April 24, 2008 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Books Etc
The Cardathon Challenge was an absolute blast! It’s running for the rest of the year, so I urge anyone who isn’t familiar with Orson Scott Card’s books to at least try Ender’s Game, which is the best science fiction novel I’ve ever read.
Of the books I read for the challenge, Ender’s Game was my favourite, closely followed by Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide.
I filled my other three choices with books/series recommended by Card in his weekly column, and all of them are now favourites of mine as well. Widdershins by Charles de Lint was a wonderful book. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner are some of the best juvenile/young adult works I’ve read, as are Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy, The Goose Girl, and Enna Burning.
Since the challenge lasts at least through 2008, and its not even the end of April, I’m going to start two other Cardathon challenges, reading the six books in the Enderverse that I have yet to read, and six non-Ender books by Card. I’m looking forward to some great reads during the rest of the year!
Tags: Cardathon Challenge
April 22, 2008 at 4:44 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
62. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card (Science fiction) 592 p.
I didn’t love Xenocide quite as much as Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead. Not to say that it wasn’t a complex, exciting, wonderful, challenging book, because it was all of those things. Unfortunately, I didn’t like several of the things that happened. They weren’t wrong for the story, but they annoyed me, as did many of the characters, even as they also engrossed me. I still stayed up late because I couldn’t put the book down, though. In quality, Xenocide is every bit as good as its two prequels, but for personal reasons, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much.
This book is a close sequel to Speaker for the Dead, and takes up pretty much where that book left off. Valentine, her husband Jakt, and their family are halfway to Lusitania, about to meet up with young Miro Ribeira. By the time they arrive, 22 years have passed, and the Lusitania fleet, sent by Stairways Congress to take control of, and probably destroy, Lusitania Colony, is less than a year away. Tensions rise between the sentients species on Lusitania, and some kind of xenocide seems nearly inevitable, although who will be the victims and who the perpetrators is somewhat less clear.
Meanwhile, on the far-distant colony world of Path, a 16-year-old girl named Qing-jao (”Gloriously Bright”) makes a decision that may seal the fate of more than one species.
Orson Scott Card is at his brilliant best in the world-building he does in Xenocide. Path is a simply fascinating place, one of the most original future societies I’ve ever read about. As usual, OSC is a master at combining small-scale human concerns with sweeping moral investigations and implausible but gripping scientific speculation.
(I went looking to find out which novel beat out Xenocide for the 1992 Hugo, since both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead won the award in previous years. Turns out it was Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar. Bujold is one of my favourite SF authors, and I even love Barrayar, which a lot of fans don’t, but better than Xenocide? Come on.)
ETA: If you pick this up, you’re better off not reading the blurb or the author’s note, since both of them give away plot details that would be more fun to find out in the course of the book.
Pages read: 17,871
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Ender quartet, Enderverse, Orson Scott Card
April 13, 2008 at 8:18 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
52. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (Science Fiction) 382 p.
I don’t know what to say about this book, because it’s so good, so wonderful, so human, in ways I don’t know how to articulate. But I’ll try.
Speaker for the Dead begins about 3,000 years after the end of Ender’s Game. It takes place on the small colony world of Lusitania, whose only human inhabitants are a small village of Brazilian-Portuguese Catholics. However, Lusitania is also home to the first sentient alien species humanity has encountered in the Bugger Wars three millenia earlier. Due to the time dilation effect of faster-than-light travel, Andrew Wiggin is still only 35 years old. When the call goes out for a speaker for the dead, he can’t resist travelling to Lusitania.
That’s a really inadequate summary, and it only touches on the plot, which, although excellent, isn’t at the core of the book. It’s the people and ideas that make Speaker for the Dead so special, that set it apart from other science fiction. OSC manages to explore some really compelling xenology and xenobiology (i.e. alien anthropology and biology), without sacrificing character development. Not all the people in Speaker for the Dead are human, but they are all interesting and complex and very, very real, because Card never takes the easy way out.
A good example of this is Bishop Pelegrino, the religious leader of the community. At first, he seems like the reactionary, righteous, slightly stupid Catholic priest recognizable from many other books, but Card is a better writer than to stop there. Although he does have these traits to some degree, they are far outweighed by his ability to be flexible, by his caring for his community, and by his compassion.
