert is more than literary appreciation or enthusiasm; his obsession has a focus on adultery, on that most notorious Flaubertian creation, Emma Bovary, on authenticity, on the two parrots. Asking who is the real Flaubert is really asking who is the real Braithwaite (and perhaps also who was the real Ellen as well). I loved the three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life: one recording his achievements and successes, one recording his tragedies and failures, and one last one made up entirely of quotes from his writing. How chameleon a single individual can be! Our image of them perhaps no more authentic than a parrot’s imitation of their voice.

But all such lofty thoughts aside, the simple fact of his fixation on Flaubert is what makes the book appealing to me. Who knew that Flaubert was such an interesting individual? In corollary, if I’d realized before just how wonderful his prose was, I would have made more effort to finish reading Madame Bovary from where I left off so many years before. (I’ve since been inspired to check it out from the local library.) Also, I had especial sympathy for Braithwaite’s emotional defensiveness of Flaubert, his dissection of the writer’s flaws and his equally careful defense of them. I spend a lot of time criticizing books and authors in writing and in conversation, but I am equally prone to jump to their defense when they are criticized by others. Perhaps it’s because no book I’ve read has been entirely worthless: even those I’ve hated or despised have left their imprint on me and have become touchstones for my opinions and reactions, and of course, the most frivolous novel still provides a few hours of pleasure, if nothing else.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton: What a clever twist on the mannerpunk novel! It seems to be the fashion to write fantasy set during the Regency or Victorian period (or perhaps I’ve just gravitated towards those novels), but I don’t think any author’s gone so far as to write about Victorian dragons before. I’m reminded not so much of Jane Austen but of Charles Dickens (e.g., the casual cruelty of Daverak to his servants and social inferiors, young Avan trying to make his way in the city, the pseudo-industrial setting of a countryside being overtaken by railroads, the seeds of socialist consciousness). Walton cites Trollope for her inspiration, which makes me think that I ought to read Framley Parsonage someday. Some particularly interesting twists: Victorian prudishness being biologically enforced by female dragons changing color after they’ve been in close contact with a male, the Old Religion (equivalent to the Catholic Church, I suppose) being a vehicle of socialist reform, body size as equal measure of prosperity as wealth, and of course, that beginning scene that I’ve heard mentioned in every review of this book, children and other relatives devouring their dead father’s body as part of their inheritance. Strangely, the eating of dragonflesh—should I call it cannibalism?—didn’t shock me that much, partly because the dragons themselves thought it perfectly natural. (A testament to how well Walton thought out this society.)

Faces Under Water, by Tanith Lee: I was bemused once I started reading Faces Under Water, which is the first book in the quartet, to find that the book was riddled with grammatical mistakes and ungainly prose. The lush, almost gothic descriptions that I remembered from Lee’s other writing were there, but I also saw missing periods, misuse of parentheses, half-finished sentences, and a fondness for repeating sentence fragments, all of which occurred too often to be excused as a writer’s liberty to break the occasional rule. On the other hand, A Bed of Earth, which was written four years after Faces Under Water, doesn’t show such egregious errors, so I’m inclined to chalk them up to a bad editor.

As for the story itself, the book focuses on the more sordid side of Venus, with descriptions of orgies, alchemist-magicians, and corpses. Even the beautiful is also slightly horrific, like the paralyzed face of Eurydiche, whom the protagonist falls in love with. I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I’d hoped; some of more grotesque moments were just grotesque enough to make the book fall short of being the indulgence that I expected it to be. My impatience with Furian, the main character, didn’t help: in Siddharta-like fashion, he abandons the life of wealth and ease to which he was born and chooses to live in the gutters of Venus instead. I imagine Tanith Lee wanted to evoke the usual dualities inherent in the element of water (each book is based on an element): beauty and corruption, life and death, purity and filth, etc. But mostly I just felt irritated at Furian’s lack of personality and Eurydiche’s passiveness.

Hangman’s Holiday, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I seem to be reading a lot of short story collections these days. Although the choice was inadvertent; I thought Hangman’s Holiday was a full novel. The first four stories feature Wimsey, two of which I’d already read before from Lord Peter; six focus on Montague Egg, another amateur detective whose profession is traveling salesman to a wine and spirits firm; and the last two are not properly mysteries at all and describe instead the crime as it takes place. Of the latter category, “The Man Who Knew How” came off as darkly ironic, but the very last story, “The Fountain Plays”, sent a shiver up my spine. As for Monty Egg, he’s a very different character from Peter Wimsey, and his stories seem to have a much more lighthearted quality although the crimes are no less severe. It’s surprising how much social class makes a difference in the character. Both Wimsey and Egg seem comical on first impression—Wimsey with his flippancy, Egg with his earnest devotion to selling his product—but have keen, observant minds and good insight into human character. Both are also always ready with an apt quotation, although where Wimsey cites a classic or a poem, Egg has his Salesman’s Handbook memorized by heart instead. In the end, I find Wimsey the more thoroughly developed character, which is only natural given that Sayers gave him several novels’ worth of development, while Egg (as far as I know) only gets a handful of short stories. The Montague Egg mysteries are self-contained “drawing-room murders”; the solutions are deft and clever but the setting is still everyday. Wimsey, even in short story form, seems to encounter more bizarre and more complex crimes.

