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.

I suppose that David Allen’s Getting Thing’s Done is old news by now, but I just got around to reading it cover-to-cover. I’ve picked it up a few times but never before made it to the end.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but it gets a bit dry in the middle, once the initial enthusiasm of what he’s telling you wears off. In case you’re new to GTD (as the system is referred to on the web), the focus on it boils down to writing down everything so that you don’t have to waste brain power worrying about whether you’ve forgotten something, and then making lists of the Next Action you have to do on all your projects. Breaking eveything down into discrete steps. I’ve dabbled with the system and it really does work.

It seems only fair to buy the book, but honestly there’s an almost cult-feel to GTD and a lot of the information in the book can be found online. In fact, Allen’s own website might be a good place to start. There is of course a Wikipedia entry on the system that gives a good overview and has a lot of further reading links. 43Folders.com also has a good ‘getting started’ article.

Well, I could go on and on and never say anything that hasn’t already been said about the book a gazillion times. It’s a great system for reducing stress in your life. You can buy the book and get it from the source, or do some googling and get the same info for free. But if you’ve got a lot of stuff on your mind, this system can really improve the quality of your life. Again, I’ve only dabbled with it, and even that made my days a lot less stressful.

Ellen Kushner is one of those authors that I’ve been aware of for a long time, but I can’t say exactly why. I’m sure I’ve never read anything of hers before. It might be as obscure a reason as her possibly having been a member of a museum I used to work for in East Hampton. She’s from NYC and is part of the arts community there, it seems, so it’s possible she summered in ‘The Hamptons’ and joined The Guild Hall there. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that The Privilege of the Sword is brilliant! And it was a complete suprise, for me. I mentioned a bunch of posts ago that the 2006 World Fantasy Convention sent me box of books, and this was one of them. I picked it up, more or less at random, and starting reading it and was immediately sucked in.

Kushner weaves words into a tapestry. You don’t read this book…you sink into it. I am, quite frankly, in awe of her skill, of her voice and how she just causes imagery to bloom in front of the mind’s eye. Let me just grab a random passage for you. In this scene our heroine Katherine is meeting her uncle, ‘the mad duke’, for the first time:

My uncle the Mad Duke looked me up and down.
“You aren’t very tall,” he said.
Beyond his face I could see his back reflected in the convex mirror over the fireplace, so that he swallowed up the room.
“No, sir.”
It was a delicious room, painted blue and white with touches of gold; very modern, very airy, filled with pictures on the walls and curios scattered on little tables that seemed to have no other purpose but to hold them. Tall glass doors opened onto gardens overlooking the river.
He said, “This is Tremontaine House. It is very elegant. I inherited it from my grandmother, the last duchess.” When he mentioned her, the planes of his face hardened in distaste. I recognized the expression from many family dinners of our own. My uncle’s face kept turning familiar, as though I’d known him all my life. A tilt of the head, a flick of the eye—I knew him—and then it was gone, and I was confronting a fearsome stranger. He had my mother’s long brown hair, which looked very odd. I thought only students had long hair. He’d been a student once, but surely that was long ago.

The book is fantasy, but there’s no magic in it. The setting is a land where the kings have been overthrown, but the nobility still exists, ruling in what seems to be a quasi-democratic fashion. We really only see hints of this. Many disputes between nobles are solved by dueling, and more often than not, the dueling parties hire professional swordsmen to stand in for them. The Mad Duke has brought Katherine to the city to have her trained in using a sword, for reasons known only to him.

This is a world where women don’t do such things as dress in pants and carry swords, so it’s a bit of scandal. But the Duke is nothing if not scandalous. He is wealthy and of noble blood, so he Matters, but he is also prone to drinking and drugging, and his lovers are as often men as women. In general, he is something of an irritant to proper society in town. A fascinating character and very fun to watch.

But the main thrust of the book revolves around Katherine as she grows accustomed to her new life, makes some unlikely friends, and ends up playing the part of the hero that she has long read about.