I love the world Card creates on Lusitania, because it’s just so interesting. The Piggies, of course, and the mystery of their society, but especially the human community of Milagre. I look forward to seeing more of both in the third book in the series, Xenocide. When I started this book, I didn’t think any sequel could come close to being as good as Ender’s Game, but I was wrong. As amazing as that book was, Speaker for the Dead somehow manages to live up to it. I can now number Orson Scott Card among my very favourite writers.
Pages read: 14,286
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Ender quartet, Enderverse, Eponymous Challenge, Orson Scott Card, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
March 22, 2008 at 12:19 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
41. Widdershins by Charles de Lint (Urban Fantasy) 560 p.
I’d heard enough good things about Charles de Lint that when I got the chance to buy Widdershins, with its very attractive cover, at half off the remaindered price, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t know much about this book before I read it today, except that it was urban fantasy and part of a loosely-connected series of novels set in the imaginary North American city of Newford. I didn’t know how much I was going to love this book.
Actually, even after I started it, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it at all. The beginning, where a young Celtic fiddler named Lizzie is stranded by car trouble and has her first encounter with the magical world, caught my interest in a limited way. I liked Lizzie, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing a good bit more of her, but the point of view shifted in the next chapter, to a character I wasn’t nearly so interested in (although luckily Lizzie returned throughout the book.)
I’m not a fan of perspective shifts; they only work for me when I’m equally interested in all of the characters, and when the author resolves suspenseful episodes before skipping to another point of view. Charles de Lint doesn’t do that, unfortunately, and it continued to be something of a problem for me throughout the book—although less so as I got to know and be interested in more of his characters.
As Charles de Lint mentions in his author’s note, Widdershins was written partly because of requests from his fans that he write more about a particular character, Jilly, and show her getting together with her friend Geordie, since everyone but the two of them can see that they’re made for each other. I’m very grateful that de Lint didn’t limit the scope of his book to Jilly and Georgie, because I found them by far the least interesting characters in the book—especially when they were together! Maybe it’s because this book was written with established fans in mind, but there was a lot more telling than showing when it came to their personalities; I still don’t feel like I know much about the two of them beyond the things said by other characters in the book.
So I was reading along, mildly interested, but not enough to carry me through a 560-page book. The urban fantasy element wasn’t much different from other things I’d read, the plot wasn’t really going anywhere yet, and the characters weren’t wonderful enough to carry the story on their own. Then I got to page 111, and I started to sit up and take notice.
He was a curious little man, born a treekin—a kind of fairy about the height of a man’s knee, made of twigs and mulch and leaves and moss, all held together in the shape of a human body with a weaving of braided grasses and vines. Treekin needed to replenish their body parts from time to time—when a twig got old and chipped, or when a grass braid snapped and the press of leaves and moss that gave shape to limbs began to fall away. The materials they needed for repair were easy to find, even in a city, for there were always gardens and parks to plunder amongst the tall towers of concrete and steel.
But in the past few decades, many of the treekin began to utilize bits and pieces of electronics and computer parts for their repairs, metamorphosing over time into creatures made as much of wiring and circuitry as they were of organic material. Eventually, some, like Edgan, became creatures entirely made of synthetic castoffs; each techno treekin—as they came to be called—as individual as the materials they were able to scrounge. In Edgan’s case, he had a torso built up around a computer motherboard; his limbs and head were a complicated tangle of wiring and less identifiable objects, though his nose was certainly a spark plug and his eyes a pair of camera lenses.
He was in Computer World tonight because he’d recently seen another of the techno treekin sporting an iPod in the twisting snarl of wires that held her torso together, and he simply had to have one himself. He already had a PDA wired into his motherboard body—as well as a digital camera and a pair of cell phones—but its memory capacity couldn’t match the sixty gigabytes of the iPod. The iPod would be perfect for storing the data he pilfered from the Internet, but he also liked the shiny whiteness of its case for how it matched his spark plug nose.
I don’t know why, but that passage really appealed to me, and from that point on, I was fully engaged in the story Charles de Lint’s characters were telling me. In the end, it’s an intriguing one, about a potential war between the fairies, who came over from Europe with the first North American immigrants, and the Cousins, or First People, who were there before them. It’s also a story about hurt, malice, abuse, and vengeance, and how those things can keep hurting even after the fact. Ultimately, it’s about love and understanding, and about finding common ground. The message was a little heavy-handed, but the plot had a strong enough hold on me that I didn’t much mind.
