“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
EOS (2004)
384 pages

I went into this book expecting something along the lines of Larklight, and boy was I wrong. Sure, it still has the same Victorian-like steampunk setting, but the story is darker and the lighthearted moments are rarer, and people actually die in this book, sometimes for no reason. Or at least, for no reason that advances the plot. People die. That’s it.

It’s a post-apocalyptic future, and it is a bizarre one. After a war destroys almost all civilization, the cities of the world are converted to mobile ones — traction cities that roam across the continent eating up each other in a system called Municipal Darwinism where the strong prey upon the weak. Tom Natsworthy is Third Class Apprentice of the Historian’s Guild, living in the great traction city of London. A visit to Thaddeus Valentine, a famous historian and someone Tom hero-worships, turns his pretty mundane life upside down when he finds himself caught in a middle of a conspiracy.

The plot zips along very fast, introducing us to an array of interesting characters and relationships. Some of the exposition at the start bogged down the narrative a bit, but after that it moves along without any hitches. A lot flawed, human relationships here, where no one is quite only one thing, where good and evil aren’t clearly divided. There are consequences to the actions the characters choose, even the noble and heroic (and right) decisions they make. Tom is earnest and a bit bland — his naivety made me wonder if he was learning anything at all as the story progresses. Hester balances him out nicely, though: she’s rough and angry and bent on revenge and of course the two don’t get along at all when they first meet. The other supporting characters range from sweet to intimidating to strange and there are many of them. Surprisingly few survive to the end of the novel. I was blinking at the body count.

The book can be read on its own, but I’m certainly going to get the next book, Predator’s Gold. I’m very interested to see where this series is headed. And a plus: it’s a quartet and it’s done, so no biting-your-nails waiting at the end of each book. ;)

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[Edit] And of course I forgot. This book was also read for the Speculative Fiction challenge hosted by Renay. :)

Despite being a voracious reader, I was never one for libraries. It’s probably because when I was younger, it was such a hassle to go to the library — it was so far away (on the other side of the island! the other side, I say, and it’s not a small island!) and no self-respecting parent was going to let his or her children to go by bus on their own. I think I only went to that public library once, along with a friend’s parents. In university, I got along well enough with the libraries, despite their limited material in the fiction shelves. (Hey, an engineering campus! Let’s fill all the shelves with books on rigid body mechanics!) Most of the time I was borrowing engineering reference books from that library, though I never . . . really read them.

Well, that was a lifetime ago and I’m living somewhere else now and I no longer have access to the university libraries. I finally went to our community library, after a lot of pondering and studying Google Maps. If nothing else, I’m pretty bad with directions here; I haven’t drove around much and traffic jams are the bane of my existence. Here’s the website of the library: the Petaling Jaya Community Library. The library wasn’t hard to locate, and is about twenty minutes or so from our house, but that route is just a magnet for traffic jams on peak hours on weekdays, so that makes me go :(. It has three floors, fiction is housed on the first floor and the selection isn’t as large as I had hoped it would be, but I guess it shall suffice. Children/YA books are on the ground floor — and they obviously don’t really care what is actually for kids and what’s YA because it’s a mess. Some of the YA books you can find on the ground floor, some of them are scattered along the general fiction shelves. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded if all the YA stuff were filed along with other books in general fiction (you can’t find the Harry Potter books unless you’re willing to patiently go through the shelves and poke within the vicinity of JF ROW in a room on the ground floor which is painted in bright colours, but Susan Cooper’s books are in general fiction upstairs, neatly arranged under F COO) so then I wouldn’t have to traverse two floors just to check what’s being held where.

The classification system makes me scratch my head. The non-fiction works seem to be sorted according to the Dewey Decimal System. For fiction there’s just “fiction” and “junior fiction”, arranged by author’s last name — that’s it. There’s no way to browse through category; you’ll have to walk through the shelves and hope you remember the authors’ names right. Everything fiction is preceded with an “F” and followed by the first three letters of the author’s last name. The OPAC — online public access catalogue — works and is accessible through the internet, but some of the information seems out of date: some books I’ve seen on the shelves simply do not appear on the system. (Well, there’s a possibility it’s because they got the title or author wrong in the system; I didn’t really try searching using the other parameters — but those should have been correct in the first place.)