A wonderful book. Delightful from first page to last. Oh, and I have the ‘trade paperback’ print and I’d recommend it. The font and graphics used for chapter headings and section breaks really add to the experience. Well worth the extra few bucks over the cost of a mass-market paperback edition.

It has taken me literally months to read Gary Gach’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Buddhism. which is more a reflection on me than on the book. But it means I don’t feel qualified to ‘review’ it, if you even consider what I do reviewing a book. I don’t even remember details of the first two-thirds of the book.

It took me so long just because my interest in buddhism and spirituality in general waxes and wanes constantly, and when I’m not in an ‘interested’ phase I can’t bring myself to read up on it. I go all cynical and scoff at everything I read and that just seems pointless. No sense in reading it if my mind is tightly shut to what the author has to say, right?

Anyway, in brief, the Guide breaks down into three parts. First is an historical overview of Buddhism. Where it came from, what the various ‘flavors’ are and how it spread across the world. Next is a kind of ‘hands-on’ section that teaches you little snippets of practicing. I actually found the meditation parts interesting and I think what I really wanted to be reading was a guide to meditation. I’ve had a bit of success using the techniques to quiet my mind at night when my brain is so full of ideas I can’t sleep. Anyway, I digress. The last part of the book is a kind of ‘buddhism and you’ section, talking about how buddhism can impact your life, and the kinds of things buddhists have done to improve the world around them.

Even though the style is typical of an “Idiot’s Guide” (breezy and way way too cute) there was still a lot that I didn’t retain. I could see re-reading the book again in the future. I think I’d get more out of it with a second read. Though maybe a different ‘beginning buddhism’ book would be a better choice. One thing that Gach reinforces is that there isn’t one philosophy that is buddhism. There’s a myriad of variants, so it might be worthwhile to get a second opinion written by someone who looks at them all a bid differently.

I finished Jennifer Fallon’s Harshini last night. This is book 3 of The Demon Child Trilogy. I liked the first book, Medalon, and loved the second, Treason Keep. So it breaks my heart to say that Harshini didn’t satisfy me.

My problem was that a few of the characters, and in particular the main character, changed dramatically between the end of Treason Keep and the start of Harshini. Now I know the whole point of novels is to watch people change and grow. But this just felt ‘off’ to me. This is an awkward metaphor, but it was as if R’Shiel had been a medical student in Medalon, an intern in Treason Keep, then a lawyer in Harshini. I kept thinking “Wait? What? R’Shiel wouldn’t be acting like this!”

Again, don’t take the metaphor too literally. I’m not actually talking career choices here. But she was brash and wreckless in the first two books, yet she was also sympathetic. Your heart went out to this young girl that was facing so many hardships and so many uncomfortable truths. You could forgive her her faults, what with everything she was going through.

In Harshini, she is still brash and wreckless, but now she is also thoughtless. She keeps doing things that hurt people and doesn’t really seem to care. Or if she cares, she doesn’t learn from the experience. When her actions — actions that she has been advised against again and again — cause the death of someone she seems to like and respect, she laments it for about one paragraph. In the first two books she’s often referred to as a spoiled brat, but it isn’t until Harshini that she begins acting like one.

Stan Lee once said (through the mouth of Uncle Ben in Spiderman) “With great power comes great responsiblitly.” Listen up, authors. You need to listen to Stan! The man knows that of which he speaks! In this book R’Shiel is wielding great power, but she’s wielding it with no thoughts of responsibility or consquences. It would be a trivial thing to change Harshini into a book where R’Shiel was the great evil to be conquered, really. Specially since the ‘evil god’ in these books is uncomfortably close to the Christian God in what he considers sinful. (Fallon’s ‘out’ here is that Xaphista considers love a sin. Don’t ask me how he expects his followers to procreate.)

When the hero of a book is someone you find yourself strongly disliking, it’s hard to enjoy the book. So that was my main issue. My other main gripe is with the gods. They’re active characters in this series but in the first two books Fallon managed to restrain them in various ways. But in Harshini, they become a deus ex machina solution to too many problems. At the same time, R’Shiel is, well, a nasty bitch to them constantly and they just sigh and let her walk all over them. Very strange.

