Author: whatmeread

Day 287: The Dragonriders of Pern

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Cover for Dragonriders of PernAnne McCaffrey’s fantasy books about Pern were a guilty pleasure for me starting in high school. For years, I picked up every one of the books, until it seemed as if she was simply dashing them off. I understand that the series is continuing, written by McCaffrey’s son Todd.

I recently reread The Dragonriders of Pern for old time’s sake. This book incorporates three of McCaffrey’s Pern novels: Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon.

Dragonflight was my introduction to and the first novel in the series, and I still enjoyed the tale of Lessa, revenge, and a new life. Lessa has been living as a kitchen drudge in the hold that Lord Fax invaded when she was a child, murdering the rest of her family, who had been the hold’s rulers. For years she has been nursing her thirst for revenge, and sees an opportunity when F’lar, a dragonrider, comes to the hold in search of female riders for the as-yet unhatched dragon queen. Soon, she finds herself renouncing some of her plans and going off with the weyrfolk. This novel still has all its original magic, featuring a fully realized fantasy world, an immanent threat, and an engaging hero and heroine.

Dragonquest begins seven “turns” after Dragonflight. F’lar and Lessa are now weyrleaders, and they are trying to unite all the weyrs in the battle against thread, which looks as if it might consume their planet. At the end of Dragonflight, Lessa went back in time to bring forward the weyrs from the past for help. Now those weyrs are behaving like a bunch of feudal lords, and F’lar and Lessa are searching for solutions to the problems. This novel was also just as good as I remembered.

The White Dragon seems much more of a children’s novel. Lord Jaxom is the son of Lord Fax, whom Lessa got F’lar to kill in a duel in Dragonflight. As a lord holder, he is expected to take on duties that have nothing to do with weyr life, but when he is a boy, he accidentally impresses a white dragon. The dragon never grows very big and seems to be unsuited to the regular tasks of weyr life. But Jaxom is convinced that his Ruth can fight thread and act just like any other dragon. This novel seems much more juvenile than the other ones, and I find it much less interesting.

I should also say something about the edition, which is cheaply constructed and poorly edited. I found many typos that I don’t think I encountered in the original versions of the novels.

Day 286: Await Your Reply

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Cover for Await Your ReplyLucinda Rosenfeld with the New York Times was stuck by this novel’s bleakness. I was more struck with its cleverness. In fact, I think I’ll have a hard time conveying what an incredible novel it is.

At first, it seems to be a set of three stories about people who are not connected, but the connections begin to occur to you as you read it. Although the novel plays with time by relating incidents out of order, you eventually understand how the characters and the incidents are related.

Ryan is traveling to the hospital with his severed hand in an ice bucket. He has been holed up in a remote cabin in Michigan with his father Jay, but a violent incident has just occurred. Later, we learn that Ryan was a student at Northwestern University until he was contacted by Jay, who told him he was his real father–that the parents who raised him actually were his aunt and uncle. Ryan, feeling his life is a sham, has abandoned his school and parents and gone to work with his father as an identity thief.

Lucy has run off with her high school science teacher George, who has promised her they are going to make a lot of money. Lucy has been dying to leave her hick life in a hick Ohio town, as she sees it. She is dismayed, however, when they arrive in Nebraska at an abandoned motel shaped like a lighthouse near a dried-up reservoir and take up residence in a creepy old house the description of which reminds me of the one behind the Bates Motel.

Miles has been searching for his twin brother Hayden for ten years. After a period of extreme mental illness in high school, Hayden disappeared. Miles has never been sure whether his brother’s condition was real or faked, because Miles and his brother used to spend a lot of their time creating elaborate fantasies. Now, every once in awhile, his life working in a mail-order magic store is interrupted by a paranoid and semi-coherent letter from Hayden offering Miles clues of his whereabouts, which sends him off in pursuit. Each time he arrives late, after his brother has left the area, and finds that his brother has been using a different name, working a different job. Now Miles is driving to the farthest reaches of Canada to try to find Hayden.

The novel is constructed like a puzzle, providing the pieces, but jumbled up, and building a sense of suspense and dread. You become completely absorbed in reconstructing the events and connecting the stories. You begin to wonder what has happened to some of the characters, who seem to have disappeared.

My only small problem with the novel is a key incident, where a character is lured to Africa by the classic Nigerian Letter scam, which offers a huge amount of money for helping a stranger get a larger sum out of the country. This scam is well known on the Internet, and I in fact ran into it in letter form about 20 years ago. I have always been incredulous that anyone would fall for it, although I realize that people still do. But the character who falls for it in this novel is one who has long used the Internet for identity theft. It seems as if he would be likely to know of the scam, even though his character is one who seems compelled to believe in the fictions he has created.