World of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse: I think I started reading this omnibus before because I recognized the first half of the stories compiled in this volume. They’re organized in more or less chronological order too, providing a nice survey of Jeeves and Wooster’s literary lives. Wodehouse never fails to make me laugh. Each story also has a predictable pattern: Bertie has a falling-out with Jeeves, usually over a matter of fashion or proposal of vacation; he then ends up pledging to help a friend out of a (often romantic) predicament; Jeeves eventually saves the day and by the end, Bertie gives in, no matter how strongly he made up his mind to not be managed by his valet. It really is amazing how manipulative Jeeves can be: several times, he actually engineers an unsuccessful outcome but convinces Bertie that it was for the best.

What an artificial life Bertie leads! In an artificial time and artificial society. But it’s comforting to look at this rarefied bubble of time: when “going to school together” meant one could rely on the obligations of friendship, when young bachelors of a certain class had nothing better to do than to dress well and enjoy themselves (at least until their allowance was cut off by an irate relative) and fall in love every other week, when the most terrifying prospect that one could imagine is the visit of a tyrannical aunt. I’m certain that even in Wodehouse’s time, the world was nowhere near so simple. But isn’t it pleasant to imagine that it was, for just one short moment?

Yet if these stories demonstrate nothing else it is the appalling unpreparedness of the average nineteenth-century gentleman when he accidentally stumbled into Faerie. The Duke of Wellington is a case in point. Women do seem to have fared somewhat better in these perplexing circumstances; the heroine of “Mrs. Mabb”, Venetia Moore, consistently demonstrates an ability to intuit the rules of Faerie, which the older and more experienced Duke is quite without.

What really charmed me about the book was how authentic all the stories sound, as if they were really taken from actual folklore passed by mouth to mouth in the countryside until recorded into writing by an eager amateur researcher. They’re all slightly different too: you can see the direct fairy tale inspiration for “On Lickerish Hill”, which draws on “Rumpelstiltskin”, but “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” sounds vaguely Gothic, while “Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower” is in the form of diary entries. It’s mindboggling to think how much Clarke must have read, from all periods of English history, to carry off such different voices so effortlessly. But her talent for imitation doesn’t mask her style: each story exhibits that unique touch of whimsy mixed with a slightly sinister twist, much like the fairies themselves. Like a prism in the window, casting a shadow next to the insubstantial rainbow: an imperceptible shiver down one’s spine to accompany each charming phrase.

Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik: I read this book without having read The Black Powder War, which breaks my usual rule of reading series in chronological order whenever possible. I still enjoyed the book though. Where Throne of Jade reimagined imperial China in Novik’s alternate world history with dragons, Empire of Ivory takes us to Africa, where certain tribes consider dragons to be reincarnations of heroic ancestors. Isn’t that such an interesting idea? Of course, Laurence is held prisoner by the African dragon-king so I suppose he didn’t exactly share my fascination with the culture, but nonetheless, it’s funny to think that the Europeans, and the English in particular, seem to be in the minority in their insistence on treating dragons as “beasts”. The ending is, alas, another cliffhanger, but I’m glad to see Laurence doing what he believes is right, even though he has to betray his country to do so. For someone like Laurence, it must have been one of the most difficult decisions of his life: choosing between honor and loyalty.

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett: The return of Moist von Lipwig! Who turns from the Post Office to the Royal Mint. I didn’t like this novel quite as much as I liked Going Postal—the book was, to put it simply, not as funny—but it was still clever and entertaining. Dropping the gold standard, printing paper bills, fighting off the machinations of the Lavish family who owns the Bank…Moist manages to juggle it all with his natural instincts for charlatanry. I was a little surprised at the ending (the subplot with the golems felt a little like deus ex machina), and I’m still not sure what Pratchett intended with Mr. Bent. But I was very amused by Hubert (whose model of the Ankh-Morpork economy uses water to represent money and not only predicts but causes economic change), and if I understood economics or finance better, I’m sure I’d find even more amusing references to laugh at. Probably not going on my list of most memorable Discworld novels but still a good sequel, which makes me look forward to Moist von Lipwig’s next change of career. (I’m still waiting for Ankh-Morpork to build its subway system!)

Idoru, by William Gibson: I suppose I should simply resign myself to being perpetually confused by the ending of Gibson’s novels. I think Idoru was more coherent than Neuromancer, but it still ended abruptly for me: I still don’t quite understand what Rez and Rei were aiming to accomplish. What is the Project? What is the island that the idoru owns? I like the atmosphere of Gibson’s cyberpunk novels—the creatively imagined technology, the densely urban settings, even the eccentric characters he creates—but I’m always left with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the end. Did I not read carefully enough? Am I missing something important? In any case, I kind of wish I had Laney’s talent for intuiting “data nodes”—we could certainly use that sort of talent in genomics research, what with all the eye-glazing massive datasets we have to deal with and essentially no good method for determining signal from noise—but of course without the traumatic past as an involunatry experimental subject in an ethically dubious orphanage.

