The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 2008

edited by Ellen Datlow
and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.

Checked out from the library along with many others. This is a huge book, of course - it's 458 pages. (I had started it long before starting on Watchmen and then finished today after finishing Watchmen).
- it gathers up (obviously) the best fantasy and horror (from the 2007 calendar year I think) - plus several long essays that sum up the best from that year in both genres, plus music, graphic novels, and movies.

Here are some notes:

Stories that I liked the best (most of these I did like, but not going into a detailed review here. This is mainly for me to remember what I read so I can go back and look again for these authors, etc).

* The Evolution of Trickster Stories by the Dogs of North Park After the Change by Kij Johnson
I wonder if this writer ever goes to WisCon. I'd bet she does since she divides her time between the Midwest and the West Coast.
I really liked this story (dogs get the power of speech but sadly this spooks almost everyone and they are kicked out of house and home. One woman still talks with them).
It reminds me of Pat's work.
One of her stories - "26 Monkeys, and the Abyss" is nominated this year for a Nebula (see her site).

* Up the Fire Road by Eileen Gunn
I didn't know that a Sasquatch can change how people perceive it, including Maury Povich and a couple of x-country skiers who get lost on its mountain...but now I do!
really good story.

* Winter's Wife by Elizabeth Hand
Really liked this. Liked the world, liked the Icelandic sorcery and the folk tale feel of the story.

* Troll by Nathalie Anderson
this goes very well with Winter's Wife. from the troll's point of view:

"And where do they get off, those billy goats,
calling themselves gruff? Here they come again
traipsing so innocent..."

* The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics, by Daniel Abraham
First this captivated me because it came from a spelling bee anthology (the word here being cambist (currency exchange).

* The Last Worders by Karen Joy Fowler
I liked this first because it's by KJF and also because of the portrayal of the 2 main characters who are twins (interesting reveal that they are twins, they are writing the same last name in their notebooks when fantasizing about the same boy).
Also perhaps feeling a little guilty that I am having trouble getting into "Wit's End". I skipped finishing that to dive into this anthology. This just moved along a lot better as a story.



* A Reversal of Fortune by Holly Black
I don't know if I could win an eating contest with the devil by eating a multitude of sour-gummy frogs (plus one extra!).
She is also the author of the Spiderwick Chronicles


* The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang
I liked the time travel in this and the aspect of meeting (or avoiding) your self in other times.

* Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell
(I want to get her short story collection - "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves).

* The Hill, by Tanith Lee
Mysterious house with exotic animals kept around it - mystery of why and what the owner is like, and what is happening with all this weird stuff going on in town?

* Splitfoot by Paul Walther
This one freaked me out - a poltergeist-type scariness in a house that it's only being visited because the owner wants to transfer ownership...And the characters who come to view/transfer the property were very unique and interesting.

* The House of Mechanical Pain - by Chaz Brechley
Also freaky and also sad. I do like the type of story where someone is exploring an old house and the people who live there - really horrible things happened in this house.

* The Monsters of Heaven by Nathan Ballingrud
The lost child, the parents driven apart by guilt and grief, and the "angels" who are so creepy (and unexplained, they're like X-files weird things - but in a short story I guess there's no time to explain).

* Mr. Poo-Poo by Reggie Oliver
Also very disturbing and sad because there is no real escape for Mrs. Poo-Poo.

* Closet Dreams by Lisa Tuttle
Also very good but disturbing

Here's a bunch of stuff from the 2007 Summaries to go back and read!
Fantasy
Ursula Le Guin's young adult series (Voices, Gifts, Powers)
Guy Gavriel Kay - Ysabel
Naomi Novik - dragons and European colonial
Logorrhea - Good Words Make Good Stories - ed John Klima
Shadowbridge - Gregory Frost
In the Cities of Coin and Spice - Catherynne M. Valente (sequel to In the Night Garden)
Territory by Emma Bull - Western with witches, blood, Wyatt Earp
One for Sorrow by Christopher Barzak - "a lyrical debut novel of Midwestern magic realism"
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare - fast paced immensely entertaining fantasy novel set in NYC.
Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos - R.L. LaFevers - 11 yr old heroine can tell when ancient artifacts carry a curse

Graphic Novels
The Arrival - Shaun Tan

Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages

I'm actually rereading Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell right now, but I wanted to write about Portable Childhoods since I realized I only need a quick spiel on the Facebook thing.

