new reading

[cimorene]

I have a list of books to track down and read and some of the entries on it are quite old, as I don't always go through it in order... so I tend not to remember where I got a book recommendation from when I finally read it most of the time. Which might be too bad in this case, as if there were more with it I'd probably be interested to read them... but in the last week I've read

• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981). Low fantasy: fairies. This book reminds me a tiny tiny bit of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I love, but which has a very unusual feel. People sometimes compare JSMN to Austen, which I think is mainly caused by the fact that her narrative voice does a pretty flawless job of sounding like literature actually written in the same era as Austen; JSMN isn't an Austen pastiche and her style isn't especially Austenlike, and her subject matter is very different, although there are some similarities in her sense of comedy. At any rate, JSMN is very different from most genre fiction, and if you put aside the Austen-reminiscent tint, it has a lot in common with Little, Big. This is a long story which moves at a leisurely pace, seeming to meander quite a bit on the way, with a quirky perspective and a layer of distance between the narrator and POV characters, while the supernatural is treated in a matter-of-fact manner. But as I think about it, I wonder if the association in my memory was perhaps because somewhere someone recommended it for people who liked Susanna Clarke? I honestly am not sure either way now. I wouldn't say that I liked this book quite as much as JSMN, but it was very good, and it has a similar intriguing enchantingness: I just wanted to sink into the world and not let go. It didn't feel entirely even, and I didn't like all of it equally, and I was a bit surprised it was written in 1981 because even though Crowley goes to some effort to write major female characters, and isn't exactly sexist about it, there are a few things that definitely made me chortle and... for which I assume a female beta reader was not consulted, put it that way. There was something that felt very 1970s about the male POV characters' views of the female characters, although in his favor, they weren't like... Smurfettes, or 70% absent, which is a bit more typical of the 1970s. So I'm giving him credit here, but it's really too bad he didn't have a better beta reader. Anyway, I anticipate rereading this book multiple times with pleasure. It's probably the most exciting new book discovery I've made in years.



• The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford (1983). I have an inkling that this one might have been recommended by Neil Gaiman in a post on his Tumblr, but I might be mixing it up with a different book. Actually, these are weirdly nearly the same age - and also nearly the same age I am, but I'm sure the recs aren't from the same place, as the former has been on my to-read list for a couple of years now and the latter was a recent addition. This book is a bit of a conundrum. It opens with three first chapters, essentially, one right after the other, introducing three wildly disparate young heroes on the cusp of perilous adventure - a Welsh wizard, a Byzantine boy in occupied Gaul, and a young female doctor at the court of Lorenzo de Medici. There's nothing to tie these beginnings together at first, but they were all exciting and engrossing. This takes up nearly exactly one quarter of the book. Then the narrative is suddenly at an inn in Switzerland, where all of the introduced characters appear, get snowed in together... and the book appears to be turning into a locked-house murder mystery. It seems like it's going to be that for a couple of chapters, but then instead the three main characters and a new fourth one are all drawn into... the death of Edward V and accession to the throne of Richard III. That's the last third of the novel, which is magical alternate history with a great deal of political intrigue. Tragically, there isn't an actual dragon, but I forgive it for that. It's kind of a page-turner, actually, more than the beginning is, although I was a little disappointed that the main characters split up and the action was confined to Britain. This was as exciting to read as the other, or even more so at first, but I wanted more of it... and I'm not quite sure the pieces of it all fit together quite right.

Most of the new things I've read recently have been mysteries or thrillers, but none of them have been memorable. I've read most of the fsf from my to-read list now though, so I'd better make an effort to fill it up again.

Comments

[spark]

Little, Big is one of my all time favourites, probably top ten all time. I've tried dipping into some of John Crowley's other books but they haven't quite caught me, I think just because they're not Little, Big. I should try again. He has/had a blog somewhere too, seems like a very nice guy.

I've been meaning to read The Dragon Waiting for a while now too.

[cimorene]

I read a bunch of Goodreads reviews of the others, and it sounds like he has a lot of different ideas, rather than a lot of similar ones. I wouldn't expect any of his other books to be like Little, Big... in fact at least one of them isn't even fsf I think? But his next best-known is an Ægypt quadrilogy, and it is supposed to have detailed and beautiful prose and a lot of literary persiflage, so perhaps the most similar... but I gather from the reviews that its approach to the occult seems dated and that a lot of people find it boring or purple. I'm going to try it and also one called Ka.

I really liked The Dragon Waiting, even if it was a bit of a disappointment because there wasn't a whole book or more in the medieval Wales and medieval Gaul and medieval Florence settings and I didn't get a whole supernatural snowed-into-a-Swiss-tavern mystery either, and because the friends hinted at a found family without entirely becoming one... there were a lot of places where it seems Ford assumed we could take what happened as a given because it wasn't relevant to the plot, but it also seemed a little more interesting to me than something the plot spent more time on. Alas.

[spark]

I think of Little, Big as a work on the philosophy of story (or Story I guess) as embedded in a millenium+ of Germanic cultural conquest, clothed in low fantasy (an inadequate description, really, but at least it genuflects in some of the right directions). I sort of feel like if he riffed on similar ideas it would be a dilution, so my hope would be/is that he has different ideas that I would find equally compelling. I think I have Aegypt around the house somewhere, maybe I'll dig it out and put my toe in again.

[phosfate]

John M Ford is awesome, and more of his stuff is supposed to be coming out as e-books. He also wrote a Star Trek novel that turns into a musical comedy, because there was a time when you could do that. Still in print digitally, and loads of used copies exist.

[cimorene]

I saw that he wrote quite a few Trek novels on Goodreads. I used to read those from time to time as a teenager, but I'm afraid after so much fanfiction my standards will be altered and I'll just be annoyed by tie-in novels that don't fit my ideas about the characters and canon...

[phosfate]

Not helped by Paramount's turn of the century decision that by GOD Star Trek is a BOY THING NOW FOR MANLY MEN. The older stuff, however, has a really good chance of being quite delightfully deranged. And somebody noticed there's still a market for it, so much of it has been released digitally. You want a crossover with Here Come the Brides? They got you covered.