Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Magical Valley for Kids and Adults OR The Difficulties of Getting Rid of a Hobgoblin’s Hat I love all the Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson because they are so whimsical and wistful, charming and unsettling, strange and deep. Each book has its own mood, setting, and story-type as it combines with the others to present a full picture of Moomin Valley life. So I was looking forward to hearing Hugh Laurie read an early book in the series, Finn Family Moomintroll (1948). In it, Moomintroll (a soft sensitive animal the size of a plump child), his parents (Moominpappa and Moominmamma), and his friends Snufkin (a wandering loner), the Snork Maiden (a vain and strong girl who loves Moomintroll), the Snork (her know it all brother), and Sniff (a self-pitying coward), as well as their guests the Hemulen (a pompous dress-wearing collector) and Muskrat (a dour hammock philosopher who’s always reading a book called On the Uselessness of Everything), and assorted mysterious creatures, like the deaf and dumb Hattifatteners, the kleptomaniacal mouse-sized herring-faced friends Thingummy and Bob, and the dread wintry Groke, participate in spring and summer adventures initiated by the finding of the Hobgoblin’s black hat: magical transformations, island explorations, alien encounters, nonsensical courtroom dramas, wish-fulfillment feasts, and more. There are many funny asides like when the narrator swears by “the-Protector-of-all-Small-Beasts” (instead of God) or says something like, “If you want to find out what the muskrat’s false teeth were turned into, you can ask your Mama. She's sure to know.” Most of the incidents in this story are charming and cheerful, but beneath them flow undercurrents of dissatisfaction, insecurity, loneliness, and sadness flow. The scene where Moomintroll is unwittingly transformed so that his friends and even (briefly) his own mother don’t recognize him starts off funny but turns distressing. The scene where the Hemulen is depressed because he’s completed his perfect stamp collection and hence has stopped being a collector and become an owner is interesting. Moominpapa is ever writing his memoirs and crying when he recalls his youth, and Moomintroll’s longing love for Snufkin is poignant. Amidst her whimsy, Jansson reveals the depths of the human heart through her cute, grotesque, and fantastic creatures. And her distinctive illustrations are prime: clean lined, lovely, strange, simple, detailed, and fantastic. All those features, in addition to her original imagination, make her books appealing to both kids and adults. Finn Family Moomintroll is not the best Moomintroll book and listening to any of them without Jansson’s illustrations is a loss. However, hearing Hugh Laurie (with his natural British accent) read moments like the rising of the August moon shivered me with pleasure: It sailed up, a deep orange colour, unbelievably big and a little frayed round the edges like a tinned apricot, filling Moomin Valley with mysterious lights and shadows. “Look! To-night you can even see the craters on the moon,” said the Snork Maiden. “They must be awfully desolate,” said Moomintroll. “Poor Hobgoblin up there hunting!” Yea, she can really write fantasy, like “A top hat is always somewhat extraordinary,” “Oh, to be a Moomin and to dance in the waves when the sun gets up,” “Far away, Lonely Island lay flaming in the light of the sunset,” AND-- “It [a ball of poisonous pink perennials] twisted slowly up out of the hat, and crept down onto the floor. Tendrils and shoots groped their way up the walls, clambered round the curtains and blind-cords, and scrambled through the cracks, ventilators, and keyholes. In the damp air flowers came out and fruit began to ripen, and huge leafy shoots blotted out the stairs, pushed their way between the legs of the furniture and hung in festoons from the chandelier. The house was filled with soft rustling sound: sometimes the pop of an opening bud could be heard, or the thud of ripe fruit falling on the carpet. But Moominmamma thought it was only the rain and turned over on her other side and went to sleep again.” View all my reviews
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Tales of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Things of Value Thrown out of a Burning House “And at last, when melancholy brought only regret and the uselessness of his work gained round him with age, he decided to consult a magician.” Most of Lord Dunsany’s nineteen Tales of Wonder (1916) depict such yearning to escape the everyday real world of London, work, business, steel, gas, etc. for the magical, beautiful, and exciting world of fantasy. Drugs (e.g., hashish or “bash”) or alcohol (e.g., rum or “Gorgondy”) may ease the passage or open the vision to “the Edge of the World,” the liminal site of wondrous adventures or sights (milk, “a cursed beverage,” won’t work). Even