And of course this is just me writing reading notes. I'm sick right now also and am writing this in bed on the laptop (having just had some generic Nyquil like cold medicine). It's kind of comforting to have Portable Childhoods and Max Merriwell hanging around. Also I just reread Points of Departure, but I guess that is a different post.

My copy is paperback and is signed but I think I bought it from Amazon, so that is mysterious. I didn't remember having noticed that it was signed when I bought it on the site. Maybe I should have bought it locally (and could have had Ellen sign it too, I guess) --- but I wanted it pretty quickly.

I like Neil Gaiman's intro because he paints a pretty good picture of what Ellen seems to be like in person (he calls her "a force of nature" which is quite fun) and how that differs from her writing. It's also obviously quite cool to have him writing the intro at all. I blogged here earlier about when we first met Ellen at the Gaiman reading in Berkeley - she was sitting behind us and we heard "nebula award" and our ears perked up. Then Dave actually asked her who she was. I think she thought we were more than a little crazy.

Basement Magic
I loved this one, maybe partly because I share this fascination with basements and I kind of miss not having one here in California. That one house we saw that was quite crappy, almost sold itself to me on the strength of having a huge, albeit unfinished, basement.
I also think Dave would be interested in this story with the stepmother theme too .
motherless daughter, strong female role model in Ruby, magic that comes true...

Intelligent Design
God as being almost like a spoiled child, making the world by whim, while his grandmother is the one who's been there even longer...
I think overall I didn't like this one quite as much as the others, but still liked it.

Green Glass Sea
Doesn't need much more description other than that I love Dewey (and I wonder when her birthday is).
And where is my copy of Green Glass Sea?

Clip Art
Nice "documentary" of a young girl who collects paper clips. amazing amount of detail with the clips and their names, and the cutting between different scenes...

Mobius, Stripped of a Muse
Ever increasing layers of authorship -- a scene...it goes for a while, and then the unseen writer is like, "no that's not working" and the scene starts again....
It sounds like an improv game almost (and maybe it is).
I liked this one a lot. Good pre-nano story.

Time Gypsy
I love this one -- woman goes back in time to meet physics scholar she's admired all her life, and winds up falling in love..

I bought this as a chapbook when I was at borderlands. Maybe at the same time I bought Green Glass Sea..
Part of why I like this is just the fandom of finally meeting and getting to know, someone you've admired for a long time.

A Taste of Summer
This is probably my favorite story in here that I hadn't already read before. I just love the feeling of adventure when she actually crosses the street, looking for refuge, and the cool science-y role model type that Nan is. Really similar to my character in the Nano (and not suprisingly).
I also liked how Nan isn't conventionally dressed - showing Mattie that's it's ok to wear men's clothes....whcih she hadn't really seen before.

Portable Childhoods
This one, sometimes I see myself in the unnamed child and sometimes in the mother, who always seems a little bit amazed to have this person in her life, her daughter, who is her own little person - different from the mom, and she wonders if the two would have been friends.
Also please note on p158 - there's a whole thing about St. Elmo's Fire, interesting because of Pat's affinity for St. Elmo.

And all the stuff about shuffling cards -- how important it is to learn and what a milestone it is. I totally feel that way too. I learned to shuffle at my grandma's house because we were playing a lot of solitaire, and I wanted to shuffle better. Dr. Gammell wound up teaching me.

And last but not least
In the House of the Seven Librarians
Which i had already read in the Firebird anthology but I love so much. And here kari is going to be a librarian.

And the best part -- the afterwod for me..
" I didn't start writing, or at least writing seriously, until I was almost forty."
there's hope yet for me!
Jon Hassler had said the same thing.

The Riddle of the Wren by Charles de Lint

Buy on Amazon!

I seem to be on a "first novel" kick - both writing and reading. This is Charles de Lint's first novel, which has been out of print for a while. de Lint says in the author notes that this isn't the first book he wrote, but the first book he started, and that he had written seven different versions of it.
Like Pat Murphy's The Shadow Hunter, it was reprinted several years after its first publication as a hardcover limited edition, and he was "pleased to find it in the seeds of themes he's still exploring in my work to this day."

I really was impressed by the depth of the world he created - language, race names (erlkin, etc) travelling between worlds by tracing symbols on henge stones - it reads like it is a book in a long-established series.
And the main character's journey to really find out who she is and how she's supposed to accomplish what seems to be an impossible quest, resonates with me as well.
Also, when browsing around on his site and that of his wife, Maryann Harris, I found this account of how they met (it's the foreword to a collection of the yearly Christmas stories that he writes for her each year). It seems so random that people so compatible meet so randomly.

Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology

Buy on Amazon!

This is a book to benefit the Save the Children foundation for tsunami relief -- a very interesting anthology of science fiction and fantasy, and for a good cause (although I checked it out from the library).

To remember the favorites:
"Report from the Near Future: Crystallization" - this was a pretty scary account of a humongous traffic snarl in LA that would clog up the entire region. Triggered by just a few seemingly small events. Seems like a little too close to reality for comfort, but very well done.

"Tough Love: 3001" by Juliet Marillier
The author had just run a writing critique group where she learned that "no amount of literary technique is going to make a person a good writer."
This story was very entertaining because the participants in the group were all aliens who chose pseudonyms of famous writers, and the one who decided to call himself Gaiman was the coolest.
and "Sea Air" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, about a boy who realizes he's meant to be of a different race entirely - even though he's always been afraid of the ocean, he eventually rejoins his family in the sea. (this is like several other stories I vaguely remember. It seems very Lovecraft).

Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November

Buy on Amazon!.
I originally became interested in this book because I evesdropped on Ellen Klages at the Neil Gaiman reading and found that she has a story in the new Firebirds anthology (Firebirds Rising) - which is her famous story about the girl raised by "feral librarians" (DZ overheard her mention this story which is why he perked up my ears too, normally we are not so nosy... ha ha).

But the new book is still "in processing" at the San Mateo library system so it may be a while before I can get a copy. I think this means that all the librarians are passing it around to read before they release it to the general public!

The editor of this book is Sharyn November (who I really want to meet after reading through her site - I'm not sure if I would be able to ask people who know me to describe me as she has), and also a motherless daughter whose page about her mother has inspired me). Plus, the Firebird imprint is also responsible for Pat's "The City" coming out in paperback finally.

I am just going to list the stories and authors that I really liked, with short blurbs about them so I can remember to go back and get their other works:

* The Baby in the Night Deposit Box - by Megan Whalen Turner. Best described almost as a girl raised by "feral bankers" - a baby is deposited into a bank and grows up there safe from the clutches of her evil aunt, until the evil aunt comes to make her withdrawal. This was so hilarious and sweetly odd that I told it to dz in the hot tub, and he actually listened to the whole thing.
I got all excited looking at the author bio which said she lives in Menlo Park but curses, she has moved to Ohio!

* Mariposa by Nancy Springer - really great story of a woman who has lost her soul (quite literally - it's a physical object in this world and she's about to get an artificial one put in, like plastic surgery). She decides to try to find it first, and returns to her childhood home and her mom and grandmother (who have certainly found their souls already or not lost them) to see if she's left it there.

* Medusa by Michael Cadnum - good to get the story from Medusa's perspective for once! As he said in the Author's Note, she couldn't always have been such a terrible creature.
Also note that he has a book out about the Vikings: Daughter of the Wind.

* The Black Fox - adaptation of trad. ballad by Emma Bull and illustrations by Charles Vess
Very nice to have a mini-comic story from Charles Vess here in the anthology

* Hope Chest by Garth Nix - a train pulls out of the station in a sleepy little town, leaving a large steamer trunk precariously balanced on the edge of the platform, with a little baby swaddled in a pink blanket on top. Of course the townspeople save her before she can fall, finding a note that reads, "Alice May Susan, born on the Summer Solstice, 1921. Look after her and she'll look after you."
And she does.

* Little Dot by Diana Wynne Jones - from the cat's point of view, about "her human" (a wizard, apparently) and also has a very interesting mobile hen-house type contraption that the cat can actually use to fly around the yard and the house with.
I am surprised I haven't yet read anything else by Diana Wynne Jones, she seems really quite awesome, and she wrote Howl's Moving Castle.

* Flotsam by Nina Kariki Hoffman
Jeff meets a young alien named Poppy at the basketball court, who needs to get back home (and looks human enough to pass until he tries to talk...). She also wrote a book recently called Catalyst which has first contact themes as well, but not the same characters or world.

Sidebar - we just watched Star Trek: First Contact last night on DVR - which I find fascinating because the 2063 year that they travel back to, the year of first warp drive and first contact, is not that far away. They can now shield microwaves using a "invisibility" cloaking device. Not far to visible light...

