Book Update

I've got a great deal to put down here, but since the volume is overwhelming, I'm going to break it down into individual posts. So here's the latest on the reading front.

I finished Kushner'sThe Privilege of the Sword. It became more compelling the further I got into it, and Kushner always has a deft touch with dialogue and detail, and the characters were fun to watch—though Kushner switched between first and third person narratives with abandon, which always feels something like cheating, as if she couldn't get the story told from a single perspective, which she could have easily. Thomas the Rhymer employed shifts in point of view as well, but it was only among three characters, each in first person, and each of the three voices had their own section of the book, so it worked more smoothly. PotS also caused the cognitive dissonance in me that always occurs when I'm reading about characters with a very different moral compass from my own. I'm all for reading the stories of characters different from myself, but some are easier to sympathize with than others. Here, the characters seemed to have very flexible morality simply from convenience (as opposed to, say, necessity or difficult upbringing or the like). So it was readable; I liked it but didn't love it. I still highly recommend TtR as one of the better fantasy novel's I've read.

I curse Stephen King, and not for the first time. I plowed through The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon in two days and, in Garrison Keillor's words, "I couldn't put the sucker down."

King is just a brilliant storyteller. Let's get over whatever snobby resistance we have to that fact (if, in fact, you have any). He is not a brilliant writer, but he tells a story like gangbusters, which would be plenty for me if I could master it. His language is often lazy and/or out of character (his nine-year-old narrator uses words even I would never use); for a guy who so strenuously recommends avoiding adverbs, he uses them constantly, perniciously, and often unnecessarily; and while having minor mental tics—like the repetition of commercial jingles—is realistic, it's also often quite annoying. And he, too, loves to switch perspective: this can work sometimes (as with The Stand), but here it's applied so inconsistently that it just feels random and, again, lazy. And yet, darn it, I couldn't stop reading the thing. His deft touch with specifics, the honesty of some of his passages, and his pacing are superb.

Because of that, I went ahead and picked up Everything's Eventual, a short story collection. I'm more interesting in his storytelling techniques than the horror aspects of his works, so I thought I'd stick with the short and sweet. To date, I still believe that his best work is The Gunslinger (and not his "revised" version, either), which was brilliantly terse and mysterious. I'm hoping to catch more of that along the way. By the way, if you're looking for a good book about writing, you could do much worse than King's On Writing, a combination of autobiography and instructional guide. I don't agree with all of his advice, but it's a good read.

I haven't cracked the King again, though, as I'm just finishing up Beagle's The Line Between, another short story collection. I'm enjoying it much more than his last, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, though I did like that. The stories here are more in the mode of my favorite Beagle book, The Innkeeper's Song—in fact, one of the stories is set in that world. In this collection, Beagle ranges into a lot of historical fiction and even a mystery with Sherlock Holmes as a supporting character. He's got a couple of preachy "parables" included, but overall it's a really nice collection. I'm on the last story now.

I also picked up Robert Howard's The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane which Devin pointed out to me long ago and which has obsessed me ever since. Anything with a subtitle like "The Adventures of the Legendary Puritan Swordsman" is a winner in my book. Howard also wrote the Conan stories, of course, and I haven't gotten beyond a couple of pages yet, but I'm looking forward to some old-school fiction.

The final book on my list, An Autobiography of Fireflies, you won't find over at Amazon.com because it's a manuscript written by our neighbor, Debra. I was fascinated to learn that our neighbor also has aspirations as a writer; I was shocked and terrified to learn she'd already written four novels which she has never done anything with. We finally convinced to her let her work see daylight, and she gave me a copy to peruse. I won't really report on it here, because manuscript reading is a different monster than that of published novels, but it's fun to be on the reading end of a manuscript for once. In related strange news, it turns out there's half a dozen aspiring writers in our neighborhood and circle of contacts, which I never suspected. I'm hoping we can get together and commiserate from time to time, and maybe I can get them to sign up for my creative writing class up in Big Bear come January.

I hope you enjoy reading about books, and you must if you've made it this far. Normally I don't enjoy such a high turnover of reading, but with classes starting up in a week, I'm cramming in all I can. As for my writing? I'll report on that next week or so.

Goodnight, all.