White Is For Witching is what I would call literary fantasy. In other words, fantasy that’s wrapped up in a pretentious style that made everything difficult to understand. There’s something to be said for not talking down to your readers, but when a reader needs a degree in literary criticism to follow a work, the audience will be limited. However, because this has literary pretensions, it got nominated for and won a few awards. So some people obviously got it. If you have the background and/or fortitude to sift through it, by all means knock yourself out. I won’t call it a bad novel; I didn’t understand enough of it to make that kind of judgment. But this is not a book for an average idiot like me. It barely avoided being my first D.N.F. this year.

Here’s my synopsis. I can’t guarantee how accurate it is because, as noted above, I had a hard time following most parts. Miranda Silver has pica, which causes the sufferer to eat non-nutritive substances. In Miranda’s case, she likes to eat chalk. Her mother, or her grandmother, also ate chalk. See, they are sorta around. Or not. Because the house where Miranda and her twin brother Eliot live is haunted. The plot part is that everyone acts weirdly, and then Miranda goes off to college and dates a black girl. Because Miranda’s great grandmother was racist, the haunted house is racist too. The obvious inference is that it’s doing bad things but the descriptions of the supernatural stuff is so obtuse that I can’t tell what, or if, it’s responsible for anything that’s going on. The ending was very abrupt too, leaving me with a huge huh?

So uh, that’s all I have to say. If anyone who has read this wants to explain it, please do.

A bunch of other blogged reviews:

• stuck in a book
• A Striped Armchair
• Serendipity
• Tamaranth’s Creative Reading
• The Indextrious Reader
• Stella Matutina
• The Speculative Scotsman
• Farm Lane Books Blog

Title: White Is For Witching
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Cover creator: Emily Mahon (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Nan A. Talese / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 227 p.
Publication date: 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-52605-0

Halfway through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I had no idea what was going on. I was confused. Too many characters. Too much jargon. And very obtuse writing style that doesn’t explain what the characters are actually doing. Stuff like dialogue that would imply a character at Brixton (city or building I don’t know) wasn’t happy about it but no explanation why Brixton is bad.

It’s pretty rare that a book that starts off so poorly for me turns out to be a good book. I can’t think of another case off the top of my head. But it happened. Right around page 190 things started to change. Fewer characters. Less dependence on subtle rivalries between Brixton and Sarratt etc.

There’s a mole in the Circus which I take is part of the British intelligence services. Or perhaps the entire service. I don’t know. Anyway, the mole is pretty high up. A botched spy job in Czechoslovakia forced out the director and most of the high ranking personnel. The mole is one of the four newly in charge people. So word gets to the government minister whose portfolio includes intelligence that there’s a mole, and he goes to former spy George Smiley (forced out because of the botched job) to root out the mole. Since the mole is effectively running things, Smiley can’t actually do anything from within to find him.

A lot of reviews I saw online warned that this book doesn’t have a lot of action. I wasn’t too worried about that, and it really isn’t an issue. Smiley does all his work by research (that part is pretty inscrutable) and interviewing people. Every interview is fraught with the danger that Smiley’s quest for the mole will be discovered. The turncoat could turn the tables, or disappear. Psychologically, that was pretty good.

If only I understood the first half.

One other blogged review:

• Nick’s Café Canadien

Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Author: John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell)
Series: George Smiley
Imprint / publisher: Bantam Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 369 p.
Publication date: July 1975 (originally April 1974)
Subject: Smiley, George (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Intelligence service — Great Britain — Fiction
LC classification: PR6062.E33

In the mystery genre, I generally lean toward police procedurals or hard-boiled crime fiction. I’m not so much a fan of cozies. But I do quite like this cozy. And that’s even with another strike against it as far as my tastes go. I generally don’t like books about British stiffs, particularly blue bloods. My eyes glaze over whenever the subject turns to English nobility. I actually have a similar reaction to the antebellum South as well. But, as I said, I liked this book.

It’s set in an alternative England. I’m not quite sure where Walton had this one diverge from real life. The U.S. never intervened in World War II, the British and the Germans have a truce, and Europe is effectively controlled by the Germans. In the early 1950s.

Chapters alternate between two perspectives: Lucy Kahn and Inspector Carmichael. Lucy starts us off at a party at her parent’s country estate, Farthing. The entire Farthing Set will be there. The Farthing Set is a faction within the Tories that once controlled the government, lost that control, and is on the rise again. On their return to London, the Tories are expected to vote into positions of power several of the party-goers. Except that one of them, James Thirkie, is killed over night, his body found stabbed with the knife holding a Jewish star in place on his chest. That’s where Carmichael comes in. He has to investigate. There’s even a component of no one can leave the house because one of us is the murderer going on.

The pace is a little slow at the beginning, but it picks up. It ends with a mad rush and a bang. It never got duller, only more interesting.

I like the alternative history scenario. Too many stories I’ve read were what if the Nazis won kinds. This is somewhat different. It also gets to explore how fascism and Jew-hating could arise in countries other than Germany. Plausible scenario? Not really. But there certainly has been an anti-Jewish part of the British and America populations that never really was addressed because we got caught up in patriotic fever after joining the war. What if it grew and expanded?