The Birthday of the World, by Ursula K. Le Guin: Almost all of the short stories in this collection focus on the worlds of the Ekumen, the loose universe in which The Left Hand of Darkness, Rocannon’s World and many of Le Guin’s other stories are set. It includes one of my favorite short stories by Le Guin, “Solitude”, which is as compelling on rereading as it was the first time I read it. For several days afterwards, I kept thinking of the end, when the narrator goes back to the planet as an adult and how she lived there, how she could go back to being alone again.

The rest of the short stories were new to me. A few were set in worlds that I had already read about, e.g. “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which was set several years after The Left Hand of Darkness. (Interesting to read about the helplessness and rage that the young Gethenians feel about the onset of kemmer; how like our own puberty despite all the biological differences Le Guin posited.) There was also a short story about Werel, which Le Guin had explored previously in Four Ways to Forgiveness, although I thought it was a little unfocused. “The Matter of Seggri” was much more interesting, containing multiple “primary source” excerpts concerning a world where there is a large gender imbalance, and women run most of the civilization, while men are kept in castles where they engage in violent games to show their physical strength while women choose the ones they like to father their children. The boys are treasured and pampered as children then sent off to the castles when they reach puberty. An interesting inversion of gender prejudices: men are not educated, they are not expected to know about technology or art, they do not form families. Le Guin writes about the effect that contact with the Ekumen has on the society as well; there are rebellions, both physical and intellectual. I was struck by the short story, purportedly written by an avant-garde author on the planet, where a man, who becomes the favorite of a particular woman, falls in love with her and is devastated when she finds his attachment unnatural and ultimately rejects him. Also by the first-hand account of a boy who escapes the castle and goes to the university for education: when asked what he wants most, he says he wants to be a wife, to be able to love another person and create a family, rather than be the breeding tool that his society expects him to be. Another interesting set of stories is set on a world where marriage occurs between four people, two couples of opposite gender and different moiety. I’ve been informed that the moieties actually do exist among Australian aborigines and certain tribes in South America, which is unsurprising given Le Guin’s extensive anthropological background. The difficulty in meeting a single person suitable for marriage…imagine how much more complicated it would be to meet three!

The best story in the collection though wasn’t part of the Hainish universe at all. “Paradises Lost” is set on a spaceship that has been traveling to colonize a new planet. It’s been several generations since the spaceship left Earth, so that all the inhabitants have only known the world of the ship. They have no knowledge of what it’s like to live on Earth and are not expected to live long enough to see the new planet. A new religion denies that the destination even exists; only the Journey is important. They have slowly started to erase records of the old Earth and alter curricula so that the younger generations are receiving less and less education about how to live on ground. Thus, the ship is caught unprepared when an unexpected acceleration schedules their arrival several decades ahead of the expected date. Life on the ship: sterile, peaceful, without danger. Everything is provided and recycled in a near perfect closed system. You never really think about how different it would be for people who were born and lived and died on that ship, and how strange, even frightening, the natural world of a planet would be.

The story traces the lives of two friends, Hsing and Luis, in excerpts over the span of their lives: it’s as much a wonderful portrait of their relationship as it is a commentary on religion and community. I loved the last line, when they have landed on the new planet and grown old together:

Swaying, she lifted her bare feet from the dirt and set them down again while he stood still, holding her hands. They danced together that way.

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 Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (trans. William Weaver): I received this book as a graduation gift from the post-doc who supervised my senior thesis. It’s been on my reading list for a while, especially after I read and enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco won me over right away by drawing parallels between his protagonist, the Franciscan monk and ex-inquisitor, William of Baskerville, and Sherlock Holmes, what with the physical description, the style of deductive reasoning, and the tendency to slip into periods of lassitude while intaking certain herbs. And of course, Adso, the first-person narrator, sounds rather like Watson, not only in name but in their admiration of their respective detective companions. The solution to the crimes was a little disappointing, although I do think as a nemesis, Jorge is similar to Moriarty in that he only really dirties his own hands at the very end. That final confrontation with both William and Jorge loathing each other as much as they admired each other rather reminded me of the Holmes-Moriarty dynamic. I was surprised though because I had suspected Jorge at times through the novel and had discarded the possibility as being too obvious. In any case, The Name of the Rose isn’t a very satisfying mystery, but it’s still a brilliant book. I liked the intentional anachronistic moments—William’s justification of democracy through theological arguments, the “quotations” in Adso’s writing that would of course only be apparent to a modern reader—and I also thought Eco was very clever in the whole layout of the library. I managed to get through the untranslated Latin without too much trouble as well, although I hope I didn’t miss anything essential in some of the longer passages. I was surprised to discover how much it had in common with Foucault’s Pendulum: in fact, I would say that it is even more “metafictional” than Foucault’s Pendulum, being after all, about books. I could also identify with William, even in his less strictly Holmesian aspect: in the end, for me, the central question of the book was whether it was possible to be both a person of faith and a rationalist…and whether it was even possible to be just one without the other, as paradoxical as that seems. William’s belief in the importance of making knowledge accessible, his desperation to save the forbidden book and the rest of the library (to the point of allowing Jorge to die), and most of all, his crisis of faith after the library has burned down. The whole story tied together well, what with all the philosophical discussions about laughter and comedy, the masses versus the educated elite, heresy as the other side of holy mysticism, the theological question of poverty…I suppose I found the theological arguments in the book easier to read through because of my own Catholic background, although I still found some of the political in-fighting between the orders and the Pope a little difficult to get through.