So now I’m stuck. I don’t know if I can still recommend the other two books, knowing the end is going to be such a let down. I suppose I still can. Harshini isn’t a horrible book, by any means. Other readers may even like the newly empowered R’Shiel. But to me… although I’m glad I read the book, it was just a disappointment after how wonderful I’d found Treason Keep to be.

I woke up this morning to the sound of rain against the windows and nothing else. It took me a moment to realize what had me feeling odd. The power was off. No quiet humming, no blinking lights. No lure of TV or the internet. Nothing to do but curl up near a window with a good book and read while the rain continued to lash at the glass.

And so I finished Treason Keep, the second book in Jennifer Fallon’s Demon Child Trilogy. If you’ve read my review of the first book, Medalon, you know I had some issues with the writing on a technical level. I’m happy to say that Ms. Fallon’s second book is much more polished, with the only real problem being a somewhat rushed ending. Characters undergo some rather drastic changes in attitude quite rapidly, just in time for the book to end. It’s almost as if Ms. Fallon had a certain word count that she needed to finish inside of, and ran out of room.

But that doesn’t mean Treason Keep is a bad book. Far from it. Once again Ms. Fallon grabs us by the hand and drags us along through a wonderful adventure. There’s magic, love, political intrigue and battle. What more can the fantasy reader ask for? Our favorite characters from Medalon return, and Fallon smoothly introduces new people for us to love or hate, as the case may be. Along the way we lose some friends, too; here is an author who knows how to pick characters to kill off. Her victims are important enough that we really care about them dying, but not so important that we lose interest in the story or feel betrayed.

Harshini is the last book in the trilogy and I’ll waste no time in getting started with it. Fallon has me in her clutches and I have to know how this story will play out. Medalon was a very enjoyable book. Treason Keep is better. Recommended.

I’m having a bit of a dilemma. What should be my focus when reviewing a book?

Jennifer Fallon’s Medalon is the cause of my cundundrum. I can’t help but think if she submitted it to a workshop or something, it’d be torn to pieces by writers who’ve learned all the rules, as I have (or am trying to). There are some very strange feeling point-of-view shifts, and the story jumps back and forth in time in a way that can be distracting. There are little details that don’t work, like people swimming out to a ship and throwing a grappling hook up over the rails to board (can’t be done). So technically, it has issues.

And yet I sit here in a sleep-deprived fog because the book had me up until 6am and 3am respectively, for the past couple of nights. I loved it. Couldn’t put it down. So what matters? That I could see some rules-breaking, or that I enjoyed the read?

Happily I’m just a dumb blogger and I’m not getting paid to make these kinds of decisions, so I’m going to go with that fact that it was a really fun read.

Medalon is a small country ruled by “The Sisterhood of the Blade,” an athiestic governing body. Oddly, none of the sisters carry blades, instead they are supported by The Defenders, the all-male army of Medalon. To the north is Karien, ruled by The Overlord, who prays to the god Xaphista, aided by a cadre of zealous priests. To the south lie Hythria and Fardohnya, both of which worship the Harshini and the ‘pagan’ gods.

It’s an interesting world. Existing somewhere between the gods and the people are, or were, the Harshini, a magical race who can see and speak to the gods. When the Sisterhood came to power, they wiped out, or drove out, the Harshini. Karien and Medalon have an uneasy treaty, one condition of which is that the Sisterhood wipe out any pagan worshippers that might show their heads.

As our story begins, rumors of coming of The Demon Child are spreading. This child, half-human, half-Harshini, is suppose to herald the return of the Harshini and gods to Medalon. Pagan cults are springing up all over Medalon, and Karien is threatening to cross the border to stamp them out if the Sisterhood doesn’t do it themselves.

Enter R’Shiel and Tarja, the son and daughter of the ambitious and ruthless Joyhinia, a member of the ruling Quorum of the Sisterhood of the Blade. Medalon follows their story.