in stories where the real world is not transcended, it is transformed (as with the Bureau d'Exchange de Maux), or larger than life protagonists (like Shard, Captain of Pirates) attempt amazing feats in it. Dunsany’s imagination is fertile and original, his writing style rich and elegant, and his tone playful with wistful, ironic, and ominous undertones. The following passage embodies the pleasures of Dunsany's fantasy: “And so with painful steps (for the shores of the world are covered with huge crystals) he came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan and saw them pounding to gravel the wreckage of fallen stars, saw them and heard their roar, those shipless seas that between earth and the fairies' homes heave beneath some huge wind that is none of our four. And there in the darkness on the grizzly coast, for darkness was swooping slantwise down the sky as though with some evil purpose, there stood that lonely, gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be found in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars, beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered [See any dictionary, but in vain.] at Neepy Thang.” And here is an annotated list of the stories: In “A Tale of London,” a Baghdad “hasheesh eater” dreams of the wonders of “the desiderate” city of London, transforming it into an exotic Arabian Nights-like place. “Thirteen at Table” depicts the unintentional exorcism of a haunted manor house via an offensive joke. In “The City on Mallington Moor” an alcoholic shepherd helps the narrator access a fabulous city of white marble and gold minarets in the British moors via a strange rum-like beverage. “Why the Milkman Shudders when he Perceives the Dawn” is a teaser story with a great hook-question that’s never answered, because we’re not of the company of milkmen. “The Bad Old Woman in Black” is another teaser story in which said woman is rumored to have run down the ox-butchers’ street, leaving unanswered questions in her wake, like “What future evil did this portend?” In “The Bird of the Difficult Eye,” if the renowned jewel thief Neepy Thang can steal the eggs of a mythical bird before they can hatch, they’ll turn into extraordinary emeralds; otherwise, it will be “a bad business indeed.” *Here’s Sidney Sime's exquisite illustration of the Bird:* The narrator of “The Long Porter's Tale” hears a story about a quest for an old woman’s song leading to a wondrous city at the edge of the world. “The Loot of Loma” is a Native American pastiche, with warriors who raid Loma stealing four of its idols and, unwittingly, a secret curse. “The Secret of the Sea” reveals that when an entire ship’s crew falls down drunk, their ship goes its own secret way to the Temple in the Sea to meet other similarly free ships, but we cannot know “what lyrical or blasphemous thing their figureheads prayed by moonlight at midnight in the sea.” In “How Ali Came to the Black Country,” a man with the seal of King Solomon comes from Persia (on foot) to save England from the devil Steam, but when asked to save it from the devil Petrol, he says, "And shall a man go twice to the help of a dog?" The fine concept of “The Bureau d'Exchange de Maux”—a bureau d’exchange where the “goods” exchanged are evils, the narrator trading his sea-sickness for another man’s fear of lifts—is marred by antisemitism. To evade the pursuit of five navies in “A Story of Land and Sea,” the pirate captain Shard unprecedentedly sails his “merry” but “volatile” men on his “rakish craft the Desperate Lark” through the Sahara, only to run afoul of some stubborn Arabs. In “A Tale of the Equator” a poet so vividly tells of a wondrous land lying south of the world and the fabulous palace his Sultan will have built there that the Sultan says, "It will be unnecessary for my builders to build this palace, Erlathdronion, Earth's Wonder, for in hearing thee we have drunk already its pleasures." “A Narrow Escape” features a jaded magician who decides to wreck London, requiring for the purpose the heart of a particular toad. In “The Watch-Tower,” an old man claiming to be the spirit of an old Provencal tower tells the narrator to beware of the Saracens, who’ve been gone for 400 years. In “How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire” a single combat between a giant and an ugly dwarf ends unexpectedly. “The Three Sailors' Gambit” is about a team of three sailors who seem ignorant of chess but beat a legendary master in two straight games, thanks to the devil, a crystal, and a soul. After riffing on forgotten gods, the narrator of “The Exiles’ Club” is invited by an exiled king to a dinner attended by other exiled monarchs, whereat a faux pas reveals that the ex-kings are but the waiters for the real members of the club, who are "upstairs" and prone to flinging lightning bolts at curs. In “The Three Infernal Jokes,” the narrator meets a tout who regrets having received three killing jokes