Arctangential

I just finished Rhialto the Marvellous, the final book in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series. This book doesn’t deal with Cugel — instead it’s about the adventures and political machinations of a group of wizards from Cugel’s home town. I won’t go too much into the plot — it’s too convoluted and idiosyncratic to really do justice to. Instead, I’ll replicate a portion of the book’s introduction, which lists the wizards who are part of this coterie. I think just this list gives a lot of insight into the kind of writing Vance has pulled off in these books, and it shows a lot of the prolixity that has shown up in every book in this series.

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Some of you may remember last year when some weird flowers sprung up unexpectedly from my front lawn. Well, they’re back. Yesterday I took this picture:

And then this morning they had bloomed quite nicely:

There are some more shoots coming up, I will dutifully post pictures of them as they bloom, too.

(All pictures are click for bigger.)

I just finished Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. It was pretty good. Yet another Discworld novel, although he’s clearly trying to move away from that milieu with this book — it has chapters, and the fact that it’s set on the Discworld has little to no bearing on the story apart from the occasional place name and two notable cameos at the end of the story. I like this moving away from his staple though — I’ve gotten somewhat bored of all the Discworld book, and while I am still willing to read them, I admit that I was happy to see that this was not par for the course.

The story is about a young girl named Tiffany, who may or may not be a witch. She lives on a farm and when her younger brother is stolen, she has to go and rescue him from “The Queen”. She has the help of a talking toad, and a group of 6-inch high blue skinned men known as the Nac Mac Feegle. The story features most of the Pratechettisms you’d expect — magic that’s less than it ought to seem, miracles that are more than they could ever seem, ordinary people taking on extraordinary tasks by using common sense, etc. The ending is very satisfying, as his generally are, and I overall enjoyed the book very much.

I’m now reading Rhialto the Marvellous by Jack Vance — the final Dying Earth book.

I got some new art! (New art is at the bottom of the page.)

I finished Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga earlier tonight. It was, in some ways basically the same book as The Eyes of the Overworld, but it differed in some important stylistic aspects which I’ll talk about in a minute. The plot is very similar; Cugel has once again been thrown far to the north (roughly 20 yards from his previous starting place) and goes on a long journey back to see Iuconnu and visit his revenge upon him. Because he left such a trail of anger and resentment on his last trip, he decides to go the other way around this time, and instead has a different set of adventures. Each place he lands, he uses his wiles and trickery to get the advantage of the locals, and then he inevitably overreaches himself or forgets a detail, and is run out of town on a rail, generally with as little as (or less than) he entered with.

The book is full of really fantastic images and flights of fancy from Vance’s boundless imagination. We learn that in the far future, horses have evolved such that they consider themselves the masters of those whose carts they pull — they deign only to pull them such that their servants are closer at hand when they need hay or beer. At one point, Cugel learns a method to make any object have no weight at all ; he uses this ability to lighten an entire sailing boat and attach it, by rope, to a horse. He and a number of other travelers use this to cross a great desert. Later, Cugel comes across 4 men who share the use of a single eye, mouth, ear and arm and helps them find their other stolen appendages; they are also all father to a single man.

I’ve now started reading Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men. It’s about what I expected.

I finished Malzberg’s The Men Inside last night. What a great novel. Malzberg as a man may be totally insane, but as a writer he produces some very dense, compelling prose that also tells an interesting story about real characters; or, in this case, about one character: a small man by the name of Leslie Blount. Blount is a “Messenger” — a man trained to use the Projector, a device which allows him to shrink to 1/80th of an inch tall and travel inside of people for a short period of time. He uses this device to excise incipient cancers from people, and to clean up the “tendrils” of metastases after a more gross surgery. Malzberg talks a lot about Blount’s psychology — his fears and paranoias, his insane urges and his fantasies. And the best thing is that while the plot is very predictable, there is a great revelation near the end of the book that entirely changes the context of the plot, and casts everything that has come before in an entirely new light. This is my favorite kind of ending — it provides a real surprise and shock but does not diminish the rest of the story. It’s not a “twist” ending; it doesn’t turn out that Blount is really a ghost or anything, it’s just really fun.