* Cotillion by Delia Sherman - I can't succinctly summarize this at all but to remember it - ball, faery world, Valentine brought back to human form by girl (and lots of cool music played on old instruments). This is the story of Tam Lin, btw, I am cribbing from a review elsewhere to remember that.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Storm of Swords: Buy on Amazon

I can't remember if I have already written about the other books in this series.
This is the third one. I started this off originally by reading Game of Thrones, the first book, in a weekend in order to go to the Kepler's book club on a Sunday night and talk about it.
Pretty crazy.
I do kind of inhale these books even when I am not on a deadline, making it harder to write intelligently about them.
I hated Sansa in the first book but actually really like her now, that is one of the traits of these books, unexpected char and plot development - he has no qualms of killing off any character.
Other favorite people are Arya, Danaerys, Jon Snow, and Samwell Tarly.
I finished this on April 11 and immediately went to get Feast for Crows, the newest book.
In Storm of Swords, at one point I thought 3 main characters had just died. It turned out to be only one of them had died so it was a little less nervewracking.
He does kill off a lot of his characters but many do seem to keep coming back.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials (paperback trilogy): Buy on Amazon!

I first read these at least a year ago but reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made me think of Philip Pullman.
Both have very believable worlds that incorporate magic, fantasy, and in His Dark Materials, almost a whole alternate version of our world.

The whole concept of daemons as being extensions of your personality and unique only to you - I read a quote from Philip Pullman where he said kids were writing to him saying that after reading this they felt that they have their own daemons, and he pointed out, we all do. (If you have not read the book, these daemons are not evil "demons" - they're more like very intelligent familars which are there to help each person, augment their strengths, etc).

I haven't read this recently so I can't go on and on about it but the characters of Lyra and Iorek Bjornson are probably my favorites.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Buy on Amazon

'I have a bit of a problem now that the fairy roads are all open ... what do I do with them?'. - a quote from the author in a recent interview.

I got this book for my birthday about 2 weeks ago from my boyfriend, and am finally almost done with it. Of course this is to be expected to take even me this long, because it has 846 pages!

It is really its own world, an alternate "fantastic" (meaning not fantasy like dwarves and giants, or even magical magic as in Harry Potter with wands and such). The story is set in nineteenth century England, during the "Revival of English Magic" led by the two foremost magicians, Strange and Norrell.
They are actually commissioned to do magic - for example, Strange goes off to Portugal to help fight against the French with Lord Wellington. And there is a whole world of magical history which Clarke gives us a glimpse of, with very detailed footnotes regarding magical deeds and wizardry of the past, fairy stories, and more.

It is hard to describe, but I am loving it. I laughed out loud when hearing of how Strange moved the city of Lisbon temporarily to America to avoid being attacked by the French, but then has to send magical messages to the troops still in Portugal so they'll know where the troops are.
The birds around the armies are enchanted to sing in rhyme,
"Lord Wellington says.. blah blah" and that's how the message is conveyed (also by little cakes baked in the shape of letters by a baker who has no idea what they're spelling out).

Anyway, very very English. I remember being in England and how entertained we were by the wordiness everywhere.

"Way Out" instead of Exit.
The Construction Sites had about a paragraph of text: "This Road will be closed for this long because of this big project which is taking place for this reason and so on"
where in the US we might just say "Road Closed Due to Construction. "

Susanna Clarke talking about her influences on her site:
I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why — except that they know things other people don't and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
In C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories there are only two magicians. One is weak and wicked, and the other barely gets two lines of dialogue.
But they both fascinated me. One (the weak one) has a tray of magic rings, green and yellow, as shiny and bright as sweets. They're magic, they're jewelry and they look like scrummy sweets. What's not to like? In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could. The closest model was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea stories. While you're reading them, magic seems perfectly real. You feel it must exist and it must be just as Le Guin describes.

Narnia media mania! Chronicles,Movie, Companion, Game!

Bought the movie companion collectors' book at Keplers the week before the movie came out because I could not resist. Also bought the Nintendo DS game a couple weeks earlier as well (partly for work research :-)





Reread Chronicles of Narnia right after seeing the movie (starting Dec 9)

Read new edition of Companion to Narnia after getting it for Christmas from my lovely sister...

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
I'm so happy to see so much about Narnia all over the place, it is now actually somewhat "trendy" to know about Narnia.
I always felt when I was a kid just like the Pevensies felt when being teased by their pre-dragon cousin Eustace - "Kids who talk and talk about Narnia tend to get barmier and barmier..."
It seemed as if no one knew what I was talking about and now people can come out of the woodwork and talk more about having liked Narnia in the past and the present.
It was quite fun to revisit the whole series again after having seen the movie, but of course we always read them in the original order (not the new post 1994 order) - the true order beginning with "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" not with "The Magician's Nephew".

