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.