Enchantment (Card)

Sleeping beauty in Russia with time travel and the most formidable and despicable witch known to folklore. Wheeee! The words leave my mouth raw, but Orson Scott Card has again produced something clever, original, convincing, and very intelligent. I don't want to like this man, but he delivers. Just remember the standard Card preparations: realize that while he is LDS (was LDS? I don't know anymore) you are still liable to trip over the harsh, the crude, and the sickening; understand that he can make you approve of his characters even when their actions are unlovely or offensive; and prepare to be charmed by hints of whimsy even when they buried under plenty of grit and decay. And, above all, be wary because you're going to enjoy the book to your shame.

Maybe that's enough dancing around my confession. Here it is unadorned: I devoured that book, squirming heedlessly through the nasty bits because I was hooked, and now I feel that Card has gotten the better of me once again. That miscreant. I need to stop seeking him out.

My only consolation is that I didn't buy the book.

Elantris (Sanderson)

Here's that rare thing, a fantasy that recreates the genre. I have never before read a novel quite like this. There are fallen gods, an imploding city of the damned, ploys to fill the throne, religious war and conquest, unrequited love, villains worth respecting, and plenty of death and sacrifice. It's political adventure dabbling in the supernatural. I really hate political intrigue stories. I really liked this one. Sanderson has got it going on.

A Fistful of Sky (Hoffman)

Commenting on this yarn might be pointless. There isn't so much for me to say. The basics,then.

Did I approve of it? Mm. Not really.
Did I enjoy it? Sort of. Hard to say.
What was it about? A late blooming daughter in a family of witches. Ho hum, rum dee dee.

It was generic and had none of that delicious sparkle that some authors can sink into any premise. If I had to pick a saving grace, it would be the excellent descriptions of obesity, food, clothing . . . everything, really. Here is a story without much to say and nowhere to go, but places, objects and people are beautifully drawn and warm to the touch.

Again, no sample because I'm done thinking about it.

Flash Forward (Sawyer)

I have yet another novel to report, because this is the rut in which I am squatting at the moment. This book hooked me with the premise. All of humanity simultaneously and inexplicably loses consciousness for about two minutes. For a lot of people it's a natural disaster. Planes drop out of the sky, there are innumerable traffic accidents, and staircases become death traps. For the survivors it's a supernatural event; most experienced a two minute jump of consciousness twenty years down their timeline. The book is fiction wrapped around a hypothesis. What would silly sentient bipeds do if they had some idea of the scenery down the road? How do they adjust to a known future?

It's a cold read, but the chill is somewhat offset by the exploration of various theories for time, the observer effect, and predestination. Don't we love physics at play?

A sample:

"A standard argument in favor of the many-worlds interpretation is the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat: put a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison that has a fifty-fifty chance of being triggered during a one hour period. At the end of the hour, open the box and see if the cat is still alive. Under the Copenhagen interpretation - the standard version of quantum mechanics - until someone looks in, the cat is supposedly neither alive nor dead, but rather a superposition of both possible states; the act of looking in - of observing - collapses the wave function, forcing the cat to resolve itself into one of two possible outcomes. Except that, since the observation could go two ways, what MWI proponents say really happens is that the universe splits at the point at which the observation is made. One universe continues on with a dead cat; the other, with a living one."

Much Ado in the Moonlight (Kurland)

This was a novel I pilfered from a friend's shelf and read over a weekend. It was nothing spectacular, and certainly not life changing (except for the mysterious disappearance of a weekend). That said, at least it was pleasant. Some parts made me laugh, and for a romance it was less repulsive than I might have expected. (And clean! Oh happy day. When my friend assured me that it was lacking in moral trash I assumed she meant that in a strictly relative sense. After all, the back cover makes explicit mention of a "gorgeous Highland warrior". I doubted with reason.)

Would I recommend it to all my friends? Certainly not. It took me at least four chapters to fit myself to the writing style and then some extra patience to wait out the handful of characters that Kurland keeps around so they can do nothing much over several pages at several locations in the plot. That said, it isn't without merit. For those already converted to the genre, this one's a solid pick.

No sample because I'm not paging through it to find one. :)

Ever (Levine)

Some fiction is written in lush, rococo prose. Details crowd together and the story swells into a clotted mass of sensation. It could be an approximation of how we usually experience life. At any one moment there are dozens of details that pile together to shape our experience of that minute, those seconds, this splinter of awareness. The more detail an author can provide, the closer we can come to living in their story. Without description you have a sparse summary of events, a newspaper article. Or maybe you have something worse - Passage to Zerahemla, for instance. We already know we're never going there again.

Ever is another species of literary animal. There is no layering of detail, and yet neither is it dry fact presentation. Rather, Levine demonstrates the discerning use of detail. She crafts brief and simple sentences, offers frugal descriptions, and somehow creates a world all the more vivid for its few colours. For extra kick, Levine laces her story with wry humour. This novel is an example of story telling done well. I very much liked this one.

A sample:

"I see Puru's fingers for the first time. The god of destiny bites his fingernails."

Passage to Zarahemla (Heimerdinger)

Um. There was this silly thought that too many "idea books" creates a certain staleness, and that I needed to read something light and fun to keep me fresh. Right now I'm slogging through a book about genocide, and ergh. It is not filling me with light, love, and buoyancy. So I picked up a novel by Heimerdinger hoping for adventure and stupid characters who get a clue somewhere before the end pages. This is, after all, what he's good at.

Now I'm on the hunt for another novel, because I still feel stale. The book read like a flat description of a film. I consider it a serious tactical error to approach prose in this way. The boon of books is that they have the space and time to be something other than surface. They can show you more of the characters and get you further inside another's skin than any movie. Movies are limited to sight of beauty, colour and motion. Books can transmit touch, smell, and sense of beauty along with all the other things. They lack only music. This piece flunked everything. I was happy to snap it shut when it tediously pottered to a close.

A sample (because I will not be alone in my torment):

She studied him for a long moment. "It can't be good," she began finally. "I mean, I don't think it could ever be good to feel so much hate."

The statement seemed to irritate him. "Hate is all I have right now."

"But you can't change things," said Kerra. "You can't change what happened. Maybe you should let it go."

He bristled. "Those are the words of a coward. I will change things. I will fight for my people."

"That's not what I mean. I mean . . . Wow. I'm sorry. It's just . . . Nothing lasts, Kiddoni. Especially things like love. You can count on it."

Kiddoni's face softened. "Do you believe in nothing?"

"Not really." Kerra shrugged. "Not much."

She could feel tension building inside. Finally she leaped to her feet. "Ahhh! This is all so crazy! It isn't right. It's not real. You're not real. Everything -- this miracle -- it could all go away at any instant, and I'd never see you again."

Kiddoni reached out one more time to take her hand. "But it's here now. We're here."

Kerra pulled away. "I have to go. They'll start looking."

Do you see what I have endured? And now you think I am an idiot.

Fair enough.