A tangent: William Weaver seems to be responsible for translating both Eco and Calvino. I wonder if he’s some sort of master translator for contemporary Italian authors.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling: I don’t consider Rowling to be a great author, which may be why I was able to enjoy this last book so much without feeling any disappointment. People have been complaining about the epilogue, the treatment of Slytherins, and various “out-of-character” scenes, but I was actually surprised by how well-written the rest of the book was. I liked the quest for the Horcruxes, the temptation of the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore’s backstory, and most of all, the way Harry ended up defeating Voldemort. I probably have a much higher tolerance for derivative adventure fantasy than I do for derivative boarding-school stories, but I think she’s also improved in her writing. The pacing was a little rushed sometimes, but at no point did it stall, which I thought was a relief. The only real complaint I have is that I completely missed the fact that Lupin and Tonks were dead until Harry saw Lupin’s spirit when using the Resurrection Stone. Surely it’s not asking too much to devote more than a sentence to a supporting character’s death. Also, Neville is awesome.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace: Wallace is one of those authors who walk perilously close to the line of being a little too clever, which is probably why he gets slapped with the label of being pretentious from those who are fed up with postmodernist (post-postmodernist?) literature. Of course, since Wallace was the first postmodern author I’ve ever read, I think he’s quite brilliant, so I didn’t exactly bring an objective perspective to this novel: I went in prepared to like the book. I also rather like Wallace’s stylistic flourishes (excesses?)—his love of footnotes, his verbose and overly technical jargon, the way his narrative streams-of-consciousness skip and start and circle back (much the way minds actually think)—and authorial voice. But my bias aside, I really do think that Wallace shouldn’t be dismissed as pretentious because he (1) is clearly self-aware of exactly what he’s doing to a microscopic level, (2) has a brilliant and absurd sense of humor, and (3) writes emotion sincerely, despite knowing that it isn’t fashionable anymore to be genuinely emotional.

Infinite Jest is strangely epic in scope, although its subject matter is really (yet again) the spectrum of dysfunctional and neurotic individuals in modern America. It’s told chronologically out-of-order and jumps around from place to place and from character to character, although it seems to focus primarily on Hal Incandenza (junior tennis champion and lexical prodigy) and Don Gately (recovering narcotics addict). Both live in Enfield, which is located on the outskirts of Boston, and having just spent the last four years in Cambridge, the whole setting felt disturbingly familiar. The characters are often walking through neighborhoods that I’ve physically visited; I’m so used to simply imagining places in books that it felt almost surreal to be reading about places I actually knew. What’s interesting is that Wallace wrote the book ten years ago and set it in the post-millennial future, which means that the book is roughly taking place around now. The future he imagined is clearly meant to be unrealistic and ridiculous—what with NATO being dismantled and replaced with an Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), whole U.S. Northeast being forcefully given to Canada to serve as a waste-dumping ground, cable and broadcast TV being replaced by a new system of customizable mass entertainment monopolized by a company called InterLace—but it’s a little disconcerting to realize that some parts ring surprisingly true, including anti-American terrorism and a rather idiotic president who may or may not be a lame duck. (Well at least Bush isn’t a former lounge singer.) Of course, there are some things that have changed in the past ten years that Wallace wasn’t able to predict, such as the degree to which the Internet has taken over our lives.

I’m a little disconcerted by the ending. We never find out what happens chronologically after the first scene of the novel, and Hal was the character I felt the most invested in reading about. Probably because I could relate to the whole experience of attending a high-pressure school. I keep wondering if the ending is supposed to leave you feeling at a loss—it really seems to just cut off, as if someone flipped a switch on the television—or if Wallace just ran out of steam after a thousand pages. Despite how fragmented the narrative is, the novel is incredibly coherent (even the most seemingly inconsequential details turn up again, if you are an attentive reader, which is why I recommend reading the novel in a continuous stretch if possible). And as silly as it sounds, I really did find the novel meaningful, what it said (or what I thought it said) about freedom and compulsion, pleasure versus happiness, addictions. There are accounts of abuse and dysfunctional family relations, not to mention a thousand ways in which people ruin their lives and reach new points of psychological and physical degradation, all of which I find to be repulsive and depressing in most other contemporary American novels but not this one. I never felt mired, so to speak, in the “filth” of the book, perhaps because Wallace treats all of his characters, even the unsympathetic ones, with a sort of honesty that is kinder than compassion. It’s not a cheerful book but still a funny one. I mean, who wouldn’t laugh at the idea of a militant Quebec separatist group called the Wheelchair Assassins?

