Review: The Long War

The Long War by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can only repeat here what I said about The Long Earth, except to add that The Long War is even less interesting.

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Review: Atonement

Atonement by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In which the innocent atone for the sins of the guilty, but isn't that always the case? Beautifully, brilliantly written.

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Review: Ajax Penumbra 1969

Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

a decided improvement on "Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore," which is too transparently clever for its own good. The pacing here is better and the storytelling more persuasive.

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Review: Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North

Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North by G. Ronald Murphy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

scholarly, persuasive, fascinating, one of the very best books I've read in many years. The only drawback is the publisher's failure to reproduce the photographs in way that is anything but embarrassing.

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Review: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A shallow young man lives in a thoughtless daydream of a world that is about to vanish. His older, more worldly self, tells the story, but allows his past actions to speak for themselves.

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Review: Red Harvest

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Often crime fiction has a romantic glamour cast over it, as if there were honor among thieves when all there really can be is a doubtful truce. Red Harvest has no such illusions.

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Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a beautifully done book about what fools we human beings are. Our folly defies and defines both faith and reason. The climax of the book, which is melancholy but not without a glimmer of hope, is heartbreaking.

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Review: Wait Till Next Year

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A deftly done, clearly written memoir of growing up in an America that seemed idyllic, but was on the crest of change. It's nice to be reminded that memoirs needn't be sopping with narcissism, and the lurid fascinations of shipwrecked lives.

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Review: Nothing On Earth

Nothing On Earth by Conor O'Callaghan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Written with a sure touch, it never gives much away, or spells anything out for you. It leaves you wanting to know more, but feeling that there is no more that can be known. Spooky, creepy, lovely.

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Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was a kid, the Burton-Taylor movie of this play always ran on tv in the middle of the night, split into two parts shown on two nights. There's a reason for that. The play is so scalding that it's hard to endure all at once. Amazing. Unpleasant. Brilliant.

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Review: Ender's Game

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Aside from a nice twist right near the end, this book wasn't very interesting. Almost all the main characters are young children, which is fine, but they are implausible as such, and the author does little or nothing to make them plausible. The prose is sturdily unremarkable.

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Review: Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What amazes me the most about Middlemarch is that its most powerful scenes take place in an eloquent ironic, silence, in which the characters can almost never say what they wish and often misunderstand each other entirely, while the reader looks on, fascinated and helpless.

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Review: The History of Middle-Earth Index

The History of Middle-Earth Index by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn't so much a review as it is a recommendation. If you are interested in using The History of Middle-Earth as a source for studying Tolkien, this book is an indispensable aid. It's hard to come by, but will make for a lot less work. Not that flipping from volume to volume isn't fun.

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Review: Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien

Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an excellent contribution to the scholarly study of the role and importance of women in the works of Tolkien. The writing is clear and level-headed, and the editing is thorough and professional. Every article is good, and several are exceptional. There's a lot of fine work here, which will repay the scrutiny of fan, student, and scholar.

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Review: The Long Earth

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This was not a bad concept, but a middling execution, and a disappointment after all the good things I've read by Terry Pratchett in the past. I don't know whether to put it down to a partnership that just didn't work (unlike the successful partnership with Gaiman in Good Omens) or whether Pratchett, stripped of the humor of the Disc World novels, just doesn't have much to say.

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Review: Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs by John Lindow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A solid work of scholarship. The introduction provides essential background material for the culture of the mythology, and an interesting, if brief, discussion of the nature of time in Norse mythology. Since the body of the book is arranged alphabetically by topic or character, it helps to have some grounding in Norse mythology to start with. So if what you're looking for is a narrative of the tales of the Norse gods, this not the right book.

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Review: Possession

Possession by A.S. Byatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a wonderful book, both fun and literarily impressive. Byatt weaves together many voices through letters, journals, books, and poems written by the characters, in addition to a third person narrator who sometimes addresses the reader and sometimes shows the reader things that most of the characters will never know. It's a good story well told, and it's even more fun if you know something about literary criticism and the academic world.

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Review: Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well written, but strange book, though I suppose the same could be said of its author. The first two thirds of the book remind me of a Thomas Hardy novel, with all the grim foreboding that entails, and you reach a point where you think it can only end in two gunshots. Then suddenly, with the turn of the page, a character who could have sprung from the forehead of Dickens appears, complete with an appropriate family, and you know somehow that all will end well.

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Review: American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book by Neil Gaiman that I've read, and the only one so far that I've found disappointing, very much so in fact. This was quite a surprise to me given how I liked Stardust, and loved both Good Omens and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and given how many people whose opinion I respected had told me good things about it. I found the basic concept of the book intriguing -- when immigrants bring their gods to a new land, and then stop believing in them, what happens to those gods? -- but was seldom charmed by, and often shook my head at, the execution.