This novel is about identity and its relationship to death. Various characters take on different identities throughout the book. In doing so, they come to view their old selves as dead. It is almost as though Chaon views identity and selfhood as being entirely fluid–or perhaps his message is that this is a change wrought by our uses of the Internet.

Day 285: Full Dark House

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Cover for Full Dark HouseThe back cover of this mystery calls it “mapcap” and “great fun.” I found it mildly amusing in a silly way.

John May arrives at work in the present time to find the place has been blown up, apparently with his partner Arthur Bryant inside. He investigates this incident while he thinks back to their first case together.

John joined Arthur during the Blitz in World War II working in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Their case was that of a dancer at a theatre in Covent Garden who is drugged and then dragged into the elevator with her feet sticking out, so that when the elevator moves, her feet are cut off.

There are many gothic touches in this novel, which is not surprising because the author is apparently a writer of horror fiction. However, after references to phantoms, vampires, spiritualism, and so on, the murderer turns out to be human after all. I came away feeling that this book promises more, in the way of humor and the unusual, than it actually delivers.

Day 284: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

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Cover for The Big ShortIn The Big Short, Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street bond trader and financial journalist turned author of best-selling nonfiction, explains what happened in the bond market from 2002 through 2008 that nearly destroyed the economy. He begins, however, a little earlier, with the first financial debacle involving the subprime mortgage market in the 1990’s that, once it was weathered, everyone assumed would not reoccur.

Let me start with a quick comment that I am not by any means knowledgeable in financial matters or even usually interested in them, so it’s possible my brief synopsis could have some mistakes, but this is my understanding.

The problem began with greedy subprime mortgage dealers lending money to people for houses they could not afford (and for which they would normally not qualify) using adjustable rate mortgages and balloon payments and sometimes requiring no down payment. That this money was loaned at all was a reflection of the profitability of this market, where deals were made and then put into packages with other deals and sold immediately to someone else.

Eventually, a few discerning traders and analysts who set out to understand the structure of some of these bonds realized that when the higher interest rates kicked in on the mortgages, or sometimes when the first payment was due, the home owners would default. They also realized that if enough of these bad mortgages were packaged together, the bonds encompassing these packages of subprime mortgage deals would default. Once they could find no serious difficulties with their reasoning, these few traders decided to bet against–or short–these bonds.

A disturbing feeding frenzy went on among traders who did not understand how risky these packages were. And those that did not understand the packages included the rating agencies, like Standard and Poor’s, who apparently made no effort to understand them. In fact, the bond traders willfully convinced the rating agencies to rate bond packages almost completely composed of these bad mortgages as triple A.

The book is full of colorful characters and stories that lend interest to the descriptions of the financial details. I occasionally had problems grasping the details of what was going on, but by and large, Lewis has explained this disaster in a way that is eminently readable and incredibly scary. If you have any illusions about the morals of the people running our financial institutions before you start reading, prepare to give them up.

Day 283: My Alsace

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Cover for My AlsaceDuring a visit to Alsace several years ago, I was fascinated by this book, especially by the pictures, but I could only find it in French. Then, awhile back, I found it on Amazon in English.

My Alsace was written by Hansi (Jean-Jacques Waltz), a beloved Alsatian poster and children’s book artist who grew up in the late 19th century under German occupation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region of Alsace, which identifies itself as French, changed hands between Germany and France four times. In the German school at Colmar as a boy, Hansi only learned about the great Prussian victories and the defeat of Alsace in his history classes. He deemed this period the worst in his life and wanted Alsatian children to know that Alsace has a prouder history.

My Alsace is a selection from the history he wrote in 1912 and some writings from after World War I. The latter section of the book goes on to tell about the trouble he got into with the German authorities during World War I because of his jokes about Germans in the earlier book. He was originally fined and later he was given a year’s prison sentence for insulting a German officer. He published the latter part of the book in 1919 to celebrate the region’s liberation from the Germans.

Hansi’s drawings are wonderful. He was well known for his pictures of Alsatian villages, people in traditional costumes, and celebrations of Alsatian life from an earlier time. The text is amusing, although it is full of anti-German satire. Written for children about eight years old, it is also entertaining for adults.

Day 282: Speaking From Among the Bones

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Cover for Speaking From Among the BonesEleven-year-old chemist and detective Flavia de Luce is back with her latest adventure in Speaking From Among the Bones. An expert in poisons and an accomplished snoop, Flavia has already solved four crimes before the ripe old age of twelve.