His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik: Dragons in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The main character being a Royal Navy officer, Laurence, who stumbles across an egg of a rare Chinese breed, originally promised to Napoleon himself, and finds himself chosen by the newly hatched dragon, whom he names Temeraire. The charm of the book for me was the way we were slowly introduced to aviator culture, with its freedoms and unorthodoxies that come as a shock to Laurence with his strict Navy discipline. Still, Laurence is not so inflexible that he cannot adapt, and both he and Temeraire undergo training to become members of the Royal Aerial Corps. Temeraire, by the way, is an adorable character, an inquisitive and precocious child at first and later an intelligent companion. It’s his relationship with Laurence that really ties this book together.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Another one of those books that I find it difficult to write about. This book really shook me—I went to sleep when I was halfway through the book and had nightmares about it—in much the same way that Oryx and Crake did, although in a more subtle way. I think it has to do with the insidious way in which Ishiguro makes you (that is, through Kathy’s first-person perspective) realize that you are not considered human. There is something horrific about the thought of human clones, about manufacturing people without acknowledging their personhood…and Ishiguro doesn’t force the issue on you but instead lets the feeling of wrongness eat away at the back of your mind until the truth is revealed. Also, the usual Ishiguro theme of might-have-beens, all the missed opportunities of the past. Except before, it always seemed that there was still some way for his protagonists to correct their mistakes—some possibility of reconciliation, however slight—but there doesn’t seem to be any such hope for Kathy and Tommy. They can never go back. That hit me like a sledgehammer when I finished the book, and I could have cried and cried at their quiet resignation, their very lack of regret.

Throne of Jade, by Naomi Novik: Sequel to His Majesty’s Dragon, which I read rather hurriedly at the Coop right after my last final. I found the voyage to China rather long—although I did enjoy the description of the festival-at-sea, with all its delicious foods—but it was interesting to perceive the East-meeting-West encounter from British eyes instead of the other way around. I’m very much used to the anti-imperialist rhetoric criticizing the Europeans for their arrogance and cultural insensitivity, so it was a bit of an eye-opener to see the same criticism applying to the Chinese, who show just as much arrogance and insensitivity to the British in the book. That isn’t to say that Novik portrays Chinese characters or culture in an unflattering light; quite the opposite since she portrays China with the grandeur of an old and sophisticated civilization (while avoiding the mistake of exoticizing it). The reconfiguration of the human society to accomodate dragons was particularly well thought-out.

In the Beginning…was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson: The fact that Neal Stephenson could keep me endlessly entertained while writing about operating systems is a testamonial to how compelling his authorial voice can be. The clever metaphors (he starts off, I believe, by comparing operating systems to cars sold by different types of dealerships), the philosophical asides (the almost metaphysical dichotomy between the command line and the user interface), and the smart commentary on the subcultural differences behind each of the operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Unix, etc.) made it a swift and smooth read. The book was released before the advent of Mac OSX, so it’s a bit outdated, but the book’s essential points are still valid. Stephenson went to some lengths to make the technical aspects comprehensible to the lay reader, and I especially liked the descriptions of how the earliest computers worked (my first computer was a 286 IBM-compatible, so I had no conception of the pre-DOS computing world). I’m also enamored by his descriptions of what some of the Unix-based GUIs can do, and if I had the luxury of owning several up-to-date computers, I’d set up a Unix machine right away.

Unexpected Magics, by Diana Wynne Jones: I was more than a little disappointed to find that I had read all of the short stories in this anthology because they had all previously appeared in Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories, Hidden Turnings and Firebirds Rising. The only new story was the novella Everard’s Ride, which seems to be one of her earliest works. The writing was unsteady, without the characteristic authorial voice that I’ve growned accustomed to, and there seemed to be several missing scenes. The ending was also unusually tidy (her endings tend to have few loose ends but they normally leave you with the feeling that the story could be continued, but I can’t imagine a sequel to Everard’s Ride).

Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding: I’ve seen Bridget Jones referenced obliquely so many times—in magazine articles, in the Very Secret Diaries, in passing conversations—that reading the actual book was somewhat of an anticlimax. I suppose it also didn’t help that I had watched the movie with Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth before I ever read the book. It was a light-hearted and enjoyable read but somehow unexciting. I suppose the problem is that I don’t think—or write—like Bridget at all, so the book’s appeal to me was more a matter of anthropological curiosity than any sense of identification.

The Club Dumas, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (trans. Sonia Soto): Sometimes a book is so perfectly fitted to one’s tastes that discovering it feels almost like an astrological convergence, an incredible coincidence and yet also an act of fate. Excuse my melodrama. I came across this book while combing the fiction shelves of the small bookstore at LAX, where I had been waiting several hours for my flight back to Boston. (I arrived at the airport at half past two in the afternoon, and the flight was scheduled for nine that evening.) I wonder if I would have ever come across the book otherwise and am thankful that I did. How could there be a book more custom-tailored to my guilty pleasures? The combination of Dumas and The Three Musketeers (a book that I had near memorized when I was ten), neurotic bibliophiles and book-forgers, an intriguing mystery with a cynical sleuth, occult rituals, a suspenseful plot, an unreliable and probably egomaniacal narrator…what more could I ask for? In fact, the neurotic bibliophilia alone would have been enough to appeal to me; in the end, this book for me was a book about the inseparable dangers and pleasures of reading. I am still not sure what exactly the girl was supposed to be—I suspect Pérez-Reverte may have been a little too ambitious in his storytelling since that plotline was resolved rather sloppily—but I adored the major plot twist in the book and the fanaticism of the characters. To love a book is to let it possess you.

