Post Captain

by on January 26, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

It’s been… wow, a decade? Since I read Master and Commander.

So, yes, I can say that you don’t need any detailed knowledge of the first book before reading this. In fact, while the climax of the first book gets brought up a lot, the only impact on this book is that these events happened. There’s no direct consequences.

This one wanders around a bit, establishing a slightly larger cast of characters, and looking deeper into the principle two, especially Maturin, who gets firmly established a spy and believer in Catalonian independence.

It starts with a promise of naval action (without Aubrey involved) that gets cut short. From there, we get a bit upper-class romance, which is undercut a bit by O’Brian’s habit of minimal presentation. There’s not a lot of descriptions given, and a lot of things are condensed down, with a paragraph starting with one conversation, and then flowing directly into a different one. It takes a bit of an attentive eye to follow the extremely stream-of-consciousness transitions, but there are enough hints to follow.

A good chunk of the beginning gets taken up the start of a knot of romance, and money problems that hang over the rest of the book. Of course, this is still a age of sail adventure series, so that can’t last, and Aubrey ends up with a ship that looks to be the inspiration for HMS Fearless in On Basilisk Station. Though in this case, its acknowledged as a failure before ever being put to sea.

From there, there’s usual fitting out, and poor crew dramas of these types of books (and as well done as ever), culminating with the main action scene, and then a secondary action as a denouement, and way to confirm Aubrey’s fortunes are rising. Overall, it’s well written, and obviously setting things up for the long haul of a longer series of books (I’ll have to get to book three is less than a decade…), but that does cause the plot to make almost as much leeway as the Polychrest (um… read the book to get that one).

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The Raven and the Reindeer

by on January 17, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

It’s an odd enough title for a book, but it certainly fits. It’s apparently based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen (I’m completely unknowledgeable about that), though my thoughts ran to Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow, which is based off of a Norwegian folk tale. Makes me wonder if that’s where HCA got his ideas (not that they are the same story at all)….

At any rate, the writing is, as ever with T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), witty and charming, and includes a strong cast of animal characters:

The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.”
Gerta blinked a few times. “That’s…quite a name.”
“I made it myself,” said the raven preening. “I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them up until they made something worth having.”

(Which tells you about the Raven part of the title; the Reindeer comes in much later, and from an unexpected direction.)

Gerta goes on quite a journey. As usual, the first steps are faltering, and she carries a lot of guilt for having managed to lose seven months of her life (I imagine we might all do well to lose so little), but even lost, it helps her, and powers much of the rest of the story (in a somewhat more literal way than it may sound). And like all well-done stories, this is because that beginning misadventure fits in with everything else, and there’d be quite a hole left without it.

All the way through, there’s actually a fair amount of self-growth and introspection, and it should certainly be on YA reading lists for that and a number of other topics that slide in at the edges. The end is satisfying, and says just what it needs to say… though I still wish it had carried through to Gerta talking to her grandmother, just because she’s such a wonderful character.

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Pompeii

by on January 11, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 must rank as the most famous volcanic eruption in all of history, even over such titanic eruptions as Krakatoa, or such well-covered events as Mt. Saint Hellens. Of course, Vesuvius got extensive coverage at the time, with Pliny the Elder’s eyewitness account doing much to show just what a large eruption can do to a heavily-populated area. And of course, the uncovering of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the Twentieth Century has been a big boon to archaeology, and the fame of the event.

So, Robert Harris’ historical novel has a fairly solid set of known facts to build around. And he does a great job at structuring the novel around the timetable of events, and knowing that no matter what, the eruption is going to be the main star, keeps everything constrained to four days. Pliny the Elder comes in as a notable secondary character, and his known activities are part of the structure of the book.

The overall story itself is a little less successful. We start with the newly-appointed aquarius (literally ‘water carrier’, but here more ‘chief engineer’) Attilius of the Aqua Augusta aqueduct dealing with a recalcitrant crew, and a drought in southern Italy. There’s a bit of a mystery in the works, as the previous aquarius just up disappeared a couple weeks ago. This theme slowly deepens, with Attilius getting more concerned with just what exactly happened, especially as various people clam up when asked about him. Sadly, this gets somewhat summarily tossed out partway through, leaving the book to focus entirely on the natural disaster aspect. It does serve to properly introduce characters for proper impact during the final bits, but the novel as a whole feels a bit out of tune since it can’t quite decide what it wants to be.

Still, the writing is good, the overall depiction of Roman culture in the First Century AD feels well done, with a tight cast of characters instead of the ‘cast of thousands’ for an epic story somewhat typical of the ‘disaster’ genre. The overall action keeps up a good pace, and moves the reader along without bogging down, even (especially) as it goes into some of the technical details of Roman engineering.

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The War of the Spanish Succession 1701-1714

by on January 4, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The Eighteenth Century saw a series of wars in Europe, that led up to the more famous ones towards the end of that century. I’ve been wanting good books on all of these for some time.

I’m still looking for a truly good book on the War of the Spanish Succession.

This one got better as it went along, but felt entirely too jumbled at the beginning, and never seems to give more than a surface appreciation of events. Notably, there’s a wrap up at the end that places the war into better context, and some of that would have been much better served at the beginning of the book, to get context there. There’s no really detailed looks at any of the principle figures involved, nor a lot about how they related to each other.

In some ways, Spencer’s Blenheim: Battle for Europe gives a better sense of the war as a whole even though it’s ultimately focused on one campaign. As such, there are things that are not in that book at all, but you still get a better sense of Louis XIV, Marlborough, and Eugene from that book than for anyone here. Worse, while the book is generally chronological, it doesn’t present things tightly enough for that to be evident.

Either I got a better sense for things as I went through, or the writing does get better as it goes. The feeling of reading a disconnected jumble grew less as I went along, and it does present all the major campaigns of the war. Better, there’s a good number of quotes from contemporaries to provide some color and sense of how things were regarded at the time. Overall, it’s a barely decent history that could have been a bit better with some reorganization.

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Spinning Silver

by on December 26, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Naomi Novik’s latest novel is currently my favorite by her. It’s very strong, well written, and avoids the minor issues I had with Uprooted. There is a bit as it gets going where the number of viewpoint characters increase from one to three, and the novel threatens to break into three, but the three separate plots very quickly feed back into each other again and made whole.

In fact, my only real problem with the novel is that the number of viewpoints continues to slowly get larger for the rest of the book, and I had some trouble telling just who was talking. These viewpoints made their scenes more effective, as the way it gets told adds more power and impact, but I might have been just as happy keeping things a little simpler. And, at the end, things fold back down to the original viewpoint, and the main character, Miryem.

The atmosphere of the story is extremely well done. Novik really gets what makes Eastern European folk tales work. It doesn’t get into some of the creepy horror-vibe of Uprooted, but the impoverished countryside, the ice-spirits that come with winter, all really work here. Surprisingly, when the book expands scope, and gets into the politics of the realm of Lithvas, those also really work, and make sense, instead of feeling a bit simplified after the careful work on the overall atmosphere.

It adds up to something that feels a bit like a fairy tale (it is supposed to be a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, but any adherence to that concept was left on the cutting room floor in the first draft), but peopled with real people (all too real on occasion, like the depiction of a family suffering with an abusive father), and a real world. It all adds up to a great read.

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