Joining fee is RM 31, yearly renewal is RM 15. I got a library card, a lanyard and a brochure after registering. My sister registered as well. You can borrow two books and two cassettes/CDs/whatevers from the AV unit for two weeks each time. My first reaction was Two books for a fortnight? Two books? But I read one book in a few hours!, but I guess there’s nothing I can do about that.

All that complaining aside, there are enough books there to keep me occupied for a long time, I think. We checked out four books between us (the AV material doesn’t interest me much) so now I have with me Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade and Black Powder War from her Temeraire series (the library doesn’t have the fourth book, Empire of Ivory, and surprisingly, the first one as well, so I’ll probably fill in the book request form for those, just for completeness sake), David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness which I have already finished, and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine.

There are a few books by Margaret Atwood that I’ll pick up some other time, along with Patricia A McKillip’s Winter Rose, which I was looking forward to read. Maybe I’ll give the children’s section a more thorough look and see what gems I could find there. Expect another visit from me at least within two weeks’ time!

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Puffin Books 2002
336 pages

Poor Artemis. The book ended up on my not-so-honourable mentions for 2007. I was surprised myself — I certainly didn’t expect that to happen when I picked up the book in the bookstore. Kids loved it, and there are numerous sequels (four now, I think?) and the cover was bright and sparkly and blue. And it had a young boy who is a genius trying to restore his family fortune, a loyal, kick-ass butler following the boy everywhere, and fairies. What’s not to like about a book like that?

Quite a few things, apparently, at least on my side. The first being the writing style. There were sentence fragments all over the place asfdfgdjjafk;. OK, sometimes they weren’t really sentence fragments — more like one-word sentences. It drove me nuts. Here, let me try scanning a random page from the book — this is somewhere on page 181:

Mulch nodded. Another room. Before his time ran out.

And again on page 185.

. . . There! Every ten seconds, a slight jump. On every screen.

I know using short sentences and having only one sentence in a paragraph is a common (and very easy way) to create a sense of urgency. Here I think Colfer went over the top. It irked me to a point that I was grinding my teeth as I skimmed down the pages. Well — that’s another benefit of really short sentences, I guess. You can read them really, really quickly. Also, there was an overuse of ellipses at times. As much as we like those three dots, they aren’t meant to be at the end of each paragraph in a suspenseful “let’s find the fairies” sequence.

It didn’t help that I didn’t like the first chapter. White kid and butler going about bossing and bullying people around in Ho Chi Minh City! Misplaced white supremacy in the twenty-first century in a South-East Asian country! What is this! (Of course, I realised later that Artemis treats everyone like that, but still, it ruffled my feathers at that point in time.)

Some of the themes about the conservation of the environment were about as subtle as a mallet to the head. The sense of humour didn’t appeal much to me either. Sorry, but jokes about dwarves passing gas isn’t really my cup of tea. Throwaway references in the narrative about the story — “but that is a story for another book”, “but that could only be read in an adult book”, etc — and other unsubtle hints to a sequel aren’t appreciated either. And while I try not to categorise books as “for girls” or “for boys”, I found myself thinking (somewhat guiltily) that maybe an eleven-year-old boy would enjoy this a lot more than I would. I wonder if that’s true.

I didn’t care much for any of the characters. The story itself was fast paced and action packed. A lot of bad-assery going on, with a touch of too much action/adventure. I half-expected something to go “KAPOW!” or “SPLAT!” in bright, colourful fonts. Possibly the graphic novel adapted from the book would have been a better media for me? It did, after all, win in the graphic novels for elementary/middle grade category for the Cybils.

I’m probably not picking the next books in the series. Unless someone convinces me otherwise. :p

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It’s always easier to rant about a book you disliked than praise something you really loved. I wonder why.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
ATOM 2002
336 pages

I’ve never read this book before. Yeah, how a self-respecting SF/F fan can go about never reading Ender’s Game must be beyond comprehension. Somehow or other I managed to not read this book before; each time I was about to pick it off the shelf, something else distracted me. Sorry, Ender.

I think the most surprising thing about Ender’s Game is I found that I liked the book as much as I thought I would. It was one of those books that kept being shoved at me and I kept backing away in alarm — partly because I think I was being predisposed to like it. Dune had been another of those books. Don’t get me wrong — me and the Dune books, we get along, gigantic worms ruling the universe notwithstanding. I had expected the later books to be better, but they got worse in the end, yet I survived. It always makes me sad when I end up not liking a book as much as I wanted to.