The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal (trans. Richard Howard): There are two elements to The Charterhouse of Parma that make it such an enjoyable book. First, of course, is the romance. Not only romance in the sense of the forbidden love affair that is the crux of the story, but also the romance of youthful and impetuous idealism, a rosy-colored vision of the world where men are brave and gallant, love is always true, and heroes and heroines remain picturesque even in tragedy. Think Italy. Think Napoleon. The other element of course, which makes this novel something more than a romance, is Stendhal’s French skepticism and deft ironic commentary on the story. Against Fabrizio’s dreams of valiant battle, you have the absurd reality of getting lost in the middle of the battle and being taken for an enemy by the very soldiers he came to aid. Side by side with Fabrizio’s amorous adventures in Parma, you have Count Mosca and Duchess Sanseverina maneuvering for for political dominance at the Prince’s court, an exercise that revolves around the careful flattery of the monarch’s ego. Stendhal is not contemptuous but he does write condescendingly of the Italians, who are quick to emotion and far too caught up in their romanticism. (The French of course are too cynical and sophisticated to embarrass themselves in such a fashion.) His narrative voice is essential to this novel; ironically, it makes Fabrizio and Clelia’s love story seem more poignant and pure.

The Grand Tour, or The Purloined Coronation Regalia, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer: I think the letter format in Sorcery and Cecelia was more engaging than the diary entries and testimony in this sequel. But it was charming to see the four interacting. There is less prickliness and almost a sort of sweetness between Kate and Thomas…Cecelia however retains a matter-of-fact pragmatism. I read a review of the first book that criticized the two authors for giving their narrators such similar voices, and I have to acknowledge that the two are much more distinguishable in the sequel than they were before. Kate is more obviously insecure, while Cecelia is confident about everything. I must admit that I had no idea which author had written which character until I read this book.

The Devil in Music, by Kate Ross: Maybe it’s because I read this last book a month later than the first three, or perhaps it’s a function of the setting, but The Devil in Music seems to stand apart from the rest of the series. We are given more to the story and yet not enough, we hear more about Julian’s past than ever before, there are politics and music involved, and most of all, Julian is in Italy, not England. I’m glad I read The Charterhouse of Parma before this book because I had a better sense for the passions of the place. Julian falls in love more intensely than he does in previous novels (which may be why the emotion seems more convincing). The novel is more interesting for the music (and the Carbonaro conspiracies) than the mystery itself. All the new characters are vivid and fascinating, and I was particularly moved by the story of Valeriano, the castrato singer.

Conrad’s Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones: Chrestomanci is such an insufferable teenager, but he is still my favorite part of this book. I don’t know whether it was because I was reading the text on-screen rather than in print, but I found the pacing more uneven than usual. The usual untangling of the plot as all is revealed at the end felt more rushed than ever, and truth be told, I wasn’t all that interested by Conrad as a character. He was a bit nebulous, I thought. I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say the book was unsatisfying, but it felt like a permutation of previous storylines, which I found odd because DWJ likes to try out new things. The real highlight of the book was seeing Christopher before he actually became Chrestomanci and also getting a glimpse of his relationship with Millie. Prior to this book, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to attempt Chrestomanci fanfiction, but now I have a better handle on his character.

Thud!, by Terry Pratchett: Another Sam Vimes book in the Discworld series. Pratchett has that rare gift where he manages to satirize serious social issues in our world (ethnic conflicts, religious extremism, prejudices in all its forms, etc.) but also creates a uniquely Discworld flavor. Both the dwarfs and the trolls do remind me of various immigrant groups here, but what’s also striking is that Pratchett’s dwarfs and trolls are never made to map exactly to real-life counterparts. The dwarf culture has a specific Discworld context—how everything revolves around their original occupation of mining—and likewise for the trolls. It is those details of worldbuilding that really defines for me Pratchett’s strengths as a writer. Ironic isn’t it that I appreciate Pratchett most for writing good fantasy rather than good satire? Anyway, I particularly liked the concept behind Thud. The most crucial moment in the book would have to be when the dwarf Helmclever, who works for the grags but secretly is a master at the game, breaks down:

“It was the club the troll Mr Shine gave me for winning five games in a row,” he wailed. “He was my friend! He said I was as good as a troll so I should have a club! I told Ardent it was a war trophy! But he took it and bashed that poor dead body!”

Actually, the more and more I think about it, the more and more complex this novel becomes. It touches on so many issues: second-generation dwarfs wanting to go back to their roots to be more “authentic”, Brick’s drug problem, Vimes finally forced to employ a Black Ribboner in the Watch, the way history is changed and rewritten…One of these days, I’ll reread it again, even if it wouldn’t quite make it as one of my top favorites in the series. I’m so excited about the last scene though; I’m convinced that Ankh-Morpork will have a new subway system by the next book.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman: The general consensus seems to be that Anansi Boys is the most mainstream out of all of Gaiman’s novels so far, or at least the one most likely to have mainstream appeal. Same universe as American Gods, by which I mean that it works by the same rules and assumptions; otherwise the characters and tone of writing are all very different. I think what’s most notable is that Gaiman doesn’t seem half as dark as he usually is: not even Tiger really creeps you out the way his creations do in other books. I still liked the book though. I thought there was a playfulness to the story that was in keeping with Anansi himself.