as part of a fateful bargain. Although the best stories here are good, I found this collection less wonderful than the earlier Book of Wonder (1912), and I had trouble remembering the stories enough to write about them. Partly that’s due to the readers of the LibriVox version I listened to being less than stellar (though Sandra reads her stories fine), but it's also due to some of the stories being short, teaser-ish, or insubstantial. One of the best lines in the collection comes at the end of Dunsany’s Preface, written in 1916 while he was recovering from a wound: “And now I will write nothing further about our war, but offer you these books of dreams from Europe as one throws things of value, if only to oneself, at the last moment out of a burning house.” View all my reviews
The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “God be with you, ape” The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989), the thirteenth volume in Patrick O’Brian’s fine age of sail series, finds the odd couple best friends Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin aboard the frigate the Diane enroute to the China Sea to ally England with the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, a piratical Malay state, before the enemy French can do so. To accomplish this, Jack is finally reinstated to the navy, after having been exiled from it a couple novels ago when framed for cheating on the stock market (Lucky Jack Aubrey at sea, on land he’s extraordinarily unfortunate). Adding zest to the plot is the fact that Jack and Stephen’s traitor nemeses Ledward of the Treasury and Wray of the Admiralty will be involved in the negotiations on the French side. Adding an unpredictable element is the fact that the British envoy Mr. Fox being escorted aboard the Diane believes too proudly in the grandeur of his rank and too fervently in the importance of his mission, bears a sexual guilt and a strange hatred, and, most ominously, is no aficionado of music (violinist Jack and cellist Stephen having bonded over their shared love of classical music). Mr. Fox is an example of “A man who realizes he is unpopular deciding to make himself loathed.” As is often the case in the series, both Jack and Stephen have left behind some uncomfortable situations at home: Jack’s life may be threatened by a “worm” among the British powers that be, while Stephen’s wife Diana is pregnant and argumentative (which is really down to Stephen’s finally abandoning his laudanum). Interestingly, O’Brian is less interested in the espionage/political side of his story (the competitive negotiations for the treaty with the Sultan) than in the naval sides (e.g., sails, storms, currents, provisions, morale, gun practice, health care, working, singing, disciplining, and dining involved in a frigate) and natural sides (e.g., flora and fauna of the islands of the China Sea, from durians and orchids to tarsiers and rhinoceroses). O’Brian briefly sets up the situation, shows how Stephen gets intel via Chinese bankers, relates the Sultan’s doting on his “gazelle-eyed Ganymede” Abdul, and then cursorily--after the fact--resolves that part of his novel. He’s much more interested in depicting Jack dealing with callow midshipmen, a difficult rendezvous at sea, a typhoon, or a grounded ship or in depicting Stephen (“After medicine, my greatest interest is living things and their way of life)” climbing the Thousand Steps up the side of a volcano to stay in the sacred crater in a Buddhist temple in an Edenic setting full of wildlife that’s never learned to fear human beings and commune with orangutangs there. Readers who need suspenseful, realtime, violent action scenes in their historical fiction--battles, skirmishes, combats, at sea and or on land--may be bored, as the only such action in the novel happens offstage. I don’t mind the lack of war scenes so much because the other parts of the book are prime and because I enjoy spending time with the contrasting and complementary friends Jack (a big, bluff British Anglican natural seaman) and Stephen (a compact, circumspect Irish-Catalan Catholic landlubber Naturalist/Surgeon/Intelligencer). I feel good when they say things to each other like “Now surely you’ll turn in, brother. You look destroyed.” As ever, O’Brian writes vivid descriptions conveying what it was like to be at sea on a sailing ship of the line, like “In this clear weather, they could survey 700 square miles of sea... A pale cobalt dome of sky, darkening imperceptibly as it came down to the sharp horizon and the true azure of the great disc of ocean, two pure ideal forms and the ship between them, minute, real and incongruous.” And plenty of vivid descriptions of flora and fauna, like “The creature, quite unharmed, stood there gently swaying on its long legs. It was a very large insect indeed, greenish, with immense antennae and a disproportionately small, meek, and indeed rather stupid face.” Also as usual, he writes