And, if you’re in the mood for a complex novel with intertwining storylines, Medalon isn’t it. The book is pretty strongly focused on R’Shiel and Tarja, and while there are of course sub-plots, this isn’t the next ‘Song of Ice and Fire.’

But Fallon delivers a rich and interesting world and characters who are likable (or hateable in a good way, as the case may be). The pacing is brisk and every chapter leaves you hungry to know what happens next. Even though some parts are quite predictable, the ride is still enjoyable, and none of the characters are stupid. No one is going down into the dark basement to check on that odd noise while the homicidal maniac is on the loose, if you know what I mean. Some of the characters accept huge challenges to their belief system a bit too easily, but again, that’s one of the ‘problems’ with the book that would get it poor marks with a literature professor, but which really didn’t get in the way of me enjoying the hell out of it.

Fallon’s extremely enjoyable Second Sons trilogy was a ‘bigger’ and more ambitious tale, and had a more ‘professional’ feel to it. As a wannabe writer, it has been interesting for me to compare her first work to her later novels. She’s gotten better than she was when she wrote Medalon, but that doesn’t prevent me from giving Medalon two big thumbs up. Fallon is on my short list of ‘must read’ authors and I expect to enjoy everything she produces. We’ll see.

How long have I had The Silmarillion on my shelf? The copy I have is a bookclub edition printed in 1977. Why did I wait 29 years to read this book? It’s silly, really. I was so enthralled by The Lord of the Rings and JRR Tolkien that I wanted something of his to look forward to. It was like a sweet treat that I tucked away for a rainy day…and then eventually forgot about.

And now that I’ve read it…well, the candy accumulated bits of dirt and lint along the way, because, (I can’t believe I’m going to say this) it wasn’t that good. I mean don’t get me wrong, the stories and the mythology are wonderful, but the tales included aren’t written in a particularly good narrative style. It’s all told as a mythos, with very little dialog. We’re always hovering over the world, looking down at what is happening. And you can tell it was written to act as a kind of bible. As part of the creation myth for Middle Earth (actually, that is exactly what the first parts are).

I am glad I read it, but frankly just because now I know the myths myself. The actual act of reading it wasn’t particularly enjoyable (though I will say, it gets better the farther in you get). Rather than one big story there are a few separate volumes under one cover: Aunuliundale (The Music of the Ainur) starts it and is the tale of how the world was created. Valaquenta (Account of the Valar) is about the Valar and Maiar (gods and godlings, roughly) and of the one Valar, Melkor, who fell and was later called Morgoth. Among his servants was a Maiar named Sauron, and we know what ended up happening to him! These are both short works.

Next comes Quenta Silmarillion (The History of the Silmarils) which takes up the bulk of the volume and is mostly about the Elves. But…these elves are just as petty and impressionable as men are in The Third Age and it was rather disheartening to see them all squablling and going to war with each other and being manipulated by Morgoth. They weren’t very likable, most of them. Galadriel and Celeborn are in this story, not that they play a huge role, but it’s astounding to think of how long they’ve lived. Elrond appears near the end, too.

Then comes Akallabeth (The Downfall of Numenor) [forgive me for not chasing down all the appropriately accented characters here] which tells of the fall of the Numenorians as they, too, squabble and grow petty and allow themselves to be manipulated by Sauron. Last is Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age which very briefly tells the same tale as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings only again, without dialog or characters to speak of.

This last bit fills me with awe. I imagine (and I’m probably wrong) that Tolkien wrote out his creation myths and then started telling stories based around them, starting with Of the Rings of Power… which he turned into Lord of the Rings. I just imagine what Quenta Silmarillion would’ve spawned if Tolkien had lived long enough to tell that tale in a more narrative format.

The Simarillion is of course required reading for devoted students of Tolkien, but the rest of you can safely pass it by and not worry that you’re missing out on anything nearly as wonderful as The Lord of the Rings is.