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel): All right, to be entirely honest, I didn’t like this book as much as I did the two Murakami novels I’ve read before. Actually, the disappointment mostly lies with the last third or so. The chapters alternate between two storylines, one from the perspective of Kafka Tamura (a first-person narrative) and one following an old man who can speak to cats, named Nakata (third-person). The two apparently divergent narratives do end up intersecting in various elusive connections until they collide—and while I can’t exactly explain the collision, I must say that the aftermath was what disappointed me. Usually, at the end of a Murakami novel or short story, I might feel that I couldn’t explain (not in rational terms anyway) everything that happened, but I always did feel as if I understood it on some nonverbal level, that at the very least the story had some sort of thematic coherence with no loose ends hanging out. Kafka on the Shore however ended before I was ready for it to be over. The ending unraveled, if that makes any sense. That isn’t to say that I didn’t like the entire book; for most of it, I was (as usual) enraptured by the writing and the characters. It’s so odd how matter-of-fact Murakami’s writing is (I would call it almost “bald” at times) and yet how precise—it renders his most fantastical ideas a psychological realism that bowls me over whenever I read his novels. I didn’t sympathize much with Kafka—he is the character I understood least in the entire novel, and I wonder if that may have to do with the first-person narration—but everyone else was vividly real, especially Oshima and Nakata, who are ironically enough the most unusual (if we were to talk in terms of people we are actually likely to meet).

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers: What I have to emphasize about Gaudy Night is that it’s not a mystery. Oh, to be sure, there is a crime, or rather a series of crimes, with an unknown perpetrator, as well as a detective, Harriet Vane, who looks for clues and questions witnesses or suspects to discover the criminal. But the book isn’t about the mystery at all nor its solution; the book is about women and how it is possible to be both an independent human being and to be specifically female, in every sense of the word. It is a difficult problem even now. I was startled to realize how much of Harriet’s own doubts and concerns applied to me in the here and now. The American lady who believed in the marriage of intelligent women to intelligent men (the influence of the American eugenics movement, no doubt), the dons of Shrewsbury who choose academia over marriage and motherhood (and hence are perceived to be unnatural women), the young college girls who preoccupy themselves with beaux, and most of all Harriet herself, who must come to terms with her relationship with Peter Wimsey. The resolution only comes when Harriet finally realizes that Peter will not force her to make a choice and that it is possible to be in love with a man without losing one’s own personal integrity in the process. As obvious as that sounds, it’s more difficult to realize than one would imagine. Love by itself involves loss of autonomy, and when women are forced, by external circumstances, to be socially and economically dependent on men, emotional dependence becomes all the more dangerous. It takes a lot for Harriet to realize that she can afford that risk. It’s not only a matter of whether Peter himself would or would not subsume her—clearly he is too much a gentleman to deliberately do that to her the way her former lover did—but a matter of whether she could trust herself.

Wimsey drops his frivolous facade almost for good here. I wonder if that’s due to Harriet or simply his evolution as a character. It’s interesting to see him from the perspective of the people who knew him, like his nephew St. George or his old college classmates. Gives him much more dignity too; like Harriet, we were too used to Peter to realize just how impressive he appears to others.

One final note: I really liked reading about Shrewsbury dynamics because so much of the college system in Oxford uses the same terminology as the system here. But the atmosphere is extremely different. Our Houses don’t have that sense of character, the shared community, the rarefied touch of academia. It’s true that my university exists in a bubble, but I can’t say that it really has the ivory tower atmosphere. People are focused on studying for exams, but so much of our mindset is oriented towards a professional future; while I do believe that students at heart do enjoy knowledge for its own sake, this mentality remains personal rather than social.

Sethra Lavode, by Steven Brust: All I can say is, I felt like crying at the end of this book. Poor Khaavren! I must admit that most of the storyline with the Jenoine and the Duke of Kana didn’t really interest me all that much, and I was even starting to get a little tired of Paarfi’s neverending exposition and circuitous dialogue, but the ending reminded me why the books hooked me in the first place. Ultimately, it was Khaavren’s story we were reading—how he lived and changed—and while there is a happy ending, there’s also irreversible loss.

His Grace of Osmonde, by Frances Hodgson Burnett: I must say, I never knew that Burnett wrote any books for adults, and it’s kind of odd reading a very characteristic Burnett novel with typical Burnett characters, except that there’s an actual love story involved. His Grace of Osmonde seems like a cross between Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t quite like Osmonde with his impeccable chivalry, and I think Burnett is a little too fond of children upon whom “Fortune seems to smile from birth” (Cedric from Little Lord Fauntleroy, Sara from A Little Princess) but are forced to endure hardships that the cruel world inflicts on them. I mean, I enjoyed both those Burnett books, but they don’t hold as dear a place in my heart as The Secret Garden, where bitter, sullen Mary and sickly, paranoid Colin actually seem like real children, full of imperfections. They are not wholly likeable, which perversely makes me like them better. In any case, I also didn’t quite like the foreordained quality of the romance here—wherein Clorinda is the only possible woman worthy of the shining perfection that is Osmonde—although I suppose the arbitrary circumstances that keep them apart make it truly tragic. I really did like the ending; a nice change from Burnett’s usual instinct to moralize. Good people are sometimes forced to do bad things. I never would have expected her to put in such a twist.

