To be honest, the only reason I’m doing a review of Pere Goriot is for the sake of completeness. I generally do a blog post on ever book I read, so I figure I should do one now.

But honestly I feel completely apathetic about the book. I bought it, years ago, after seeing the move Balzac: A Life of Passion starring Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu is a pretty amazing actor and he brought the writer to life in a way that I found fascinating, so I ran out and bought one of his books. And it sat on the shelf for years.

And now I’ve read it and wow, did it not live up to that level of anticipation. The tale is a simple one, of a young man newly come to Paris to seek his fortune. He is staying in a shabby little boarding house and that is where he meets Goirot, a retired vermicelli maker who has essentially squandered his fortune trying to keep his two spoiled daughters well-regarded in polite society. The young man, naturally, falls in love with one of the daughters, and she in her turn finds him young and handsome enough to make for an admirable affair.

I enjoy reading ‘classic’ books because they give us such a fascinating window on the times when they were written, and that’s where I feel most disappointed. Pere Goirot feels very modern when being read; that is perhaps due to it being a translation? Sure, we’re seeing events in 19th Century Paris, in a chaotic time when the class system is breaking down. And Balzac references other contemporary plays and books (which the translation team has admirably footnoted) so you get a feel of what was and was not popular, but the language itself just felt too modern to me. And Balzac himself is awfully, awfully wordy. There are a few scenes that go on for pages when a few paragraphs would easily have done.

Not a favorite of mine, and I’m not sure I’ll be reading any more Balzac.

First a reminder. I liked Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass well enough, and really enjoyed the next book, The Subtle Knife. I was excited to see how Pullman would finish things up in The Amber Spyglass, and now I know.

And the answer is…he doesn’t. Not really. Imagine The Lord of the Rings being written such that when Sam and Frodo finally get into Mordor, they find a “Crack of Doom Disposal Service” and hand The Ring over to it, and the rest of the book is about their friendship and no further word is ever heard of Sauron. Our last view of Minis Tirith is of the two armies coming together for a final clash, and never again do we visit that scene.

That’s how The Amber Spyglass works. I’m going to include some spoilers in this review, which I don’t normally do, but I can only hope that no one makes the mistake of getting involved with this series anyway. You’ve been warned, and ultimately there is nothing to spoil because the series has no real ending.

As the book begins we have Lyra and Will still traveling together. Remember that Lyra has been tagged as the next Eve, and there’s some huge prophesy about her that she’ll influence the next age of life on the myriad worlds. The church is determined to kill her so that she can never make some grand decision that she must make. Mary, from Will’s world, has been set up as the Serpent who will tempt Lyra/Eve from some new paradise. And oh yes, Asriel is making war on god/The Authority and means to kill him/it.

The first half of the book slowly builds to a huge climax, as you’d expect it to. This part felt slow but that was ok since we’re working towards the big payoff. And then in the midst of a climactic battle god dies, his first Lt. (who has really been running the show) is cast down. And suddenly the focus shifts to Lyra and Will and their discovering their hormones as they suddenly fall in love.

And that’s the rest of the book. Lyra & Will in discovering first love in some strangely vapid Disney-esque way. The church’s assassin makes a brief appearance but is taken out via a deux ex machina re-appearance of the angel Balthamos (spelling?). Neither Lyra nor Will are ever aware of these events. The two of them are with Mary, but all she really does is give them some food. She certainly doesn’t tempt them into doing anything. And in the end, well, nothing. The book ends with the two children going home, and that’s about that. The prophesy? Who knows? False, I guess. Unless it alluded to letting the ghosts out of the land of the dead, but really Will did that. And in the end, the angels repair the universe after Will gives them a quick “How-To” on window closing.

It was the most amazing let-down that I can remember ever reading; so much so that I found myself actually angry with the author. I mean, how do you manage to turn the death of god into a non-event? Or maybe that was his point, as an atheist…his way of illustrating that god doesn’t matter?