I also really enjoyed reading the "Companion to Narnia" by Paul Ford as it is a new edition from the one I read a while ago, with new maps and new essays, plus a whole discourse that underscores how much better it is to read them in the original order!
Very hypertextual to read as it is in encyclopedia form and you are led from entry to entry either by whim or because you suddenly remember a character or idea and want to hear more about it.

Travelers in Magic by Lisa Goldstein

This is really an irresistible collection of fantasy stories by Lisa Goldstein - they do have a central theme of travel, both in time and space, but all have a separate hook.
Two stories deal with the land of Azaz, whose citizens get their news from packs of tarot-like cards, and several more touch on the Halocaust in various ways.

I gobbled this up really fast and as usually happens with short story collections, they are starting to jumble up in my mind (I'm writing this on Wed, March 2 even though I finished the book on Sunday...)

Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein

This is probably one of the weirdest books I've read recently but very entertaining.

What if most of the world's children's stories, which were "allegedly" told to children by the authors (J.M. Barrie and the Davies boys for Peter Pan, Kenneth Grahame's son for The Wind in the Willows, and so on) were actually accounts of true things that had happened to the _children_ in a Nether Land/Never Land world, and the adult is writing down these stories?

That's one of the central points in this book but along the way Goldstein also throws in quite a lot of riding on BART and the London Underground, Egyptian mythology, and history of the cemeteries in Colma (not to mention origins for the word "Colma").

I really liked the book on a whole but it did feel not fully fleshed out in some way. Perhaps part of it is the large cast of characters - It felt like some of the supporting characters were there to fulfill a mythic place but they were not really fleshed out as real people.

Good movie companions to this book would be Finding Neverland and Shadowlands.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

This book was recommended by Madeleine L'Engle in her book on writing mentioned below. As with the Robertson Davies books I could not help trying it out and it was very good.

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, in a hospital bed recuperating from a broken leg, is getting very bored until one of his friends brings in a collection of portraits for him to look at and "profile." One of the portraits is of Richard III, the king widely thought to have had his young nephews murdered to ensure his succession.
But the detective, who's always thought himself a good judge of faces, sees not villainy, but pain, in the king's face. This triggers a research crusade/"investigation" in which he digs into the historical information, (what there is of it) and tries to find out whether or not there is any proof that Richard did murder the young Princes in the Tower.

The detective's work is aided in this by a young American researcher, who's followed his actress/girlfriend to England under cover of a less exciting research project.

The plot is carried along by the researcher's frequent visits with new developments as he ferrets out facts in this ancient "case."
Madeleine L'Engle said that when this book was written in 1951 it set off several new protests for the innocence and character of Richard III.

The title apparently comes from an proverb on the title page: "Truth is the daughter of time."

This would be an interesting book to read along with watching the movie "Wag the Dog" and/or various articles written about current and past political Adminstrations and ongoing attempts to recolor actual events going on today. This book talks about a lot of the propaganda/misinformation that the Tudors either spread around or else failed to correct during the period after Richard III's death and the beginning of Henry VII's rule.
I'm reading an article in The New Yorker (the large anniversary issue) about the practice of "outsourcing torture" - it lists several examples of US officials sending those suspected of terrorism to 3rd countries (not their own) that widely practice torture during interrogations.
It's interesting that these occurences aren't really widely known by the public either - I wonder whether or not they will be referenced in future school history books?

WonderCon, William Stout, Dragons, and Dinosaurs

Yesterday Dave and I went to WonderCon and saw William Stout, among many others, including Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca in "Star Wars".)
Stout illustrated the book Dinosaurs which I have from its early edition and now is rereleased as The New Dinosaurs. I could have bought a signed edition of this book for $100 at the con but since both Dave and I are unemployed, I instead had Stout sign the free "Dragons" poster above, and I bought a copy of his 2nd Dinosaur sketchbook (below).
The Dragons poster is to promote the Animal Planet series coming out on March 20 which will have CGI representations of dragons and research on the question of whether or not dragons (as pictured in world story and mythology) actually existed. Check out the link on the poster graphic above. The Animal Planet website is quite awesome and has a lot of footage from the show.