plenty of cool lines and ideas about human nature, political conflict, and natural history, like “Politics and delicacy can seldom go together,” "Stephen had never known a judge he liked," “Good and evil are so close at times... that there is scarcely the breadth of a hair between them,” and-- “Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own... Jack was a fair example... as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be... Steven had never seen him act a part.” Audiobook reader Ric Jerrom remains the only reader I can imagine for the series, having become for me the big British voice of Jack and the lean Irish voice of Stephen. And I love his nasal, raspy, “shrewish” Killick, too. Alas, this novel begins one of O’Brian’s story arcs within the overall careers of Jack and Stephen that may span a few books, so that this one ends with a fairly large cliffhanger. I also found the spy portion of the novel a little too sketchy and hinging on an unpleasant depiction of homosexuality (“pederasty”). But as it is a compact novel and as I continue to really enjoy spending time with Jack and Steven, I will happily (eventually) go onto book fourteen. View all my reviews
The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Universe is Knowable” or “People Do Strange Things for Love” The first novel in Ken Liu’s Chinese-flavored, “silk punk” historical epic fantasy-sf Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings (2015), ends with the good-natured, ex-small-time gangster Kuni Garu drinking with the friends who helped him do the “interesting thing” by becoming Emperor of the islands of Dara. Ah, poor Kuni! As the second novel, The Wall of Storms (2016) begins five years into his reign, its name, Four Placid Seas, has become a misnomer, and he’s learned that winning an empire is far easier than maintaining one. He wants to make life better for his people, especially the commoners and women, but everyone (advisors, nobles, scholars, generals, merchants, farmers, rebels, and even his two wives, Empress Jia and Consort Risana) is competing for their own piece of the imperial pie. Perhaps what is needed to unify the fractious empire is an invasion by a formidable barbarian horde equipped with winged, fire-breathing ruminants? Ken Liu fully imagines his fantasy world, giving a Chinese cast to the main Daran culture (eating sticks, tripod drinking cups, logograms, different forms of bowing and sitting, emperors, advisors, etc.), retaining most of the flora and fauna of our world (horses, cows, wolves, etc.) while inserting exotic new ones (the gargantuan, horned, scaled whale-like crubin and the dragon-analogue garanafin, etc.), making the world and its inhabitants mostly conform to earth’s natural laws while introducing a pantheon of kibitzing and encouraging but (ostensibly) not directly interfering gods. He creates a long, rich history, complete with schools of philosophy (Fluxists, Moralists, Patternists, etc.), classical poetry, storytelling, festivals, crafts, and so on. While the first novel restricts itself to the Islands of Dara (and its empire), this second one introduces a far-off scrubland continent peopled by white barbarians partaking of Viking and Mongol qualities, hitherto cut off from Dara (and vice versa) by the wall of storms (a wall of massive cyclones). Liu’s large story unfolds via the educating, learning, strategizing, scheming, betraying, loving, and fighting of his fully human, flawed, and believable characters: no cardboard evil dark lords or pure heroes here. He develops strong figures from the first novel (like Luan Zya and Kuni Garu) and introduces interesting new ones (like Princess Thera and Pekyu Tenryo, the king of the Licyu “barbarians”). The female characters are more fully developed and complex than in the first book: Empress Jia, a ruthless rationalizer who trusts in systems rather than individuals and wants to make a stable state by reducing the power of the nobles and isolating the glory-seeking “heroes”; Marshal/Queen Gin, a heroic strategist general who scorns Jia’s schemes; Zomi Kidosu, a crippled, proud, and brilliant young scholar who wants to pass the first imperial examinations to win an important post at court; Thera, who loathes the idea of becoming a marriage pawn in the imperial game while either her wannabe hero brother or her wannabe scholar brother will succeed their father as Emperor. Not to mention Vadyu Roatan, a clever and bold barbarian princess-warrior skilled at piloting her cow-dragon garinafin. The ways in which Liu weaves these women’s destinies together are surprising and interesting. He injects plenty of thoughtful ideas and life wisdom into his novels, with great lines like: “A child who takes no risks will not lead an interesting life.” “Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a Peacock. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.” “Patriotism, like white rice, was a luxury of the well to do.” “Every day in the life of a common flower is a day of battle.” “But memory was a lump of wax that was shaped by consciousness with each recollection.” “The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.” He writes culturally suitable similes, like “his voice so stiff it bounced off the wall like roasted chestnuts,” and savory lines, like “The inside of a cow's stomach is a complicated world.” The fantasy elements are pretty much limited to the gods, because Liu is an sf writer at heart, so that his “dragons,” airships, submarines, “silkmotic” weapons, “magic” mirrors, and so on have natural, scientific explanations for their workings. Instead of magic, then, there’s science and technology, engineering, logograms, engineering, machines, etc. Themes from the first novel developed in this one are that All life is an experiment; that Love makes one do strange things; and that The boundary between history and story is blurry: “Like all true stories, it was a mix of legends and facts, of myths imagined and deeds done, of the heart of darkness and the crown of light, of experiences borne and gaps filled, of things seen and visions that could only be authenticated by the mind’s eye.” Liu can write some bad lines of dialogue, jarring in their contemporary colloquial register, like, “Let's get out of here.” And there are moments where characters do disappointing things I can’t quite believe they’d do based on their characters developed up to those points. In the middle of the novel, I found myself muttering something like, “I can’t believe A would be so dense!” or “Wouldn’t B think of that?” And sometimes the gods get a little too hands on. Things could have gotten interesting for the empire more convincingly. While the first book ends in a comfortable resting place, this one does not, and I liked the first two books enough to probably soldier on to find out what will happen to the characters and cultures, but I can’t help but notice that each book in his Dandelion Dynasty series is longer than the one before, going from 21 hours, to 28, to 38, and then to a whopping 41, so I hope that he’s not succumbing to Success Bloat. Michael Kramer is a capable, appealing narrator, his base narration reminiscent of the excellent Grover Gardener, but his god voices tend towards the overly dramatic. View all my reviews
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Communicating with the Alien Or “There was always another way” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015) depicts the collision of a civilization of uplifted sentient spiders with some human generation ship explorers looking for worlds to colonize after earth has been destroyed. That book’s depiction of spider culture is fascinating, its themes regarding the need to talk to rather than attack the Other are fine, it achieves flights of sf sublime, its plot construction is suspenseful, and its characters are appealing. All those good features are on display in the sequel, Children of Ruin (2019), where Tchaikovsky spreads his imaginative wings, introducing to go with the spiders and humans and their AI not one but two new alien cultures—an octopoid civilization and a sentient slime-mold analogue. I really like his desire and ability in his fantasy and science fiction to write from the points of view of very different kinds of characters and species and life forms, all with different ways of communicating, thinking, feeling, learning, living, etc. Tchaikovsky runs two main plot strands together here: in the past a human space-traveling, terraforming team from earth arrives at a system and finds two possible planets to tinker with, after which they learn that earth-based humanity has violently self-destructed; and in the present thousands of years after the past plot line (and just after the close of the first novel) a joint spider-human-AI team of space explorers comes upon the system discovered long ago by the terraformers. The past chapters progress chronologically up to the present ones with ever greater suspense as the terraformers encounter an indigenous, microscopic, self-evolving, group-mind parasitic life alien life form wanting to go on an adventure by riding new vehicles (like human beings), while the spider-human-AI space explorers in the present stumble upon the results of that past encounter. The novel interestingly depicts the challenges of communicating with the alien, as the humans traveling with the spiders are trying to learn how to better translate the spiders’ feet tapping and palp manipulating into words via technology and empathy, when they stumble upon the octopode civilization that’s resulted from Terran octopi having been uplifted and released upon an oceanic world, and both spiders and humans need to learn how to interpret the octopi’s color- and tentacle- and emotion-based language asap. Time is pressing, because the parasite group mind (whose chapters are narrated as “we”) is