“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.

Temeraire by Naomi Novik
HarperVoyager (2007)
342 pages

In short: it’s the Napoleonic Wars, except this time around there are dragons!

(Why the different titles for the British/American editions? The American version is called His Majesty’s Dragon.)

I’ve always loved dragons. The first time I heard the buzz about this book I went a little hyper and flailed around for a bit while I waited for it to appear in our local bookstore and wondered why no one ever came up with something like this before. After I bought the book, though, it lay in my to be read pile for such a long time despite the many times I tried picking it up.

I blame the back cover blurb. Oh, say what you want about not judging a book by its cover — it really doesn’t matter because you still do it anyway. (Is judging it by its back cover worse than judging it by its front cover, I wonder. I do so love this edition’s design.) But seriously. Let me see if I can find the offending sentence . . . here: “But when the newly-hatched [why the hyphen, idly asks the editor in me, though that's not the deal breaker] dragon decides to imprint itself on Laurence, the horrified captain’s world falls apart.”

Why, I thought sadly, Will Laurence doesn’t like dragons. This cannot mean well. And so I kept stalling — I kept picking the book up and putting it back down. It’s a very random reason not to start reading a book, really, but the very idea that the man who’ll be, according to this same blurb, “the constant companion and trainer” of the dragon not liking it just made me huffy. And I knew nothing at all about the rest of the story at this point. I have a very strange attachment to dragons, really. I think the people who kept nudging me to read the series must be gaping at the absurd excuse. (Imagine now how much I hate that fellow who actually mistreats his dragon in the book.)

All that aside: yes, I did love the book when I finally read it. The book starts at the tail end (ha!) of a fight between the Reliant, of which Will Laurence is the captain, and the French ship the Amitié which has just been captured. There’s a dragon egg on board of the captured ship, and to shorten things, let’s just say it hatches and the dragon — named Temeraire by Laurence — takes a liking to Laurence and Laurence actually likes him back (in a, uh, good dragon–human relationshippy way the dragons and the humans are supposed to be getting along in these books, that’s what I mean) and they have a lot of adventures. Good ones.

I’m no expert on the time period — Napoleonic Wars: did we even cover that in world history? — so I can’t say how faithful of not Novik is to the setting (with dragons or without), but it certainly feels real to me. I love the world she’s created, and the social commentary-ish parts she slips in.

And the characters! Oh man. I kept treading warily around Laurence at the start. It’s probably because of the way he speaks — he’s so formal and careful. A bit like the narrative itself, I guess. Then he calls Temeraire “my dear” and I melted into a puddle. The interaction between humans and dragons were wonderfully done; not just Laurence and Temeraire, but the other characters as well. That’s probably the best thing in the book, even with all the swashbuckling and the nifty moves.

I read Temeraire in February 2008. I’ve since read both Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, and the simple verdict is ♥. (The library doesn’t have a copy of Empire of Ivory yet.) I’d read whatever else Naomi Novik will write in a heartbeat, yes.

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

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. :)