Spoilers beyond the cut:

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I finished Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld last night. It was pretty good — it’s the second in his Dying Earth series, and this one is a novel set in the same basic setting as the short stories from the previous volume: it is the end of the Earth. The sun is dying (at some points during this story people indicate that the sun will go “out” in 30-40 years), and the earth is populated with wizards, peasants and monsters living in the million year old husks of once-great ruined cities. Apart from the gross concept of the setting and a few names of various creatures (Leucomorph, Deodand, Elb), there isn’t a lot relating this book to the first one.

The plot is that a fellow by the name of Cugel the Clever tries to steal some magical devices from a wizard known as Iucounu the Laughing Magician, but gets caught. Iucounu agrees to let him live in exchange for a favor — he is to fetch a magical item for him from the great northern wastes and bring it back. Cugel of course agrees, and Iucounu cats a spell which sends Cugel to the location of this item. He retrieves it fairly quickly, but has no quick way back, so the rest of the book details his adventures in returning to Iucounu. Iucounu has implanted an alien being named Firx inside of Cugel, who inflicts pain upon him whenever he slows down in his quest to return the item to Iucounu. He encounters many interesting people and has many interesting adventures on his way back. It’s a fun book — the next book in the series is called Cugel’s Saga, so I’m looking forward to reading more about his travels.

Right now I’ve just started reading Barry Malzberg’s The Men Inside. It’s good, but exhibits a very Malzbergian density of prose that I am having a certain amount of trouble cutting through. We’ll see.

And yes, I really enjoy typing “Iucounu”.

I finished Uris’s QB VII last night. I am kind of conflicted about it — on the one hand, I really enjoyed it. In fact, I stayed up last night until I finished it because I just had to know how it ended. On the other hand, the book is not very well written, it’s overlong, padded with useless exposition and it’s incredibly manipulative. Basically, the reason I enjoyed it is because I was thoroughly manipulated by it, and I don’t really like that. So, a mixed review.

The basic plot is that there’s this Polish doctor, Adam Kelno, who was in a concentration camp, and an American writer named Abe Cady who, 30 years later, writes a book called The Holocaust, in which he makes the offhand accusation that Kelno performed terrible surgical procedures during his time in the camp. Kelno sues Cady for libel, and the book mostly focuses on the trial that follows. A huge amount of the book is devoted to telling the personal stories of both Kelno and Cady — very little of which comes into play during the rest of the story. The trial itself is full of incredibly graphic descriptions of life in the concentration camps, insane experimentation, cruelty, etc. This is the manipulative part, of course — it’s very easy to evoke sympathy when you tell stories like this and Uris pulls no punches in his grab to get you to read his book.

The other main problem I had is that the central mystery — did Kelno do it or not? — is given away early and often, through a large number of “clues” that completely give away the answer. In a better book they would not have been so terrible, but they’re placed so poorly, they’re so jarring, and there are no red herring clues, so it’s incredibly clear what’s going on. I don’t think I’ll be reading many more of Uris’s books.

My current book is The Eyes of the Overworld, the second Dying Earth book from Jack Vance.

I went to the Home and Garden Show on Saturday. It was pretty cool overall. There were lots of neat booths, for lawn decoration, saunas, doors, windows, decoration, interior designers, silly products (my favorite being the Dryer Balls), and there was even a section with the humane society and lots of cute doggies and even cuter kitties. One guy I saw had these really cool metal sculptures and stuff, so I took one of his business cards, which had on them, among other things, his URL.. So I visited it. Holy crap. Now the kicker to this story isn’t his site so much — I mean, there’s tons of shitty looking websites out there. No, what I think is so funny is that his website has a link to its “designers”. The URL is http://members.tripod.com/chmnyswp2/title-1.html. Just the URL should preclude them from ever getting business, but the site itself just seals the deal. How they got Mr “Wizard of Metal” to pay them, I have no idea.

Maybe he’ll let me redo his site in exchange for one of this neat sculptures.

OK, good. The wanted list is now back up to a healthy 95 books. This doesn’t mean I’m closed to suggestions — please let me know if there’s anything you think I’d enjoy. The price of reading is eternal vigilance.