working towards their “adventure” in what appears to be monstrous way. It’s cool watching how all this develops! What the alien slime mold does to its hosts and how it replicates them from random detritus is horrifying, but is it really a dangerous parasite or a catalyst for symbiotic enrichment? How much of a host it alters needs to remain intact in order to retain its identity? How much of a human mind must be uploaded into an AI in order to retain its identity? Is it better to be happy in a group or unhappy alone? Is it possible to ever really understand an alien species? The novel develops themes about identity, consciousness, communication, copies vs. originals, storytelling, exploring, and the Other, especially stressing the importance of being open minded enough to try hard enough to communicate with the other, no matter how alien and monstrous they may seem to us or we to them. Tchaikovsky writes a page turning story by generally ignoring mundane details like eating, eliminating, sleeping, and making love etc. in favor of intense situations and by starting chapters in mid-crises involving the life or death or metamorphosis of individuals or their cultures and by ending chapters with cliffhangers. He can write vivid, weird, suspenseful, and sublime sf: “She [the AI Avrana Kern] is nothing but a copy of a copy of a copy rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants.” “There were lakes in the desert, though of what was unclear. They leapt at the eye from the dull brown expanse, yellow, ferrous red, the blue-green of copper compounds, often concentric rings of one unlikely, toxic-looking color within another and then another. They looked like waste pools from some factory about to be shut down by the environmental lobby, their shores crusted with glittering crystals. The sight was beautiful, yet a poster child for something inimical to human life. The display recorded a temperature of sixty-one degrees centigrade.” “She calls out to Portia again, feels the spider’s legs curve about her body, Portia’s underside clasping against her back in a futile attempt to conserve heat. Both their suits strain with the chill. Heaters that would have coped in the insulated cold of space are losing the battle against the conductive cold of the swirling water, and the spearheads of the ice forest grow closer and closer.” And his ironic-humorous-bleak tone is neat. When a human researcher called Meshner tells his arachnid colleague Fabian that they don’t want to fry his brain (by downloading too alien an experience from Fabian to Meshner’s cranial implant), Fabian says something like, “as tasty as that image is, we’d better be careful,” and Meshner wonders if Fabian is making a human joke or saying a spider idiom! While his humans are like straight men, he imagines fascinating details on Portiid spider culture (gender bias for females and against males, transmission of experiences and information by the sharing of chemicals), as well as on Octopode culture: unorthodox problem solving, spaceship names like the Profundity of Depth and the Shell that Echoes Only, independently acting arms, frequent mind changing: “Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind. They would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.” This novel, then, is a first contact story (from the points of view of all sides when a number of mutually alien life forms meet for the first time), a terraforming story, and a human evolution story. It's a little like Bear’s Blood Music, Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost,” and Banks’ Culture novels. I really like the novels by Tchaikovsky's I've read so far, Redemption's Blade, The Children of Time, and now Children of Ruin. The audiobook reader Mel Hudson is great. View all my reviews
The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The End of Earthsea, or Dreams and Dragons, the Living and the Dead The Other Wind (2001) begins fifteen years after the end of Tehanu (1990), as small-town sorcerer Alder (from Taon), whose gift is to mend things, travels to Gont to see seventy-year-old Ged (the former Archmage) to tell him his trouble: every night in his sleep he has been visiting the dry land of the dead and is terrified that they will make him free them to return to the world of the living. It started with a dream where his beloved, recently deceased wife's soul kissed him—bruising his mouth—and asked him to free her. Since then, crowds of dead souls have been asking him the same thing. Unable to help Alder, the “wise” wizards of Roke (Masters of magic) have sent him to consult Ged. When Ged starts dreaming of the dry land, too, he reckons that some change is happening and working through Alder. Ged gets good old Aunty Moss to give Alder one of her kittens, and when the feline sleeps with him its warm touch prevents him from dreaming: “Maybe a cat is as good as a master of Roke.” Finally, Ged sends Alder on to Havnor, where