There were a few other things I was going to mention that could have been better, but on the whole I loved the book so much I don’t want to add too many complaints to my review. Even characters I wasn’t very fond of at first tended to grow on me, and the majority are people I’d like to read more about. That’s why I’m going to end this on a positive note, with another quote (a short one this time!) Here’s an exchange between the crow girls that for no good reason had me in stiches:
“Don’t be rude,” she tells Zia.
“They’re not bribes?”
“Why would out veryvery good friends Geordie and Jilly ever need to bribe us?”
Zia shrugs. “So that we’ll behave?”
“Don’t mind her,” Maida says to me. “She was brought up in a tree by an old magpie.”
Pages read: 11,424
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Charles de Lint, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Newford, Once Upon a Time II
March 15, 2008 at 8:47 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
32. Enna Burning by Shannon Hale (Children’s Fantasy) 317 p.
Takes up a year or two after the events of The Goose Girl. It’s main character is Enna, a major character from the previous book. We learn that Enna left the capital and returned to the forest to take care of her brother and dying mother, although by the time the book starts, her mother is already gone.
Enna and her brother Leifer live a fairly contented life together, until Leifer finds a vellum scroll that teaches him to control fire. He attempts to control his power, but instead, it seems to control him, making him paranoid and quick to anger. When he sets Enna’s skirt on fire, she begins to realize just how dangerous Leifer’s abilities are.
Meanwhile, Bayern is invaded by Tira, one of its neighbours. Leifer is determined to use his abilities to fight for his country, and while he has some success, his efforts ultimately end in tragedy. Through a series of events, Enna reads the vellum and becomes a fire-witch herself, and slowly begins to lose control of herself and her power.
This is a more mature and complex book than The Goose Girl. In some ways, Enna’s inner life is more important than the plot, although the story is never dull or slow. There were times when I wanted to slap Enna for how stupid she was being, but it turned out there was a good reason for it.
Enna Burning is a worthy sequel to The Goose Girl, with even more adventure and political plotting, as well as the return of one of the more unsavoury magical powers ever conceived (and with an even more gorgeous cover!) I’m really looking forward to the release of the third Bayern book, River Secrets, in paperback later this year.
Pages read: 9,458
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Bayern, Cardathon Challenge, Eponymous Challenge, Shannon Hale
March 14, 2008 at 11:01 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
29. The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale (Children’s Fantasy) 383 p.
Strangely enough, it was the name of the heroine’s horse—Falada—that reminded me that I knew the fairy tale this book is based on. I don’t know where I found my old, battered copy of Fifty Famous Fairy Tales, published in 1956, but it was a childhood favourite—although among the stories therein, The Goose Girl was one of the ones I hated most.
Not so Shannon Hale’s version of the story. It begins with the birth of the Crown Princess of Kildenree, called Ani. Largely ignored by her parents, she spends her first seven years in the company of her aunt, who teaches her to speak to birds, particularly the swans in the palace lake.
After her aunt’s death, Ani does her best to be what her mother wants her to be, a proper heir to the throne. Awkward and self-conscious, she hates her duties but wishes desperately to please her mother. Nothing she does is enough, as after her father’s death her younger brother becomes the heir.
No longer important in palace politics, Ani is abandoned by all save Selia, her lady-in-waiting. When Ani is sent to neighbouring Bayern, to be married to the Crown Prince, she is once again betrayed by someone she trusts. Although she escapes death, she has no means to get back to Kildenree or to prove her identity, and ends up working as a goose girl, herding the King’s geese.
Since I know the fairy tale very well, there was nothing in the overall plot that really surprised me, but that didn’t matter. Shannon Hale set out to breathe life and reality into an old story, and she succeeded. She made me love her characters, and she created a form of magic that intrigued me.
Before reading The Goose Girl, I’d read lots of glowing reviews, but this book more than met my high expectations.
Pages read: 8,497
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Bayern, Cardathon Challenge, Eponymous Challenge, Shannon Hale
March 11, 2008 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
25. Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Children’s Fantasy) 314 p.
Miri lives on Mount Eskel, in a tiny village of stone quarriers. Forbidden by her father to work in the quarry with every other able-bodied person in the village, she feels her slight stature makes her a burden in the eyes of the community.
When the Crown Prince is instructed to choose his bride from among the girls in Miri’s village, the old tradition of the Princess Academy is revived, and every girl between twelve and eighteen is obliged to attend. Girls used to sleeping on cottage floors are taught reading, writing, and various courtly accomplishments. Miri is one smart cookie, and she learns quickly. When trouble strikes the academy, it’s up to her to save the day.