I liked the most of the characters. I liked Peter and Valentine’s plotting, despite some of their discussions going over my head at times. I liked Bean — to which someone immediately replied I should read Ender’s Shadow. The battles — the games — that were staged at battle school made the first half of the book made me go on reading until late at night, at what happens after hooked me to go on reading until I finished the book. It was a surprisingly fast read. It took me one night, I think. One sleepless night. Starting books on weeknights is slowly becoming a bad habit.

I wish the writing was a bit better in some spots, though. Ender and Valentine’s relationship seemed a bit too forced — he loves her, but if Card hadn’t told us that, I wouldn’t have guessed. I don’t think it’s just because Ender’s just hiding his feelings (insert for whatever reasons here), because some of the other stuff makes me so sad, like how Ender is completely convinced he’s alone, and how sorry he is at the end, but his relationship with his siblings are just so . . . strange? I don’t know how to describe it. Card tells us Ender loves Val and Ender doesn’t want to turn into Peter, but I get nothing of that from Ender himself. I have curious hang-ups with sibling relationships, I know. It comes from being the eldest of six, I suspect.

Some of the dialogue made me wince. Partly it was the slang the kids used at the battle school; it sounded strange and forced. Some of the insults the kids used left me shaking my head — those made the dialogue seem even more strange.

There were other things I wanted to say about this book, but right now it slips my mind. (New resolution: write these things immediately. Seriously. Never mind the gaps. They won’t kill you, oh no.)

Now I have Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Shadow on my to-read list. That list never grows shorter, does it?

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Note to self: it’s Speaker for the Dead. For, not of. Geez, you’d think you’d get that right after the ending and all. :p

The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
Illustrated by David Wyatt
CollinsVoyager 2004
480 pages

OK, I’ve put this off long enough. I read this book in November 2007, and after I post this, I still have seven books backlogged from 2007. Chalk it down do laziness and being uninspired; I just couldn’t sit down long enough and type anything substantial. Also, it doesn’t help that this book isn’t exactly one of my favourites — and I don’t know why.

The Merlin Conspiracy is set in an alternate British Isles, in a world almost like our world but not quite. Well, not really “almost”. There’s a King’s Progress going around the Isles of Blest all year round, and our first protagonist, Roddy, is a member of this Progress, and her parents are wizards in the King’s court. And there’s a Merlin, who’s kind of in charge of all the magic in the Isles of Blest. Then the old Merlin dies, and is replaced with a new one, and the new Merlin doesn’t really seem cut for the job, though it seems like only Roddy and her best friend Grundo notice this.

Our other protagonist is Nick Mallory, a kid from our world. Apparently Nick has made an appearance before in another of Jones’s novels, Deep Secret, which I haven’t read but it really doesn’t matter here. He tries to go to other worlds, and surprisingly (or perhaps not), he manages to do just that, getting himself into a lot of trouble. It seems he’s the only one who can help Roddy unravel the Merlin conspiracy, so Roddy seeks his help.

The writing is good — all the things you expect from Diana Wynne Jones are there: the story is fast-paced, the characters flawed but likeable (this won’t make sense if you haven’t read the book, but good lord the Izzy twins are annoying. Jones gets an A+ for those two, since I am pretty sure she intended those two to get on your nerves), the storyline complicated but not completely bewildering. And this is where I get frustrated — I still don’t really like the book.

It’s quite possibly the format. The story is told in first person, alternating from Roddy to Nick. (I am not a fan of the first person narrative. It sets me off, and I have yet to find the reason for this.) Both get whole chapters to themselves — sometimes consecutively; it doesn’t always switch to the other’s POV at the end of a chapter — and there are some overlaps in events, but not much. I was partly amused and partly irritated that the font changes with the POV changes. Personally, I prefer the font they used for Roddy.

And I’ve groused about this for other books I’ve read by Jones before, but the ending here really made me pause. Not the actual resolution to the whole conflict — that was tied up pretty well — but the very last few lines of the books. They’re just sort of . . . hanging. I mean, if I were to expect a “THE END” at the end of a book, I wouldn’t have expected it to come after those lines.

I do think the cover is really funky, though, as well as the illustrations at the beginning of each POV change. XD (D’oh, I’ve just checked and realised that they’re by David Wyatt; of course they’re awesome.)

Probably I’ll check out Deep Secret one of these days. Probably. Not any time soon, though.

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This book is also read in conjunction with Renay’s Speculative Fiction challenge!