“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Riddle-Master’s Game by Patricia A McKillip
Gollancz (2001)
640 pages

You know what the best thing about this book is? It’s about people. It’s about their joys and their griefs, their struggles and the losses and victories. I loved the characters. Well, some of the minor ones came off as a bit two-dimensional, but the protagonists were real and likeable, and you can’t help but root for them up until the end.

This single volume actually holds the whole trilogy of the Riddle-Master. A trilogy in 640 pages! Frankly, I was relieved. After reading Robert Jordan and George RR Martin, I was ready to give up reading fantasy series due to sheer length. The first book, The Riddle-Master of Hed, starts off with Prince Morgon of Hed being confronted by his siblings about the crown he has hidden under his bed. Strange thing to do with a crown, don’t you think. (His frustrated sister pours sour milk on Morgon and his brother to stop their fighting. That startled me into a fit of giggles.) That’s only the start of Morgon’s problems — now he has to go to An to meet his bride-to-be: Raederle, the second most beautiful woman in An, but he gets sidetracked along the way by all sorts of things.

After the cliffhanger ending of the first book — and man, I am glad I had everything in one volume, because otherwise I’d be tearing my hair out — the second book, Heir of Sea and Fire, focusses on Raederle as she tries to discover what has happened to Morgan. The last book, Harpist in the Wind, has Morgan and Raederle planning what to do next as they figure out who are their real friends and allies.

I liked the book. The prose is spare but evocative, and McKillip uses the language so deliberately and beautifully. The pacing moved at a sedate pace without making the story boring, and the system of magic intrigued me. And it’s a whole trilogy in 600+ pages.

The cover is rather ugly, though. I had stared and stared and stared at it, wondering what the illustration was portraying, and only somewhere near the end of the second book that I realised that it was Morgon (probably walking in the snow against the wind — I still am not too sure about that) holding his harp. If there’s a reissue, I certainly hope it gets a better cover!

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This is the last book read in 2007. I am done with 2007. Finally. Talk about slow. /o/ This book is also the last book read for the Speculative Fiction Challenge, hosted by Renay.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Translated by J Philip Gabriel
Vintage (2005)
512 pages

OK, if there was one book that I’m dreading to write any sort of recap for it, it would be this book. Proof: I have updated my “to read” list, updated the links in the “books read in 2007” page, corrected minor spelling/grammar mistakes in the reviews here and at Goodreads, and cropped the image for the book cover for this post and fiddled with it, even though it had looked nice enough in the first place, and went out shopping for books; all this right after typing the title line up there.

I don’t have much experience reading Japanese literature, really, and something like 100% of what I read has been Murakami. Yes. I am that diverse. I don’t really know many Japanese authors. And I’ve only read three books by him, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which creeped me out big time), Dance, Dance, Dance (which confused me terribly), and this book. Each time I read something by Murakami it leaves me scratching my head, wondering what the heck was I supposed to get from the books.

Simple translation: I have no idea what his books are actually about. It makes me feel a tad foolish, and I don’t really like being made to feel foolish.

This book isn’t mine — it’s my sister’s, and I took it away from her room when she had asked me whether I had read it. Rather doubtfully, I told her no. “Does any part of it have anything to do about being stuck in a well and out-of-body experiences,” sez I, since the two other books I read had, among other things, a person stuck in a well and imagery that made me jumpy, and there was a possibility (hah) that I had read this book and mixed the storylines up, but she says, “No, but there are cats,” so I say, “There was a guy missing a cat in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” and she says, “Well, do you want to read this or not?” so I borrowed it, with some misgivings.

Reading it wasn’t a chore, not really. The narrative flows well, and I was curious what Kafka, our fifteen-year-old protagonist who has run away from home, is trying to accomplish. And there’s Nakata, a sweet old man who can talk to cats — well, who wouldn’t be interested in a story about a man who talks to cats? I liked Nakata, simple as he is. I can understand why Hoshino, the truck driver Nakata meets along the way, is so willing to follow the old man on his journey. There are funny parts. There are really, really weird parts. There are parts where people suddenly discuss classical music, personal philosophy and the meaning of life. There are prophecies. There is an Oedipal theme running through the whole book. There is a lot of symbolism, but what symbolises what, I have no idea. There are a lot of metaphors. Lots and lots and lots of metaphors. Everyone speaks using metaphors. I need to find a Metaphor-to-English dictionary, because this metaphorical world is a bit too much for me.

It wasn’t a bad read, really. It’s just that I end up finishing the novel wondering: but what the heck does it all mean?

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I had alternates, but I still read this book anyway for Renay’s Speculative Fiction challenge. :P

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
Illustrated by Barbara Brown
Puffin Books (2005)
240 pages

A lot of the authors I read when I was a child tended to be British instead of, say, American or Malaysian or any other nationality, despite having spent four years, from ages one to five, in the United States. I guess I was a little too young to read then, and all the books my father brought back from the States were probably his own books about journalism and suchlike. Funny thing to bring up now. I guess it’s one of those curious things you realise years and years later.

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Philippa Pearce, though. I found this book, and picked it up, quite randomly, while I was browsing through the children’s shelf at a bookstore, and decided to buy it. The cover looked interesting, and the blurb sounded interesting and it had won the Carnegie Medal in 1958. What was there to lose?