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel): Oh, what to say about Sputnik Sweetheart. The writing literally overwhelmed me from the very first paragraph. More so than Norwegian Wood, which may be due to the different translators (I read Philip Gabriel’s translation of Sputnik Sweetheart and Jay Rubin’s translation of Norwegian Wood). The book seems relatively normal until about halfway through the book, when Sumire disappears, and Murakami becomes progressively more and more surreal until you don’t know what’s metaphor and what’s literal anymore. But of course, that’s not the point. You aren’t supposed to ask, wait, what’s really going on, because that isn’t what’s important. It shocked me how comprehensible the book was. I mean, usually with avant-garde writing, there’s a certain leap of thought required before it makes sense, that is to say, it takes a little time for it all to sink in, but not so here. Sumire disappearing, Miu’s hair turning white, the strange music on the hilltop: it all made sense. Although now that I try to articulate what it meant to me, it comes out sounding rather flat and banal. I was a bit disconcerted by the sharp transition when the narrator returns to Japan, and in fact, a part of me wondered at first if those final chapters were even necessary. And then I realized that the break in the narration, almost like a snap, is exactly like the narrator’s own transition. This kind of writing awes me to no end. Murakami’s style (at least from what I can tell in English translation) is deceptively simple, open, even dryly humorous (I forgot to mention that he’s really funny, which is not exactly what one would expect from the summaries of his novels), and yet this sensation of something powerful. I wrote in my LJ that it’s hard for me to say that I “like” Sputnik Sweetheart because the experience can’t be classified in those categories of liking or disliking. The analogy used: “when you glimpse yourself in the mirror and see yourself as a stranger, not-self, and yet the person you see is intimately familiar.” (Oh dear, to think that I would resort to the conceit of quoting myself.)

The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers: To be entirely honest, I found this mystery to be rather tiresome and not one of Sayers’ best. Too many suspects, too many details, too many detectives. We didn’t even have much opportunity to at least enjoy Wimsey’s conversation, which used to be a delight when the mystery itself fell short of expectation. Also, I do like attempting to solve the crime along with the characters, but not when I’m forced to juggle timetables in my head. I daresay real detectives have to deal with these kinds of messy mysteries all the time, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily make good narratives. Oh well, I managed to finish it in the end though. The solution to the crime was equally disappointing.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash is one of those books that when you look at it piece by piece, you wonder how the story ever managed plausibility in the first place, but when you look at it as a whole, you find it absolutely cool anyway. Hackers! Mesopotamian mythology! Linguistics! Viruses! Seriously, Stephenson comes up with the most awesome (if far-fetched) ideas. The first chapter, by the way, is a brilliant piece of writing: if you read it out loud, you notice the rhythm he’s built into the narration. The puns are…kind of obvious and bad, but I forgave him anyway. I also forgave him for equating glossolalia with fanaticism and mob mentality (not that I can exactly blame him, but “speaking in tongues” does not send you off into a mindless euphoria). Oh yes, and Stephenson’s definition of agglutinative language is incorrect as well. But quibbles aside, the whole Asherah idea—the impulse to conformity, and not just conformity but irrationality being transmitted as a virus to which human brains are particularly vulnerable—reminded me of Dawkin’s original concept of the “meme”. Also, the Babel phenomenon being responsible for inspiring human diversity was pretty interesting too, especially considering that I’m taking a course on language acquisition taught by a Chomskyite professor. The Metaverse was well designed although I wish Stephenson had included some more notes on how the user interface worked. I mean, how exactly does Hiro get his avatar to fight in the Metaverse? Is it tied into his actual physical movements? Wouldn’t that be kind of limiting? I mean, imagine if he had to stand still but his avatar had to walk? Or is it connected directly to his brain? Eye movements? Hand movements? Yes, I do obsess over worldbuilding details like these. Juanita is awesome although the way Hiro perceives her is definitely different from the person she really is, I bet. Also, why on earth does Hiro keep changing from washed-out delivery boy to hacker legend to kenjutsu master to some sort of secret agent to way too many personas for one individual? He can’t be that talented. I would call him a Gary Stu except it occurred to me that Hiro Protagonist reflects how men (or at least many males of my acquaintance) see themselves: a mix of both unrecognized genius and insecure failure. Anyway, the reinterpretation of religious history in terms of Enki’s nam-shub might require gross generalizations but what a brilliant idea nonetheless.

Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers: A much better mystery than Five Red Herrings even though again there was much agonizing over alibis and timetables. At least the solution was quite clever this time, and it all fit together pretty well, even if the cryptography seemed a little excessive. I mean, are murders, even premeditated ones, ever that elaborate? Of course, that’s beside the point because no matter how interesting the sleuthing, what this book really is about is Harriet and Peter, and Harriet’s inability to reconcile her need for independence with her very genuine affection for Peter. The author makes it more than obvious that she loves him back, but nonetheless, we must watch the painful dance. Oh the difficulties of being a Modern Woman! I must say that this book is the first where Lord Peter’s been so consistently wrong in his theories, even if he comes up with the right answer in the end.