Maybe he wanted it to be a four book series and in condensing it he cut out a lot of the other happenings? I just don’t know. What I do know is that it was a terrible “ending” and I can’t stress enough that it makes the trilogy not worth reading. Which is a shame, because I was pretty excited at the end of The Subtle Knife.

A huge let down. Give this trilogy a pass.

When I wrote my review of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass I admitted being puzzled at all the fuss being made about its “anti-Christianity” message. Well now that I’ve finished The Subtle Knife it all makes a lot of sense. In this, the second book of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Pullman’s atheistic leanings become much more pronounced.

This didn’t bother me personally, but I can understand how it could be offensive to some. And frankly, without going on a huge tangent, its easy to point to all the quantifiable evil that has been done in the name of the church (the Spanish Inquisition springs immediately to mind), but its much harder to measure the good that comes out of peoples’ religion. How much evil has been averted due to a moral compass guided by faith? Well anyway, I’m about the last person in the world who should be taking on these questions, so let’s get back to the book.

Lyra Silvertongue is back in this volume, but she ‘co-stars’ with a boy name Will who is from our world, or at least a world that seems identical to ours. He is on a quest to find his missing father, and in the course of events he finds a window into another world. Not Lyra’s world, but a third world that felt like something out of a Star Trek episode mixed with a bit of Lord of the Flies. No adults, children bordering on going feral, and an unseen evil.

In fact there is some fairly intense violence in this book, and in general once again the concepts being discussed (elementary particles, dark matter) are going to go over the heads of most younger kids, so this is definitely for teenagers and older. Also once again, there’s nothing here to make it less interesting to adults; don’t let the YA tag make you think it’s just for kids.

No talking polar bears in this one, and in general things seem a lot less fantasy-ish. Will is a fairly normal kid, and the creepy kids-only world seems fairly ‘ordinary’ too, aside from those facets I already mentioned. Plus we transition back to “our” world a few times.

But I found this volume more compelling. Perhaps because I could relate to Will more, or perhaps because the “Big Picture” of what the trilogy is building towards became much more clear. And we do get a few more of my favorite Book 1 characters popping in.

The ending is, if anything, even more of a cliff-hanger than the ending to The Golden Compass. Make sure you have book 3 at hand as you wind down to the end of this one!

Donald A Petrie’s The Prize Game turned out to be a very interesting little book. I’m not linking it here because its out-of-print and I imagine it’d be awfully hard to find, but the ISBN is 1557506698 and it was published by US Naval Institute Press in 1999. Petrie, at least at the time of writing, lived in Wainscott, NY and that’s probably why I was able to find it at Bookhampton in East Hampton some number of years ago. Local author and all that.

Turns out the whole concept of taking prizes in the Age of Sail was a way of warfare that had rules that were followed among many different countries. How different from today’s world, eh? The book talks about these rules and illustrates them by following the adventures of a few successful privateers. The book is heavily footnoted and if you flip to the back and read you’ll find Petrie got a lot of his information from actual ship’s logs from times, as well as from court documents and newspapers. Turns out that prize-taking was followed by the papers almost like a sport would be today.

If you can find it, well worth a read. I’ll be taking good care of my copy for future reference.

On a personal note, it felt good to read some non-technical non-fiction for a change of pace. I’ll have to make a point of doing more of that.

Last night I finished The Golden Compass, Book 1 of Philip Pullman’s YA fantasy trilogy, “His Dark Materials.” I have to admit this one never would’ve made it onto my radar if not for the movie version (which I have not seen) getting promoted all over the TV.

There was much to-do made about the book’s anti-Christianity message, and Pullman, as I understand it, is an atheist and did indeed set out to write a “children’s book” that set itself directly opposite the pro-Christian symbolism in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books. As someone not very much concerned with organized religion, I wouldn’t have given this aspect of the book a second thought had I not heard all the fuss about it. At the same time, I can’t in good faith (pun not intended) address the possibility of the book being offensive or troubling to someone with strong Christian beliefs.