I loved it at once. Tom’s brother Peter is ill with the measles, and Tom is sent away to live with his uncle and aunt. Tom’s very resentful about this — he had planned to spend the summer in the garden with Peter, but now he has to spend it in Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen’s flat, which is owned by Mrs Bartholomew. The flat has no garden, and Tom is bored. One night, unable to sleep, he listens to the landlady’s grandfather clock chiming downstairs, and realises with a start that it had chimed thirteen times. Tom discovers that there is a magnificent garden as he opens the back door, which no one else seems to know exists and is only there when the clock chimes thirteen. Soon he realises that time doesn’t move the same way in the garden as in his waking world — it’s night in the flat, but when he goes out of the back door it’s afternoon, and time does not seem to have passed when he returns to the flat. He meets a lonely girl named Hatty in the garden — the only person there who could see him — and they become friends. Tom notices other things too: how time skips when he’s in the garden — tonight it is spring and the next night it’s winter, and Tom is curious and wants to find an explanation to this.

Almost sounds like a ghost story? Not quite. It’s more about a young boy and a young girl and their growing friendship and how things change over time. I love how the whole story is handled. Tom’s friendship with Hatty, his relationship with his aunt and uncle, his reluctance to leave them and the garden. How Tom slowly pieces things together and figures out some things about Hatty, and the explanation how everything is possible makes sense and does the author credit. The last scene is especially beautifully done.

Some things will seem a little dated — the book was first published in 1958 — but Tom’s Midnight Garden still has a timeless, magical charm to it. I’m glad I read it.

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Penguin Books (2005)
211 pages

I can’t make up my mind about this book. I think I like it. I can’t pinpoint what I don’t like, but I can’t say what it was about the book that I loved either.

Daisy is a troubled fifteen-year-old girl, sent from New York to England to live with her aunt and her four cousins — all of whom she’s never met. She’s met at the airport by her fourteen-year-old, smoking, driving, evading-paying-for-the-parking cousin Edmond, and immediately feels a special connection with him. She loves it in England, the idyllic countryside and kind Aunt Penn telling her of the mother she never knew, and her cousins, sweet and warm, especially little Piper, and of course Edmond. Inexplicably, the war that everyone says will not happen strikes, and with Aunt Penn away, the children have to fend for themselves.

The book is in first person, Daisy’s point of view. The lack of punctuation threw me off when I started — no quote marks for speech is still OK in my book, but when even commas go missing it kinda sends my sensibilities into a spin. But after a while I kept hearing a voice in my head reading the lines, and it’s not my voice anymore — it sounds like a girl telling a story and not pausing often enough instead of me reading about characters in the story. Huh, I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s like . . . well, not any of my younger sisters; when they speak the words almost tumble over each other because they’re speaking very fast — it’s a family characteristic; I do it too — but they pause at the appropriate places, so not like them. Maybe like some of their friends, speaking in those breathless sentences teenage girls sometimes do. Sometimes I half-expected thewordstorunontogether, that’s how some parts of the book sounded to me.

Otherwise, the descriptions are almost lyrical and dreamy at times, and careless and painfully honest at other points. The feelings of the characters are tangible and shine through the narrative — the worry and the pain and the loneliness and the love they feel for each other.

While the ending itself wasn’t abrupt, but the shift between Part One and Part Two was. It sort of stopped me in my tracks, and I had to go back a few pages, just to make sure I wasn’t missing a few pages or something. Even the tone of the book changes after Part One, and after complaining about not having enough commas, I was struggling to get used of them being in the right places.

I enjoyed reading How I Live Now. It was haunting — I kept thinking about it after I had finished the book — even if I still can’t fully make up my mind if I liked it or not. I won’t have any hesitations picking up any of Meg Rosoff’s newer books after this, missing punctuation notwithstanding.

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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
SquareFish (2007)
248 pages

This is one of those books that I kept on thinking I had read as a child. I had not: my memory was playing tricks on me, because I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something as enchanting as this, and I would have probably appreciated it more if I had read this when I was younger. I wonder if the only reason why I never found this in my primary school library was because of its allegories of Christianity? If nothing else, that school — and the whole education system, let’s just admit it — had always been way too conservative when it came to religion.

Oh, there’s nothing wrong with reading it as an adult (but I am 27 going on 12, so maybe you should take that with a grain of salt) — the language is simple but the message is profound. Meg Murry is visited one dark and stormy night by an old lady, and she finds herself, her brother Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin O’Keefe going on a journey to find Meg’s father and save the universe. It’s a coming-of-age story about a lot of things: about friendship, and being different and being tolerant, and good versus evil, and how love does conquer all, sometimes. I adored Meg, even when she was being clingy and afraid and angry when she realises that her father is not able to save them all and he doesn’t have the answers to everything. (Oh, I know how that feels. You have nothing but overflowing belief in your parental figures, but there’s a time when you realise that oh. Oh, they’re not infallible after all. The world sorts of comes apart at that point, and the pieces fit back, later, but not so perfectly any more.)

Religious overtones? Sure. But that didn’t set me off — it’s more . . . spiritual than focussing on any religion, despite the quotes; nothing that would have had me running for cover, even on my more cynical days.

The ending was a bit of a rush. I was startled it ended where it did, despite it being the first book in a series and all that.

The cover illustration is really lovely. I wouldn’t mind owning the box set containing this and the next three books.

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Uh. Consider the many many posts coming after this as the 2007 home stretch. (I know, I know — it’s already the third month of the new year and I’m still slogging through the backlog. Slacker.)