I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sometime in the mid-1970’s. I remember cutting school because I couldn’t put the books down, I was so entranced. I new then that I was going to be a JRR Tolkien fanboy (though we didn’t use that term back in them old days, sonny!) for life. I do have some remembrance of also reading Farmer Giles of Ham and finding it unsatisfying.

Fast forward to last fall when I finally read The Silmarillion. Call me silly, but I’d been ‘saving’ that book for all those years, not wanting to find myself having read everything Tolkien wrote. And when I finally did read it, I was vaguely disappointed in it.

Which brings us to The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. This is a tale of the Eldar Days, long before The Shire and the Hobbits that dwell within. It’s a tale told, in much briefer fashion, in The Silmarillion as well, but this longer version has a slightly more narrative feel to it.

That said…I’m sorry, but it is still not even close to the magnificence that is The Lord of the Rings. The reader still feels distanced from the characters in the story, much more like listening to a narrator telling the tale as opposed to living it ourselves. And the tale itself is so unrelentingly morbid and sad…there is no lightness to it. It seems like despair from front cover to rear.

Once again, it is worth reading for Tokien buffs. But let’s face it, they’re going to read it no matter what I say. But if you kind of like Lord of the Rings but didn’t go nuts over them, you can safely skip this volume.

I’ve been quite lax, to say the least, in my blogging. I finished Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog quite some time ago, and never reported in. And in fact since then I’ve reread The Hobbit but I won’t be reviewing that here since I’ve read it so many times that there’s no way I could do approach it with any resemblance of objectivity. But anyway, back to the Dog.

The only other Connie Willis book I’ve read is The Doomsday Book which was about a future historian time traveling back to research The Black Death. I read it quite some time ago but I remember it as being rather somber, as the topic would suggest. In To Say Nothing of the Dog we follow another time traveling historian but this time out the tone is distinctly light-hearted.

The title here is a tribute to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog!, published in 1889. This is the story of, well, three men and a dog taking an excursion along the Thames. The hero of Willis’s book, Ned Henry, also ends up in a rowboat on the Thames and actually encounters Jerome’s trio.

And I’m telling you nothing about the actual book, am I? Aye, I’m a bit rusty.

Anyway, Ned Henry, historian, has been doing too much time traveling of late, resulting in a bad case of ‘time lag’ which leaves him generally confused. He is sent back to Victorian England for some R&R, but immediately gets caught up with ever more convoluted and silly adventures when he does so. Watching him trying to navigate the social customs of the times while trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of the upper class without doing anything to corrupt the time stream becomes more and more funny as the book goes on.

Yeah, well, it’s been a good while since I finished it…so I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it. But I will say I really enjoyed it and plan on looking for more of Ms. Willis’ novels. She captures the feel of these historical times so … well, I was going to say accurately, but how should I know what it really felt like to be rowing down the Thames in 1889? But it *feels* accurate, and that’s good enough for me!

I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.

I picked up Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness on a whim a while back. I didn’t even look at it carefully. I think I must’ve been depressed that day and saw this as some kind of self-help book. Which it isn’t. Instead, it’s a kind of “How Things Work” manual for your mind, focusing on what and why things make us happy.

Gilbert’s argument (and he backs it up with lots of research; there are many pages of footnotes at the back of the book) is that people make choices according to what they think will make them happy, but that these choices are often at least partially wrong. In other words, they make a prediction as to their future happiness basing the prediction on the assumption that they’ve made a particular choice. The problem is that people are lousy at making these predictions, and Gilbert explains why that is. Picking a random example, he cites a study where college students were asked to predict in advance how happy they’d be if their team won a big upcoming football game. Then after the game, they were asked how happy they were. It turns out that they weren’t nearly as happy as they’d predicted they would be. Why? Because when they made their predictions, they imagined the end of the game, the final play and all the hoopla. But they neglected to imagine that they still had a test to study for, piles of laundry waiting to be done, or financial woes. Their imaginations didn’t paint the whole picture when making the prediction of happiness.

That’s just one of many, many examples. Throughout the book we learn all kinds of things about our minds that we might already know if we ever stopped to think about it. For example, how bad we are at noticing things that aren’t there. A classic example is this card trick that made the rounds of the web a while back. If you haven’t seen it, go on and try it. I’ll wait.
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Back? OK, so what’s the trick? I already gave you a clue. The trick is that none of the cards on the first page are also on the second page. But under normal circumstances we don’t notice that. We’re focused on ‘our’ card and ignore the others, so when we get to the reveal page, it (normally) never occurs to us to check the other cards. We see that our card isn’t there and we’re amazed! OK, well, we’re puzzled at least.

Anyway, back to Stumbling…. In spite of all the footnotes and citations, Gilbert has a breezy, conversational style that makes the book easy going for us laymen. He’s pretty funny at times, too. I will admit that after a while the book starts to feel a bit repetitive as he describes study after study that support what he’s telling us. It’s the kind of book that’s best read a chapter or two at a time, interspersed with other reading materials. And the focus here is on why we make the (often wrong) predictions that we make; there’s very little in the way of self-improvement tips.

