“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria (2006)
352 pages

Twisted fairy tales: sure, just what I was looking for. World War II background: I seem to be stumbling across a lot of books about WWII lately. A book about books: of course I want to read it. So I did.

The writing is terribly bland. It’s . . . flat. The plot was interesting, the way the myth/fairy tales were twisted were awesome, but the writing! Oh man, the writing. I’m trying to come up with another adjective, and the only one I can up with is still “flat”. I felt no connection at all with any of the characters. David did this. David did that. David is angry with his father. I don’t know. I read on because I wanted to get to the end, and also because the book came so highly recommended by so many sources. Also, it was the book not chosen by the bookclub that doesn’t exist for the month of May. (Oh man, I still need to go along and apologise for the lateness of the not-June book discussion. Which will probably be the not-June and not-July book as well. Drat.)

Anyway. The Book of Lost Things. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old boy living in England during WWII. His mother falls ill and dies, and when his father remarries and his stepmother is having a baby, David’s anger and frustration over the whole thing kinda transports him to another world, where fairy tales are twisted and he needs to find the king and the book of lost things the king has to return home. (Or something like that. Go find some other more objective summary elsewhere.)

I liked how dark the fairytale land was, and how the fairy tales were turned on their heads. My copy of the book didn’t have the appendices with the original fairy tales and explanations by Connolly and whatnot, so I am probably missing a lot of things. I don’t particularly care — I’m just glad to escape Connolly’s prose. The ending made me wince. The author seems to be intent on making sure that we know that yes, David’s changed, and yes, he will find happiness but it will be taken away from him sooner or later. Yes, we do understand that. Please be more subtle next time.

This book gave me really odd dreams. It could simply be because I was back at my parents’ house when I was reading it and sleeping in a different bed in a different room, but still, they were really weird dreams about the book. (I was reading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game almost concurrently with this book and I didn’t dream about that book.) It wasn’t even scary — it just had the characters of the book traipsing through my dream (no David, though), all of them almost earnestly explaining why they were as they were. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall the details of their explanations — you know how dreams are. Each dream I woke up from left me even more annoyed than I was before, and as you can see, it didn’t bode well for this commentary.

Considering that this is John Connolly’s most recommended book to date, I think I’ll have to skip the rest of his works. I traded my copy with my sister’s copy of An Abundance of Katherines when I was back at my hometown. I should ask her if she enjoyed it better than I did.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Greenwillow (an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books) (1998)
(First published 1996)
224 pages

Uh. I guess I am in the minority for not loving this book like most other YA fantasy fans out there? I liked it well enough; I just didn’t love it like I expected I would.

Also, I must admit I am one of those people who actually do judge a book by its cover. I believe publishers have the facility (and the responsibility!) to make covers that are both attractive and relevant to the story, and this particular cover leaves me frowning at it. I can’t make out who it’s supposed to be. I wonder if the actual target audience of the book would find the cover attractive? I certainly don’t. I wouldn’t have idly picked this one up just because of the book design, that’s for sure — it’s a good thing that I pay attention to book recommendations. ;)

The Thief is the first book in Megan Whalen Turner’s trilogy, and it’s the first book by the author I’ve read. The book is also a Newbery Honor book. It’s in the first person (which probably explains my grouses with it!) and set in world almost like a Greek version of our own. Gen, the narrator, brags that he’s the best thief ever, and ends up being caught. He’s then roped into the King’s service into stealing something really valuable.

It started off really slowly for me. I started it, got distracted because I didn’t quite care for Gen’s voice and stopped reading and had to re-start again, and only did that because it was a library book and it was due in a few days. I did finish it at one sitting once I got past the second chapter; it’s a really short book.

I was rather surprised when I found out that there were cross-recommendations from those who’ve read both The Lymond Chronicles and this series — I couldn’t quite see the similarities here, but apparently it’s more obvious in the later books. I’ll continue with The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, I think; I’m curious enough to see what’s up next for Gen, though I’m not in a rush to check the books out now from the library.

The story’s ok. There’s nothing that I really didn’t like — it’s just that I couldn’t find anything really outstanding in the whole narrative. I like some of the characters — Pol and Sophos, mostly, and the pantheon and world-creation myths were interesting. For a narrative in the first person, Gen really holds back a lot of things from the reader. So when things fall into place, I was rather irritated with him — shouldn’t he have said something about all this sooner? Which made the ending rather problematic, at least for me. And here comes some spoilers, sorry, since this is the part that left me feeling a bit bewildered with the whole thing.