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Review: The Great War and Modern Memory

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the very best books of literary criticism I have ever read, and I've read a few. It's not an easy book or a quick read, and it is an old school work of literary criticism that pays more attention to the facts of the text than to theories about the facts. But it is worth the effort, and you will learn a lot. If you're interested in WWI, read this book. If you're interested in the lost generation, read this book. If you're interested in 20th century poetry, read this book. If you're interested in the history of the 20th century and western civilization, read this book. If you're.... Need I go on?

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Review: Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden

Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jack Vance's work has many charms. His prose is smooth and, for the most part, stealthily beautiful. Then all of a sudden it isn't stealthy at all, and it lifts you up. His wit is quick, surefooted, and dry. And he will surprise you by turning the story on a dime in an unexpected direction, but what he does follows, and you can't believe he just did that. So he is quite sly, and entirely persuasive. Even when he introduces fairies that seem to be just like those annoying, cloying toy pixies of the Victorians, they're not. Oh, no.


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Review: Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien

Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien by Patrick Curry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good and thoughtful book, knowledgeable and perceptive, though inclined to give much closer attention to the opinions of secondary sources than the evidence of primary.

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Review: Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very nice and useful edition, with the text of Boccaccio's Filostrato -- the source of Chaucer's poem -- on the facing page. This allows the reader to compare both texts closely, and to see where Chaucer departs from and expands, often greatly, on his source. In the second half of the book is a selection of scholarly articles on the poem. The only fault I can point to is one that this edition shares with too many editions of poems with explanatory notes -- that where a note is most needed, there almost never seems to be one. The story itself is marvelous, funny, sad, vexing, and enlightening. I look forward to re-reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida to see what he did with Chaucer's story.

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Review: Life After Life

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I hadn't read a review of this book before seeing the terrible cover they put on the American edition, I would probably have sneered at the book and walked on by. And the absurd endorsement that appears on the front of some editions would have only sped me on my way: "This is the best book I've read this century." It's only 2013. Maybe you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but people choose their books that way all the time.

This is a good and interesting book, well written, well read, at times bitterly funny, at times full of horror. Don't misunderstand the description given of this book. This isn't It's a Wonderful Life After Life. No bells ring here. No angels get their wings. This book has an edge, and a sharp one. And it will leave you wondering. The chapters on the Blitz are brutal.

I'm planning to read more Kate Atkinson.

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Review: Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Retribution is the first book I have read by Max Hastings, and I highly recommend it. It is an impressive work that provides a balanced account of the events and people involved in all the theaters of the Pacific War in 1944 and 1945, including many areas often neglected, e.g., China and Burma. Hastings writes well and clearly -- though, as another reviewer has noted, he chooses some odd words at times -- and he never seems shy about voicing his opinion either of the those who fought the war or of later historians who judge the way the war was fought.

As broad as the scope of his narrative is, it is also quite deep. He not only discusses and evaluates the famous leaders -- MacArthur, Stalin, Mao, Nimitz, and dozens of others -- but also spends time with many of the individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and prisoners of war on both sides. He quotes often and extensively from their firsthand accounts and memories, which gives their stories an immediacy and emotional impact it could not have otherwise. What they went through, what they did, what they felt, are by turns breathtaking, horrifying, inspiring.

In the end it is this breadth and depth that make this book so good and worth reading. Others have written and will write again that, for example, it was wrong or right to drop the atomic bombs; others have criticized MacArthur or praised him. Those arguments are nothing new and will never be settled. Hastings has his opinions on the bomb and MacArthur, too. They will not be what I remember from this book. I will remember what I learned about the size of the war in China and Burma, and what I learned about the people who fought the war and how they felt about what they did and saw. This is a good book.

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Review: Tolkien

Tolkien by Raymond Edwards
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This biography is much better on Tolkien's scholarship than Carpenter's. Edwards is perceptive, often witty, and definitely not shy about sharing his opinions. On Charles Williams, for example, he is quite scathing (p. 186):

"Williams was given to ... overuse of abstract nouns and to prolonged flirtations with impressionable young women. Williams clothed these flirtations, which in a couple of cases were prolonged over years and involved hundreds of letters, with a pseudo-mystical flummery borrowed from Dante, Swinburne and the whole overripe Blavatskian-Hermeticist tradition; but to all but dedicated fans, this stuff reads like transparent special pleading for what has aptly been called 'moral adultery'."

Now, really, who does not know that the young and impressionable must avoid the overripeness of the Blavatskian-Hermetecist tradition? I should think it goes without saying, but what does not go without saying is the source of borrowed judgements. By whom these 'prolonged flirtations' -- as as Edwards points out twice in so many words in two sentences -- were called 'moral adultery', we are never told. Not that I necessarily dispute the aptness of the opinion.

Nor is his lack of a citation here an isolated incident. For example, at one point Edwards cites Tom Shippey but gives no source (p. 303 n. 23 -- the nearest previous reference to Shippey is 15 footnotes earlier). At another (p. 83) he says that Robert Graves made a statement 'somewhere', and leaves it at that, but Google was able to locate that 'somewhere' in well under a second. Playing fast and loose like this with details undermines my confidence in the author. God and the Devil both lie in the details.

Despite faults like these, I enjoyed this book. I will consult it and find it useful. It does represent an advance beyond the hagiographic biography of Carpenter, and has profited by the research of the last 4o years. What we really need, however, is a new authorized biography based on much fuller access to Tolkien's letters, diaries, and papers.

As of this writing, the page count listed in Goodreads for this book is inaccurate. This edition has 336 pages, not 256.

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Review: A Game of Thrones

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For anyone new to this series, whether you've just heard of it, or you've seen Game of Thrones on television, the first thing I would say is that these books are certainly not for children or the faint of heart. The violence is graphic and the sex (some would say) is pornographic. Rape is commonplace (often heard of, but rarely witnessed). A Song of Ice and Fire pulls no punches. It depicts a brutal world of treachery, murder, lust, and greed, in which even the good characters have to be ruthless if they wish to survive. Time Magazine has called Martin "the American Tolkien," but that is a superficial judgment. These books are nothing like Tolkien. Imagine the Sopranos in Middle Earth, and you'll get the picture.

And yet, as dark and twisted as these books are, they are compelling. No sooner did I finish one book than I started the next, and I am looking forward to the publication of "The Winds of Winter" somewhere between now and the end of time. This is because Martin's greatest strengths are plot and character. He weaves his tale out of many threads. The perspective shifts from chapter to chapter, as his main characters take their turns at center stage in Dickensian profusion. Some of them know what the other characters are up to, some think they do, and some don't know much at all. But each advances the complex plot, driving the story and the reader forward.

There are two areas in particular where Martin does an excellent job. First, he is more ruthless to his characters than Stephen King. No one is safe. No one. Second, almost all of his main characters are quite well rounded. They can surprise you. One character, for example, commits a horrific crime early in the series, and is known to have committed another. As the books go on and the portrait of his character develops, however, it becomes more difficult to pass a simple judgment because he begins taking actions the reader wants to admire him for. I had to keep reminding myself of what he had done before, and that, as someone says in one of the books, sins can be forgiven, but crimes must still be punished. The good guys aren't simply good, and the bad guys aren't simply bad.

All in all, a good, fun read, if you're up for it. There is no middle ground.

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Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To be honest right off, first person narration is something I find problematic and difficult, something too susceptible to the hothouse cleverness of writing school. That's not to say that a first person narrator cannot succeed. David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, and Lolita are only a few examples of where it succeeds quite well.

First person narration adds an extra layer of difficulty to the author's already difficult task: with a first person narrator not only does the story have to be interesting, but so does the narrator. An uninteresting narrator -- which is not at all the same as an unlikable or an unreliable one -- has great difficulty carrying the story. And The Goldfinch is a long and difficult story, not without flaws of its own, for a narrator like Theo Decker who is not very interesting to have to carry alone.

The pity is, that Theo is at his most intriguing as a child whose mother has been killed in a terrorist bombing, and whose runaway alcoholic wastrel of a father looms offstage like the bad plot device that he is. Once his father (predictably) returns to claim him and take him to (where else?) Las Vegas, Theo devolves into just another teenager with a bad plot device for a father. He drinks, he drugs, he steals. He's just like his father, and only he doesn't know it yet.

When Theo's father dies in -- yes -- a drunk driving accident, and Theo flees back to New York City, he does become somewhat more interesting again, but not that much. Even at the end of the book, once the plot has resolved itself and Theo has revelations about life and beauty, he simply must blather on about them like someone who has read The Brothers Karamazov too many times in the middle of the night in his dorm room. It's not that what he says is not worth saying or pondering. He just takes so long to say it.

I would have found Theo a frustrating character if someone else had been telling his story -- almost very interesting, but not quite; almost very likable, but not quite. But in the narrator, those qualities work against the book. He reminds me of Pip from Great Expectations, interesting and likable as a child, but dull and vexing as an adult. Because his excesses start so early, by the time he is an adult they are merely tiresome.