There’s another method I frequently see used in alternative history books as well as some literary fiction set in historical settings. That is the tendency to overdo appearances by historical characters. For instance, in The Darling Russell Banks has made up all sorts of connections between his characters and the real life rulers of Liberia during the 1980s and 1990s. In Orson Card’s alternate history fantasy The Tales of Alvin Maker and Mike Resnick’s Dragon America we are treated to what new prominent role would the famous people play in the alternate reality? Walton doesn’t do that thankfully. Her book only mentions Winston Churchill. He doesn’t play a role in the story. I like this because it keeps the focus on the characters in the story rather than distract from them.

Watch the Skies did pretty good by releasing this as an e-book. I doubt I would have purchased it otherwise, but now I’ll be buying book two Ha’Penny (though probably not right away, my list of stuff right on front of me is pretty damn large).

Title: Farthing
Author: Jo Walton
Series: Small Change; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Holtzbrinck
Format: Electronic book (PDF)
Length: 319 p.
Publication date: March 2008
Subject: Police — Great Britain — Fiction
Subject: Country homes — Fiction
Subject: England — Fiction
LC classification: PR6073.A448 F37 2006

At the turn of the century the telegraph connected the world. Messages could be sent quickly between any two places connected by wire. Cable had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean connecting England and North America. But if you couldn’t hook up a wire, you were out of touch. Principally, for this book, the realm of the unconnected was the realm of the sea.

In the late 1890s, Guglielmo Marconi set out to change that. He was a tinkerer, a hobbyist with electricity as a young man on his father’s estate in Italy. But he was one of the first to figure out how to send messages over a distance, though the invention of the technology belonged to others, notably Oliver Lodge. Rather than invent from scratch, Marconi played and experimented with Lodge’s coherer device and antenna configurations of his own devising. After a bit, he had put together a system that no one else had previously done. From that point through the early 1900s Marconi kept refining the system to achieve ever greater distances.

Marconi’s story is one half of Thunderstruck. In 1910, Marconi’s invention intersected with the subject of the other half of the book, Hawley Harvey Crippen. An American living in London, Crippen worked as a homeopathic doctor for a series of patent medicine firms. Snake oil purveyors. His wife Cora performed badly in variety (vaudeville) shows as Belle Elmore. Crippen was mild-mannered and devoted to his wife. She was domineering and treated her medical husband badly, constantly threatening to leave him to coerce his obedience (and monetary support). She even renamed him Peter to which he apparently acquiesced. But in 1910 he had enough, and Belle Elmore abruptly disappeared. Murder was suspected by many. Crippen and his lover fled to America by ship.

And that’s where the stories intersect. The world watched. Everyone knew of the pursuit of the suspect Crippen as he headed toward freedom and Canada. Everyone except Crippen. Everyone knew because the captain of the ship Montrose, having been alerted by Scotland Yard, thought he recognized the fugitives. He used the ship’s Marconi wireless to inform his company and Scotland Yard. Contents of radio waves could hardly be kept secret in those days, and news spread quickly. But the Montrose’s captain controlled the wireless for his ship, and so Crippen did not know he was pursued. Wireless radio technology became indispensable afterward.

Larson writes a riveting tale of Crippen’s life. I found Marconi’s story to be less compelling however. There is no climax for Marconi like there is for Crippen. At the end, it is only Marconi’s technology that intersects with Crippen, not Marconi himself. Larson’s version of the story focuses on Marconi’s trials and tribulations (as well as that of his company), but not the technology. There’s barely any discussion at all of how a Marconi wireless worked. Just Marconi’s dogged pursuit of ever greater distances in transmission. It’s a good story, nonetheless. It’s just that there’s an abrupt switch in the last portion of the book. Marconi drops out and the interplay of his technology with the ship Montrose and Scotland Yard takes center stage. Larson can’t magically make Marconi personally involved without subverting the truth however, so his hands were tied.

After the stories have concluded, Thunderstruck includes dozens of pages of notes and a bibliography. At only one point in the whole thing did I feel like Larson took poetic license with the facts, and that was merely a minor bit of clear speculation. Despite the meticulously factual nature of his work, Larson still manages to write two engrossing character studies as well as a compelling narrative of the plot. This reads like a good novel. I’m quite impressed.

Title: Thunderstruck
Author: Erik Larson
Imprint / publisher: Crown / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 463 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 1-4000-8066-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-8066-3
Subject: Crippen, Hawley Harvey, 1862-1910
Subject: Murderers — England — London — Biography
Subject: Murder — England — London — Case studies
Subject: Murder — Investigation — Great Britain — Case studies
Subject: Telegraph, Wireless — Marconi system — History
LC classification: HV6248.C75L37 2006

Bleah. It seems I doom myself to writing bad book reviews with my choices of reading material. I think we should pass a new law for writers. While the maxim of write what you know seems solid, writers of fiction should not write stories about writers, and they should not write stories about literary scholars. I don’t think there can be anything duller.