Having accompanied her sister Ophelia (Feely) to her organ practice one night, Flavia hears a flapping in the organ pipes that she thinks is a trapped bat. Feely is practicing for the Easter Sunday service, as Mr. Collicutt, the organist, has vanished.

The next morning when Flavia goes back to the church to get the bat out of the pipes (so that she can look at its blood under her microscope), she gets distracted into eavesdropping on a confrontation between the vicar and the bishop’s secretary over the unearthing and reburial of the bones of St. Tancred from his crypt in the church. The vicar has previously received permission to do this and now the bishop is trying to rescind it through a magistrate.

The vicar insists on going ahead, and the men open the sealed crypt enough so that Flavia can look into it. Inside the crypt is the body of Mr. Collicutt, with his head in an old gas mask.

Flavia’s investigations take her as usual all over the village and turn up all sorts of secrets, including a man hidden away in an old house, a secret passageway into St. Tancred’s crypt, and the whereabouts of a diamond that was buried with his body in the saint’s crozier. At the same time she worries about family problems, such as her sister’s impending marriage and the sale of the crumbling family mansion, Buckshaw, for back taxes.

As usual, Flavia herself is the most charming part of the series, as she plunges recklessly into and out of difficult situations, contemplates the structure of blood and the properties of ether, irritates her older sisters, and rides all over the village on her trusty bike Gladys. The novel is funny, the mystery absurd, the writing splendid, and Flavia always entertaining.

Day 281: Gilead

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Cover for GileadBest Book of the Week!
Gilead is the novel that precedes Marilynne Robinson’s Home, although it is set in the same time frame and covers some of the same territory. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

John Ames is an elderly Congregationalist minister in 1956 who believes he is dying. He has a much younger wife and young son, a surprising blessing in his old age. The novel is in the form of a diary addressed to his son in the expectation that he will not live long enough to personally pass on his family history and advice.

Ames lives in Gilead, a small Iowa town on the prairie near the border with Kansas. The town was founded by abolitionists during the Free State wars in Kansas as a refuge for slaves and fighters the likes of John Brown. Ames’ grandfather, also a minister of the warrior-for-God ilk, had visions of God and once preached a sermon in a bloody shirt with a gun in his belt. With that upbringing, his son was naturally a pacifist, who left the church for awhile after that sermon to worship with the Quakers. One of Ames’ most powerful memories is of the journey he made with his father to Kansas, in terrible conditions, to retrieve the body of his grandfather, who had returned there.

Although Gilead is certainly about the history of the town–the wars, the Depression, the Dust Bowl years–it is more about the relationship between fathers and sons, both from the secular and religious points of view. Not only does it explore the relationships within Ames’ own family, but it also looks at that between Ames and the son of his best friend the Presbyterian minister–Ames’ surrogate son–John Ames Boughton.

The story of John Ames Boughton is the one more thoroughly explored in the sequel Home, although interestingly enough, Gilead tells Boughton’s story more explicitly, while Home, narrated by Boughton’s sister Glory, only hints at some of the facts.

The novel, a celebration of life and faith, is beautifully written and full of ideas to ponder. That being said, as I do not particularly have a religious background or bent, I did not fully understand some of the narrator’s ideas and preoccupations. I found Home, although told from the point of view of the same goodness and piety, a more accessible novel than Gilead.

Day 280: Death in the Stocks

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Cover of Death in the StocksIf you enjoy Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels but have never read any of her mysteries, you’re in for a treat. I’m not saying they are hard to guess, because she is so good at creating lovable characters that usually the murderer is the only character you don’t like (although in Death in the Stocks there are several unlikeable characters). But her mystery novels are funny and full of eccentric personalities. In addition, in true Golden Age form, the victim is often someone who deserves his or her fate.

A dead man is found murdered on Ashleigh Green, locked in the stocks. The victim turns out to be Arnold Vereker, a wealthy man with plenty of enemies, including most of his family members. Vereker used his local cottage as a nest where he entertained loose women.

When Superintendent Hannasyde goes to investigate the cottage, he does find a woman there, but she is Vereker’s half-sister Antonia. She has come down from London to argue with him about his having forbidden her marriage, as he was her guardian.

The list of suspects extends to Antonia’s brother Kenneth, who is the heir, his girlfriend Violet, Antonia’s shady fiancé, and Leslie, a friend of the family. Finally, the victim’s long-lost brother Roger reappears and claims his fortune.