Here's Stout's Dinosaur sketchbook #2 which I bought for $15. Right after I bought this, a guy came up behind me and asked "Do I need to pay money to get your autograph?"
Stout replied, "No..." but unspoken was perhaps the thought "No, but I wish you would _want_ to buy something just because you admire my work enough to ask for an autograph."
Dave got a lot of autographs yesterday and of course we couldn't buy something from everyone but I think he tried to at least buy a couple sketches, especially from people that he admired. After I had bought the book and had Stout sign my poster, Dave arrived separately (when we were trying to meet up again after separating for awhile) and Stout also signed Dave's historic "Daily Bugle" notebook - he did another short dinosaur sketch in the book but it was one of the most detailed that anyone had done previously.

The Dinosaur sketchbook is quite awesome - it has several sketches relating to the Disney Dinosaur movie. The most interesting is to read Stout's notes in the margins about all the details of the dinosaurs he's drawing - for example, he lists the various points of difference between a female dinosaur and a male dinosaur in one drawing of a female.

Other WonderCon stuff:

(Dave also has autographs of "Jay and Silent Bob" aka Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes in the book of record, as well as Sergio Aragones, Joss Whedon, and many others). He caught Kevin (above) and Jason at the escalator as they were trying to go somewhere but had been mobbed by fans.
During Kevin's talk, he had said "I wish I could hear from more people who are just moderate fans and aren't afraid to say so" in response to one of the many questioners saying "I'm a huge fan..."
So when getting his autograph, Dave said "I'm a moderate fan..." and Kevin retorted, "Then you're certainly wasting a lot of time here then, aren't you?"

We did not get Christian Bale, star of Batman Begins and previously adored by my sister Kati. He was at the show to promote the movie and in the midst of a huge room full of people waiting to see the Batman preview, I felt unable to spend the time to tell him as directed by Kati and Julie, "There are two women in Minneapolis who are still big fans of your performance in Newsies!"

World of Wonders by Robertson Davies

Finally in this 3rd novel of the Deptford Trilogy we find the answers to the questions:
Who killed Boy Staunton?
How in the world did Magnus Eisengrim and Liesl ever meet and form such a unique relationship?

And in addition we learn more about the history of how Paul Deptford, the boy with the mad mother who was kidnapped at age ten by an evil carnie illusionist, becomes the famous Magnus Eisengrim.

I am now actually posting these blogs right after finishing the book in question!

Fifth Business & The Manticore by Robertson Davies

Madeleine L'Engle recommended this book and the other two books in the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, in her Reflections on a Writing Life book I wrote about below.
This weekend I checked out the Deptford Trilogy from the library as well as a book by Josephine Tey, another L'Engle recommended read.
World of Wonders is the third book and will get its own blog as I haven't finished it yet.

I thought this trilogy was going to be more of a straight fantasy - thinking of L'Engle's Time Trilogy - but really the myth and wonder in these books are much more subtle. The characters are for the most part "regular" people - who grew up in one small Canadian town called Deptford.
The three books cover roughly the same chronological events but they have 3 different narrators so the end result is as if you are able to "zoom in" on the story from the vantage point of the specific narrator for that book.
I was pleasantly surprised that this was the case, as it really gives you much more time to get into the story and really know all the characters better.
Also I was very happy to be surprised by who were the narrators and main characters for each of the books so I won't write any more here about the plot.

It's interesting that I knew I was going to read these when I was pulled over to Margaret Atwood in the bookstore and they are of course both Canadian and also both with some similiarity in that they are writing fairly realistically but with some aspects of myth, fantasy, and/or the future in the story.

first post - Moominland Midwinter

This is my first post on my book review/reading list blog. I'm right now reading "Moominland Midwinter" by Tove Janssen.
I re-discovered Moominvalley while looking around in a Japanese stationery shop - very surprising to see that they had at least two different sets of Moomin notepaper.
Our Finnish LT tester visiting at work confirmed that Moomins are still very popular in their native Finland and in Japan.

I have four books checked out from the library right now and this is the last of them - the other three already devoured were "Tales of Moominvalley," "Moominpappa's Memoirs" and "Moominland Midsummer."
In "Moominland Midwinter," Moomintroll unexpectedly wakes up from his winter's hibernation and finds a odd snowy world - with few others awake except for Little My, the tiny Mymble, Too-ticky, and Snufkin, who is far away to the south. (He leaves every fall to migrate south - Moomintroll is trying to follow him).
Although I've already read most of these books before, I'm still surprised by various twists and turns and ingenious details that Ms. Janssen pops into these stories.
Also, having talked to some friends who are interested in writing and illustrating children's books - it sounds like these days people who can and want to both write and illustrate, as Ms. Janssen did, are soundly discouraged. Books like this could be a rarity in the future....
Unfortunately Tove Janssen passed away in 2001 at the age of 86.