And yet, I came away feeling as if at least a few scales had fallen from my eyes. Once you’ve been made aware of the way your imagination can paint an inaccurate picture of the future you can (in theory) allow for that. Perhaps more importantly, it’s encouraging to know that we’re not alone. That almost everyone who tilts at the gold ring isn’t nearly as happy to capture it as they thought they’d be. Knowing ourselves better is never a bad thing. Stumbling on Happiness teaches us about ourselves in a fairly entertaining way, and so gets a big thumbs up.

Charles Coleman Finlay’s The Prodigal Troll is another title out of that box ‘o books that I got from World Fantasy Con. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but damn, did Pyr ever do a terrible job on this one. I never would’ve picked this up off a bookstore shelf.

Not that it would’ve been a huge loss. This is Finlay’s first novel and though he writes very nicely, the story took an awfully long time to grab me. Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, tales of humans being raised by beasts have been a part of folklore and this is the trope that Finlay has set out to explore once again. OK, technically the human in this story is raised by trolls and not beasts, but the trolls act like apes who have language and can’t be exposed to sunlight. Our hero Mowgli…I mean, Maggot, grows strong and clever because he has to fight for acceptance among the clan that he is a member of. Had the trolls been apes, the story wouldn’t have had to change much at all.

Once he leaves the world of trolls he falls in with a tribe that takes its culture from a mixture of Native Americans and one of the more primitive tribes of the British Islands. Picts, perhaps? I’m no historian. The names are very olde English but some of the dancing and pipe smoking behaviors feel Native American. In either event, the culture of these people feels recycled. These tribes are pitted against a matriarchal version of a typical pseudo-medieval culture lifted out of fantasy. Actually, this culture has some interesting facets. For instance, eunuchs are treated as women legally, which means they can own property. This leads fairly powerful or well-familied men to become eunuchs.

The sad part is we just get glimpses of this, the most interesting culture in the book. Presumably Finlay is planning Troll to be the first of a series in this world and is laying the bedrock for later tales. In fact, we get glimpses of a lot of interesting ideas. The Knights are driving out the Peasants who are driving out the Trolls. There are ‘demons’ in the river that play a much too minor role in the story, and we meet a wizard or two who are very interesting but don’t get much ‘air time.’

But the greatest insult, and I really felt betrayed by this, is that the first 100 pages or so tell a totally different story with different characters. Characters that I came to like, with their own fears and desires and struggles. In many ways this was my favorite part of the book. Then *poof* they’re gone from the pages, never to be seen or heard from again!! They end up just being the device that Finlay uses to get the human child into the hands of the trolls, but he took much too much time with this and asked us to invest ourselves in these characters…only to toss them aside.

It really soured me on the whole story, and I think changed the way I read it. Almost as if I was looking for things to gripe about after that.

Now all that said, should Mr. Finlay write another novel set in this world, I wouldn’t be opposed to reading it, because by the end of this one he had hooked me. Mostly this was due to his word-craft. I really did enjoy the way he wrote. This is a first novel and I’m sure his next will be even better. Thumbs up or down on this one? I think my suggestion would be to wait and see what else comes out in this world. If Finlay doesn’t revisit it, then The Prodigal Troll will end up feeling like a tease.

After reading Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword I immediately went in search of Swordspoint, the first book she set in The City (thus far she has refused to give the city a name). The volume comes with the novel and 3 bonus short stories set in the same world.

I’m finding it hard to be objective about Swordspoint because, honestly, I was disappointed. But I was so hopelessly smitten by Privilege that perhaps disappointment here was inevitable. It isn’t a bad book but it doesn’t feel as substantive as Kushner’s most recent volume. I wonder if I would’ve felt that way if the world was new to me. I think a lot of the delight in Swordspoint would come from meeting the characters and learning about this strange city where nobles plot their Machiavelian plots but the Kings have been ousted.

In Swordspoint Alec and Richard are young men, lounging about in Riverside, being in love, and getting into trouble. Alec is an unknown quantity (and again, this may have changed the experience for me, as I knew who he really was from page 1) and Richard is an infamous swordsman in much demand from the nobles. Lord Ferris is a power-hungry up-and-comer, yet to experience the setbacks mentioned in Privilege. Duchess Tremontaine is in the prime of her beauty and power. It was nice, in particular, to get to know her.

When Richard refuses a contract from a particular noble, the Lord in question takes it upon himself to try to force Richard’s hand. Richard retaliates and ends up finding himself in hot water (I’m being intentionally vague). Huh, come to think of it, maybe that’s my problem with the book. There’s a ton of ambiance and character description and seeing the city, but really not a lot happens. There’re a few threads that kind of peter out to no apparent purpose. And if I were to be honest, the ending felt…well, almost like Kushner had to stretch to gather in her threads and tie them all off.

It certainly isn’t a bad book. But it isn’t of the same “omigawd you have to read this!!!” caliber that Privilege is. One of the short stories at the end is called The Death of the Duke and was very satisfying. The other two were just good fun. If you love this world that Kushner has created, you’ll want to read Swordspoint just to learn more about events mentioned in Privilege. But don’t expect to be as amazed as you were with the later book. I’d love to hear the opinion of someone who reads this book first; if anyone stumbles on this blog and wants to do a mini review I’d be thrilled to post it.