I can describe the setting though. The Golden Compass takes place in a world parallel to ours. Land masses are the same, and many countries are familiar. Technology has advanced in a more steampunk sort of way, though scientists understand (mostly) the same elementary particles that scientists in our world do. At the same time it seems airplanes were never invented, and zeppelins still rule the skies. They don’t have electricity but they have “anbaric” energy (which seems to be electricity) and “naptha” (gas?) lamps.

The big difference is that every person has a “daemon” that takes the form of an animal and is intimately connected to the person. Essentially, these daemons are the souls of the humans in this other-world. These daemons remain in close proximity to their humans, and it is a huge taboo to touch another person’s daemon. It is unclear to me if this is what people of strongly Christian faith are bothered by — the idea of a soul external to the body — or if it was the fact that Pullman re-wrote brief passages from the Book of Genesis (adding daemons to the mix).

In any case, let’s talk about the story. Our protagonist is Lyra, a 12 year old girl who has been “adopted” by Jordan College at Oxford. Although she is of noble birth, she spends most of her time playing with the children of the servants of Jordan College, so when ‘commoner’ children start disappearing, including one of her friends, Lyra decides that she must do something to rescue them. Thus starts a whirlwind adventure taking her to “The North” where talking, armored polar bears rule (as far as we see, these polar bears are the only sentient animals in this world). Along the way Lyra starts to show certain abilities that may or may not be ‘magic’. She also learns much about the parents that she never knew.

It was an entertaining tale. As a YA book, I have to think it skews old. There are some fairly advanced concepts thrown around and the vocabulary is an adult one. For the most part it is “YA” only in the fact that the protagonist is a child, and that there is really just the one plot and one set of characters to worry about. There is violence, but no sex aside from one scene where we get a short voyeuristic glimpse at what happens between daemons when people become passionate.

Lyra is well portrayed; her ‘accent’ went a long way towards making her real in my imagination. The other characters don’t ‘pop’ so much, with the exception of her polar bear companion later in the book. Also about two-thirds of the way through, Lyra changed in a way that I found it hard to put my finger on. She started using “dear” a lot as a term of endearment, which felt odd. I suspect Pullman had put the novel aside for some length of time when he was writing it, and Lyra changed while he was gone. It’s a nit, but it has stayed with me and bothered me since I came to that change.

Take to heart that this is Book I in the trilogy, because it really doesn’t wrap up very well. It just kind of ends at a logical breaking point, but with many, many questions unanswered. At this point I’m not sure if I’d give the trilogy a thumbs up or not. If I had to rate The Golden Compass, I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5. Good, not great.

It’s been a few days since I finished Steven Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 2) and I never did review the first book, Gardens of the Moon.

Why?

Because I’m just not sure what to say about them. Do I like them? Oh yes, very much indeed. Can I describe them succinctly? Not a prayer of that. Erikson has built an incredibly rich fantasy world, gritty and often dark. And at the start of the first book he drops us in it and we must learn to swim or drown in its complexity. I learned to swim, barely. Not nearly well enough to give you any tips.

Humans are the primary race of the world, but there are others, some incredibly ancient. It’s an old, old world. There is magic, based on “warrens” which each have a name and, one presumes, particular characteristics. There are old gods, and “ascendent” godlings: mortals that somehow shrug off their corporeal bodies and enter the heavens (or the hells). You start reading these books and you’re immediately caught in a whirlwind.

While Deadhouse Gates takes place after Gardens of the Moon, either book stands alone (and I suspect this holds true with the rest of the series as well). Characters are sent ‘off stage’ in Book 1 to take care of a quest, and Book 2 is all about that quest. Characters cross-over mostly in the form of being referred to, reminding the reader that we’re peering at a tiny slice of this huge world.

I personally enjoyed Book 2 more than 1, but I think that might be because I’m slowly understanding the world better. I intend at some point to re-read Gardens

If you like big, meaty fantasy tomes where the good guys don’t always win and bad things sometimes happen to good people, and you don’t need to have everything spelled out for you, then I highly recommend checking out both Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates.