“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

I just realised that the Speculative Fiction challenge hosted by Renay ended on 1 April! My posting this now is more of a coincidence than me being attentive to dates, really.

This is the first reading challenge I participated in and I’m glad to say I actually completed it! It actually helped me clear a few books off my to-read pile, some of which have been in that pile for a while. It also made me read something I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

I chose the path of A Theoretical Handbook For the Unseasoned Speculator and had two alternates. I read all the books in my main list, though I originally swapped out Temeraire for The Riddle-Master’s Game, I ended up reading both anyway. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was the only book left out.

Here’s a short recap of the seven titles, starting with the ones I liked most:

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
This is the first book of The Hungry City Chronicles, where Tom, a boy in a post-apocalyptic future in which traction cities roam, finds himself caught in a middle of a conspiracy. YA steampunk, science fiction.

The Riddle-Master’s Game by Patricia A McKillip
One bound volume with all three books in the trilogy: The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind. Young Prince Morgon of Hed goes off in search of his destiny. Almost your standard coming-of-age story, except with better prose. :P High fantasy.

Temeraire by Naomi Novik
First book in the Temeraire series, in which we revisit the Napoleonic Wars but this time with dragons. Dragons! Otherwise known as the adventures of Captain Will Laurence and the fighting dragon Temeraire. Good stuff. Fantasy, alternate history.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke
Short story collection set in the same universe as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Alternate history, fantasy.

Ilium by Dan Simmons
In which the Trojan Wars are being re-enacted on Mars. I kid you not. The book does not stand alone; it has a sequel called Olympos, which I didn’t like as much. Science fiction.

The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
In which an old guy, who happens to be the Merlin, dies, and the new one doesn’t seem to be quite up to par. Sounds suspicious? You bet! It’s up to our heroes to find out why. YA fantasy, alternate realities.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
The story of a boy who runs away from home coincides with one of an old man who can talk to cats. There are a lot of metaphors. Magical realism.

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I wouldn’t have read Kafka on the Shore otherwise, and The Riddle-Master’s Game had sat on my TBR shelf for ages, so this challenge was a good thing. So many thanks to Renay for hosting it!

Maybe one day I’ll host a challenge. Once I figure out about what.

Because I’m not, uh, fastidious enough to do things like this every month, we’ll just pretend that I’ll do it quarterly!

Statistics first: As at the end of March, I’ve read twenty-four books, including four graphic novels. (Here’s the list of books read in 2008.) I think this is good! It certainly beats the one book per week average I set out to accomplish at the beginning of the year, so I’m rather pleased. On the other hand, the list include some books by Christopher Pike (it still baffles me how I could have liked his books when I was thirteen, but hey, I guess everyone grows up), which I probably read in a matter of hours, and that makes me feel like I cheated a bit, haha.

Otherwise it’s been a mixture of YA lit (The Penderwicks and Starcross are now high on my favourites list) and historical fiction/alternate history (the Temeraire books and Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles; the latter came out of the left side and surprised everyone, myself included).

I also completed my first challenge, the Speculative Fiction challenge. Yay me! I wanted to make a separate post for it and go through the books I read, which I will, after I post this. It was fun, though it would’ve been better if there had been more discussions. I think I’m spoiled by LJ’s threaded comments, because I just can’t get used to the usual chronological comment format Wordpress/Blogspot uses to start discussions.

Other challenges: I’ve read sixteen out of fifty-six books for the 888 challenge. That’s like 29% so I guess it’s a good number for the first quarter? Actually, I’m just inserting the relevant titles into the categories as I see fit. Not surprisingly, I’ve read almost none of the books from the more “literary”-ish categories, including the classics and the Booker winners, as well as the books my sisters recommended. This is mildly worrying! I joined the challenge to diversify the genres I read, but it’s not working very well this quarter! I think I’ll start Empire of the Sun soon, just to get those categories moving along.

For the Man Booker challenge — well, this one is even worse. I’ve read one Booker winner, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and it’s not even in my original list. I think literary fiction is probably just not the genre for me? Not that I’m terribly sure what “literary fiction” is — I chuck everything I can’t classify as anything else (especially those with awards) into that genre, and read with bemusement the discussions going on in other people’s blogs, since said people are more literary-minded than me. We’ll have to see how this will go.

Next — my resolutions (oh man I really don’t like that word. would something else do? like, you know, aspirations? then you have no obligations to fulfil them, as long as you try. i think?) for the next quarter:

• Read more books! Pity the old TBR list. Also read “other” books, not just SF/F. Or YA lit. This time for realz. Well. Not non-fiction, though; I’m not brave enough for that. Maybe next year?
• Try to keep the backlog of reviews to a month at most. Or, you know, just clear it weekly. It can’t be that hard, right? (HAH.) Also I should skip a particular book if I can’t write anything about it instead of holding up the queue. Sometimes I insist on order so much it’s absurd.
• Discussions are good! Participate in them! Me = not good in critical discussion, so I tend to sit and watch. I think it’s beginning to become a bad habit.

As for other stuff: if you are not interested in bookclubs, you may not want to join this bookclub, since it is not a bookclub. (I swear that makes sense.)

Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond
Delacorte Books (2000)
240 pages

I picked up this book mostly because I recognised the title as one of the Printz winners. The Printz winners and honour books have never disappointed me yet — it’s one of the awards where I’ve consistently liked the books, compared to, say, the Carnegie medal winners, for instance. So this ended up as one of the first books I checked out from the community library. My first thought, barely a few short chapters in, was “my sister would love this book”. I have a bad habit of thinking my sister being younger than she is. She’s already almost twenty, but I still think she’s twelve or so. She loves John Green’s books, though I’ve never asked her if she preferred An Abundance of Katherines (which I still haven’t read, woe, shame, etc) or Looking for Alaska, or she loved them equally. If nothing else, the way Kit’s Wilderness lingers with you even when you put it down made me think of Looking for Alaska, especially the second half of that book.

Kit is thirteen, returning with his parents to live with his grandfather in a small coal-mining town in England after his grandmother’s death. Kit’s ancestors had lived and died in the mines, and there’s a lot of history he’s coming home to. He’s sensitive, quiet, perhaps a little too naive, and he befriends the bright, cheerful Allie and the dark and brooding John Askew. Askew gets Kit into trouble with the game of Death they play, which to many of their friends is just make believe, but Kit begins to realise that there’s something more.

The prose is haunting and careful and delicate, the imagery beautiful. The skinny ghost children Kit sees still give me a shudder when I think of them. What’s real and what’s not gets blurred steadily as the narrative moves along, and I simply stopped questioning it and just believed. The first person narrative actually works for me this time. The dialogue trips me sometimes, but often it works well enough to make me smile. (Poor Kit gets flustered so often, going “Eh? Eh?”, causing Allie to mock him, though never with real malice. Oh, Kit.) There are many threads to the story — the story of Silky, told by Kit’s grandfather whose health is slowly failing, the stories Kit writes, John Askew’s drawings and his troubled family, Allie’s love for acting — and all of them are woven together slowly and deliberately, holding everything together.

The character relationships made this work. Kit and Allie, helping each other, even when they are at odds; Kit and Askew as Kit struggles to understand him and bring him back. And then there’s the wonderful parts with Kit and his grandfather, and the stories and memories he shares with his grandson.

The pace is a bit slow, yes, but I think it suits the book’s careful dealing of darker themes.