Continue reading The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner »

Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Bantam (2004)
480 pages

This book was recommended by a number of people, mostly on LJ (and mostly by people who were frothing at the mouth at Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series). I duly borrowed a copy from the library. And my sister read it too, thanks to that quote from Neil Gaiman on the cover. She’s such a Gaiman fan, XD.

I wanted to like this. It ended up just being ok in my list. I have a few problems with it, mostly with the way the narrative jumps. The book is in the first person, Sunshine’s point of view, and written rather colloquially. I don’t have real problems with the POV or even the language; my problem is how information is presented. We need to know more about the world of course, this post-apocalyptic earth where vampires and demons roam, but there’s just too much exposition, and it’s given in chunks. And the narrative goes off in sudden tangents — sometimes for exposition purposes, sometimes just to point out something that catches Sunshine’s fancy at the moment, and sometimes it’s very, very long. She’s about to stab someone with a table knife, and there’s suddenly pages and pages on the virtues of using stakes made of other things — I think it was apple wood and ivy? — instead of stainless steel. It just throws me off. It also made the book unnecessarily bloated.

The asides (in parenthesis) and the many dashes littered across the book made me pause as well. It’s, uh. It’s too much like my own writing, I guess. The day I manage to send an email out without parentheses or em dashes in it will be the day the world ends. I keep trying to break the habit, but it’s hard, and seeing someone so comfortable doing something I’m trying to stop gives me a really bizarre feeling, especially when I realise how distracting those asides are.

I like the character Sunshine. I love her almost obsessive passion with baking and bread and cinnamon rolls, and how much she loves sunshine and how she can soak it all up. I love how she’s normal except when she’s not, and how, despite everything, she wants “to go on making cinnamon rolls”. I like her relationship with everyone at the bakery — Charlie especially, and Mel. Con certainly piqued my interest, but in honest truth I’m glad he wasn’t always there. (My sister wished Con was around more. No, no thanks. This book is about Sunshine, not . . . some vampire romance story. If there was a sequel, then I wouldn’t mind more Con. We need explanations, after all. And I wouldn’t mind, also, more explanation on Mel. Just who is that dude? Also, quite randomly, I keep interchanging him with Hank from Someplace to be Flying when I think of the book, and I’m not certain why. It is possibly because of the tattoos.)

The book can be laugh-out-loud funny at points, thanks to Sunshine’s quirky observations about a lot of things. Though I have to wonder: are Carthaginian hells worse than any other sort of hell? Why the qualifier?

Some things aren’t explained, and the book felt like a set up to something more. I was surprised that there were no plans for a sequel.

Now I shall stay away from vampires. At least for a while.

Someplace to be Flying by Charles de Lint
Orb Books (2005)
384 pages

I’m not much of a fan of urban fantasy. I’m not familiar with Charles de Lint’s work. Someplace to be Flying is the first Charles de Lint novel I’ve read. It’s one of his Newford stories; while related to the other books, it can be read on its own. owlmoose did suggest (somewhere . . . I can’t find that thread anymore; certainly it wasn’t in my LJ) that perhaps the short story collection Dreams Underfoot is the best place to start.

I think my problems with this book starts at the start. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the Newford books, but there are so many characters and I felt like I needed charts to tell who is who. And for half of them, even up to the end, I couldn’t see what importance they were to the plot except being eccentric characters who know that something is going on. And to foreshadow stuff, I think.

It’s not to say that the characters aren’t interesting. The crow girls caught my attention at once, and I think I’m a bit in awe of Margaret.

It starts off relatively slow. Lily, a photojournalist in search of the animal people, meets Hank, a cab driver who’s familiar with the slums of Newford. The “animal people” part made me pause, but I went on reading anyway. The story’s format sort of threw me off as well — there are chapters, and then subchapters in the chapters (mostly for point-of-view changes) which came a bit too often for my liking. The other problem was the chunks of text in italics — stories being told, or perhaps flashbacks — that were a bit hard to read, and I found myself skimming through those very fast, and possibly missed some stuff.

Once I got past the first few chapters, I flew through the rest of the book. The premise is interesting, and the mythology woven into the story was a definite plus. The ending left me scratching my head though. Light? Going in, coming out? Huh? I understand what was going on, but I had this disconnected feeling from the whole ending. (I guess I can get lumped with Rory and the other sceptics.)

Other things: Hank/Lily just didn’t work for me. It just keeps fizzling. Jack and Nettie held my interest much longer; pretty much till the end.

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Oh. WordPress 2.5 is out. Upgrades, here we go — though not now. Tomorrow morning, maybe.

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