Tenar and Tehanu are staying in the palace of King Lebannen to advise him about the increasingly aggressive dragon incursions into the Archipelago, sensing a connection between the dreams and the dragons… The rest of the compact novel sets out to resolve the outstanding issues from the earlier stories: death and dragons and human beings and animals. It also develops the characters of people we’ve come to love in Earthsea, like Lebannen, Tehanu, Tenar, and Ged, while introducing compelling new ones like Alder and the Kargish “barbarian” princess Seserakh. There is dragon diplomacy; a multi-national, multi-class, multi-species, multi-gender quest; a cute gambling game played with the islands of the Archipelago as stakes; and an unexpected way for Alder to employ his mending gift after he’s surrendered it. The Other Wind is an unusual book. It’s a page-turner that made me forget everything in the real world outside for hours at a time as I was reading, while lacking almost all the usual kinds of heroic fantasy action. We hear in passing about King Lebannen taking out a bad slavery piracy kind of force a while ago, and we hear references to things like a wizard dueling a dragon to mutual death long ago, but the present adventure is psychological, emotional, and spiritual rather than physical. There is no dark lord figure like Cob in The Farthest Shore, but rather a bad choice that some influential people made a long time ago. Although the stakes couldn’t be higher, the novel may bore people who require plenty of violent action in black-white conflicts between good-evil. As for me, I reread many sentences several times to savor their rhythm, image, idea, beauty, or power, like when Alder is introducing his dream about his dead wife to Ged: After a while he said, “We had great joy.” “I see that.” “And my sorrow was in that degree.” The old man nodded. “I could bear it” Alder said. “You know how it is. There is not much reason to be living that I could see, but I could bear it.” “Yes.” “But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. She was in the dream.” “Tell it.” Or like when Ged, who has permanently used up all his power and is “just” an old man, watches Alder (with nostalgia if not envy) as he mends a Tenar’s favorite broken pitcher: “Now, fascinated, he watched Alder's hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not know their meaning. Alder's face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in time and task that timeless calm shone through it. His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole. He looked at it with quiet pleasure.” I like that Le Guin doesn't put people above animals as Pullman kind of does in His Dark Materials. “What’s the difference between animals and us? Maybe the difference isn’t language but that animals do and are, while we choose what we do? They’re beyond good and evil, but we have to choose them?” Anyway, we should all be part of the same cycle of life and death. It is neat how she depicts Seserakh as a lioness with humor and courage and beauty (of course) and brains, and it is moving and effective how she shows the King get over his fear of her (and of women in a group) through the course of the adventure. I'm still sad that Ged refuses to have any contact with Lebannen, who loves him and would do anything he wanted him to do. I know Le Guin is showing Ged as being done with doing and not wanting to be perceived as influencing the young king, but it still seems a little too unsentimental (if not perverse) to deny the reader (this reader!?) a little reunion candy. I also think that she may do a BIT too much summarizing of events from the past novels and “Dragonfly” so as to bring readers new to Earthsea up to speed here; at times it reads like a Greatest Earthsea Hits medley. Anyway, Le Guin is a great writer of ethical, moral, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical fantasy; simple on the surface but with depths beneath and behind; capable of sublime scenes and earthy ones. And it is amazing how what happens in this book to solve the mystery of humans and dragons and life and death does nothing to violate the first book she wrote in the series back in 1968, almost as though she knew where she'd end up. It shows how carefully thought out and rich her created world and stories in it are. (However, it also thins her fantasy world of much of its fantasy.) Almost every word in this novel is where it should be; everything works for and towards her metaphoric and symbolic and thematic ends. The audiobook reader Samuel Roukin is fine, with a nice British voice and a perfect manner for Ged and Alder, except for one nearly fatal flaw: he distractingly keeps changing the pronunciation of Irian’s name, sometimes within the speech of a single character. 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Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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