Now some, like Stephen King, have used "Dickensian" to describe The Goldfinch. There certainly are a lot of orphans, and characters like Hobie and Pippa and (in a strange way) even Boris could slip into Dickens' world. So far so good. But that's about as far as I think the comparison goes. The wealthy Barbour family are a case in point. They take Theo in after his mother's death, and seem about to adopt him when his father shows up to take him away. Some years after Theo returns to New York, he becomes involved with them again.

Now if Dickens had brought them back into the story, as he would have done, he would have done something with them that would not have been better left out. There would have been some astonishing, unexpected moment where you learned something heartbreaking that you'd never guessed. For example, in Bleak House, Lady Dedlock flees her home and dies because she fears her husband's reaction to discovering the indiscretions of her youth, but he is shattered by her leaving. He doesn't care what she did long ago; he just loves her and wants her back. You don't see that coming. But in The Goldfinch the Barbours return for no reason that justifies all the time the story spends on them. They're just there, rich and blandly dysfunctional.

The story does end better than I had begun to fear it would. I was never really expecting a happy ending, but by page five hundred I was dreading that the denial of the happy ending might be delivered in a needless act of authorial tyranny. I am glad to say that did not happen.

Despite all this the novel does have its good points. Hobie and Boris in particular are excellent characters, and Tartt does a good job of portraying Theo and Pippa and Boris at different ages. In many ways the most interesting thing about Theo is the way his style changes over time, to reflect that the character was supposed to have begun writing this story as a teenager and continued as he grew older. That's nicely done. The story works overall. It has some nice twists and turns, two of which made me laugh out loud.

And there are moments when the prose possesses rhythm and beauty:

"Down narrow streets we wandered, damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck."

So I would give this book a tough three stars, because I cannot give it two and a half or three and a half. There is much in here that is very good, but could have been great.










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Review: The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

The Book of Lost Tales, Part One by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

People who have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings often stumble when they turn to The Silmarillion, since the two works are so different in tone and perspective. The books in The History of Middle-Earth series are different again. They contain sixty years of stories we've never seen before because Tolkien abandoned them completely, as well as abandoned, early versions of the stories we have met elsewhere. These books are the archaeology of Tolkien's subcreation of Middle-Earth. Through alternating passages of text, notes, and commentary, Christopher Tolkien lays out how his father developed this world, tale by tale and word by word.

If that sounds interesting to you, then you may well find great pleasure in The Book of Lost Tales and the other books in this series. I know I have. That's not just because I have always been a big fan of Tolkien, but because I have also always been someone who studies books as much as I read books. I found it fascinating to discover how his conceptions of this world and these tales changed over time.

If you do decide to give this book a try, I'd suggest you also lend an ear to the Mythgard Academy's free online course on this book, which is available from Mythgard's website and iTunes, and is terrific. Even for the knowledgeable fan, it's nice to have an expert guide along.

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Review: The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm

The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's a great deal of very interesting information here, which Nicolson might have used to great effect.

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Review: History of the Rain

History of the Rain by Niall Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a thing of beauty.

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Review: J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology by Simon J. Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In an imaginary world like Middle-Earth, which is 'at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws' (C.S. Lewis), nothing could be easier than for fans and scholars to find some parts of this world far more fascinating than others. Many, for example, devote long study to Tolkien's languages, which are of great importance for his world and are indeed fundamental to its very creation.. Others find questions of the adaptation of the books to film, and of the impact of the books on popular culture (and the reverse), to be irresistible. Still others investigate the spiritual lessons and spiritual foundations of Tolkien's work. The list could go on to cover many more areas, all worthy of detailed study.

Now my own interest generally resides in a very old-fashioned, very detailed literary analysis of the texts themselves as they unfold their tale, and so I have never really paid much heed to Tolkien's famous statement that he felt the lack of a 'mythology for England' and wished to remedy it. But every now and then a work comes along that changes your perspective, that changes your mind about what is interesting. Simon Cook's J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is just such a work.

At 49 pages, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is more of a monograph than a book. Yet its brevity makes it only more impressive. With admirable force and economy, Cook analyzes Middle-Earth as 'an exploration of the ancient imagination of the North, forged from profound scholarship as well as literary genius, and situated on the threshold of actual history.' Through investigation of Tolkien's earliest tales, his work on Beowulf, and his response to Hector Munro Chadwick's The Origin of the English Nation, Cook has put together a compelling argument for the origins of Tolkien's 'mythology for England' and for its larger relevance to understanding how Tolkien came in the end to write The Lord of the Rings he wrote.

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