Miri’s village and the world in which it exists may be fantastic, but the reactions of Miri and the other girls to their situation are entirely believable. Some of them want to be princesses more than others, and all for their own individual reasons. Miri is clever in a way not very many book characters seem to be, using logical, deductive reasoning to solve her problems.
The ending, while not surprising or challenging in any way, was perfect for the story, with everything coming to a happy resolution without hurting the integrity of the characters or diluting their best qualities.
I will certainly be buying Shannon Hale’s other children’s books.
Pages read: 7,528
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Cardathon Challenge, Shannon Hale
February 19, 2008 at 1:54 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
17. The King of Attolia by Megan Whelan Turner (Children’s Fantasy) 385 p.
It’s a rare series where each book is better than the last. This book introduces a new character, Costis, from whose point of view we see most of the story. Costis is a guard at the palace. Like almost everyone at court, he dislikes the new King of Attolia, assumes he’s unworthy of respect.
When he punches the King, he expects it to end his career. Instead, he finds himself in the King’s service. At first he’s resentful, but he begins to see that no one at court, and especially not the King of Attolia, are exactly what they seem.
This series already had a quest and a war, so why not court intrigue? Ms. Turner writes it beautifully. Eugenides is very much in character in this book, playing the part of a puppet so his opponents don’t realize he’s the puppet master, pulling their strings.
Despite the fact that most of the story is told from the perspective of an outsider, there’s still a lot of sharp characterization of Eugenides and Attolia. Some of the more minor characters, like Teleus and Relius, are further developed. Costis is a sweetheart, an honourable man trying to do the best he can with what he’s given, which sometimes isn’t much.
I don’t when I’ve enjoyed a children’s book as much as I enjoyed this one.
Pages read: 5,048
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief Trilogy
February 19, 2008 at 2:22 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
16. The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner (Children’s Fantasy) 360 p.
The Thief is an excellent children’s fantasy novel; it’s sequel is very different, and far better. Longer and more sophisticated than the first book, The Queen of Attolia abandons the well-executed but still fairly standard quest plot of The Thief. Instead, we’re thrust straight into the middle of a robbery gone wrong.
Eugenides is captured in her palace by the Queen of Attolia. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I was extraordinarily surprised by what happened, especially since this is, after all, a children’s book. Once he makes it back home, Eugenides becomes involved in the war that’s begun between Attolia, Sounis, and Eddis—a war which threatens to involved a powerful enemy, the Medes, who would like nothing better than to overrun all three countries.
This book had some lovely character development, particularly for the Queen of Attolia, but also for Eugenides. The plot was well-paced, with plenty of twists and turns. Once again, the treatment of some things seemed a bit simple, because I had to keep reminding myself that The Queen of Attolia is a children’s book.
Megan Whalen Turner was incredibly ambitious in choosing the subject matter she did for such a young audience, and I think The Queen of Attolia is wildly successful in that regard.
I’m also kind of in love with the way she treats her female characters; her two queens, while very different from each other, are both strong women without being Strong Women, if you know what I mean. I’m enjoying this trilogy far more than I expected (and my hopes were pretty high!)
Pages read: 4,963
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Megan Whelan Turner, The Thief Trilogy
February 18, 2008 at 9:35 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
15. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (Children’s Fantasy) 280 p.
The thief of the title is Gen, a young man whose public boasts and subsequent theft of the king’s seal have led him to a cell in the king’s prison, shackled and without means of escape. After a few months in jail, he gets the chance to leave his cell, but only if he takes a journey with the magus, the king’s chief advisor, to steal something for the king.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about this book, and none of the praise has been undeserved. Gen is an engaging narrator, and taking the journey with him and his companions is a lot of fun. I had only two quibbles with this book. First, there is some exposition at the end that Gen gives straight to the reader, which I think would have been much less obtrusive if he’d been speaking to another character.
I also found the set-up of the world Gen lives in a bit unbelievable, in a way that would be problematic if the story was written for adults. Since it’s not, I’m more than happy to let it slide. Megan Whalen Turner has used bits and pieces of Ancient Greek history, geography, culture, and religion to create her countries of Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis, and on the whole I think it works well.
Pages read: 4,603
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief Trilogy
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