The Debut follows Ruth Weiss, a young woman who lives a meaningless life overshadowed by her parents, George and Helen. Helen formerly counted herself among the C or D list actors in London. Now she occasionally leaves her bedroom. George formerly ran an antiquarian book store, where he did less selling than fussing. Ruth at some point attends university where she studies Balzac. I suppose this book has some intertwining of themes with Balzac that’ll make it more meaningful, but I haven’t read him and if Ruth is the kind of person who cares about Balzac, I want no part of him.

All three lead pathetic lives. Ruth moves back in with her parents because a date showed up late. Seriously. Helen can’t be bothered to do anything except lay in bed and recount tales of her glory days. George sells the store but drops in daily to help the new owner because he has nothing better going on in his life. The only character who participates in her own life is Mrs. Cutler, the housekeeper. At first she’s pretty sad herself. But at some point she gets moving and decides to find herself a husband. Not that people must be married, but at least it showed some gumption on her part. The others have none. So perhaps theres some intended meaning to be gained from examining the unlived life. But I care not to find it this way.

Title: The debut
Original title: A start in life
Author: Anita Brookner
Cover artist: David Monteil
Imprint / publisher: Vintage / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 192 p.
Publication date: March 1985
ISBN-10: 0-394-72856-4
LC classification: PR6052.R587D4 1985

I moved Gifted to the top of my reading pile after it was put on the Man Booker long list this week. Now that I’ve read it, I can see why it was long-listed, but I am unsure if I like the book or agree with the status the literati have accorded it.

In addition to being a novel about a gifted child coming of age, Lalwani’s novel is also a novel of Indian people in the west. Rumika Rumi Vasi is the gifted girl. Her parents are Mahesh and Shreene. Her younger brother is Nibu. Mahesh and Shreene live precariously between the worlds of India and Britain. Rumi is much more firmly drawn to the West in which she lived (Cardiff, Wales), but her parents sequester her from everything to the best of their ability. Rumi doesn’t know any better than to follow along with her father’s desire for her to be admitted to Oxford at a young age, but she’s also clearly unhappy with the strictures with which he ties her down. She makes it to Oxford at age 15, but the pressure only increases on her.

Lalwani’s writing is generally good, but I found it to be choppy. It’s less a story than a series of vignettes. While the factual details of the story weren’t particularly important, I still found my immersion into Rumi’s character displaced by new things introduced in each vignette.

The writing does emphasize how isolated Rumi is. There are three characters in the book: Rumi, Mahesh, Shreene. Well, and one half character, Mark Whitefoot, a college buddy of Mahesh’s who stops by once per month to play chess with Mahesh. Everyone else is merely setting. Anyone Rumi could bond with is forced away from her one way or another, usually by the chapter after they are introduced. It’s an incredibly warped view of the world to grow up with. I got the feeling that Rumi was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

I felt very badly for Rumi throughout the book and wanted to strangle and slap around Mahesh and Shreene. The world is not as it was when you were a child, and the methods your parents used with you probably weren’t even appropriate then! And yet, when Lalwani delves into scenes from Shreene and Mahesh’s point of view, it’s incredibly clear that they aren’t evil people. They are Frankenstein monsters themselves. I pitied them, despite my anger at them.

I think a book worth reading, but in some ways because of how Lalwani ends the novel generally, though I have a beef with the very last scene. But no spoilers here since the book is barely out, so write me if you want to know that beef.

Title: Gifted
Award: 2008 Desmond Elliott Prize
Author: Nikita Lalwani
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: September 2007
ISBN-10: 1-4000-6648-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6648-3
Subject: Gifted girls — Fiction
Subject: Mathematics — Fiction
Subject: Immigrants — Wales — Fiction
Subject: East Indians — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Children of immigrants — Family relationships — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Culture conflict — Fiction
Subject: Cardiff (Wales) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6112.A49 G54 2007

I few years ago I visited New Zealand. Took with me a stack of books, but it wasn’t quite enough. So I stopped at a New Zealand bookstore chain called Paper Plus and grabbed a couple of titles. I tried to get something I wouldn’t find here. Well, you can get Ian Rankin books here, but they aren’t quite as popular as they are in the Commonwealth. It was pretty close to the end of the trip, and I never did get around to reading this particular book. Well, not on the trip anyway. I have now.

Ian Rankin is a mystery author. He’s best known for his Inspector Rebus character, a detective in Edinburgh, Scotland. Beggars Banquet is a collection of short stories, all mysteries. Quite a few are Inspector Rebus stories, and the rest are non-recurring characters. Or at least they don’t show up in other stories in this collection. They may appear in other works by Rankin.

One of the things I liked about Inspector Rebus in these stories is that he doesn’t have a lot of demons. He has regrets. He has a history. But it’s a fairly normal one of growing up and moving away from home. He also doesn’t behave like the typical mystery police officer. There’s no running off ignoring orders from higher-ups. He’s not a cowboy. In fact, he sometimes drags along some of his fellow inspectors who don’t want to get involved but are intrigued anyway. And he does bend the rules, but in a way that seems to me to be more realistic that the normal hard-boiled mystery detective. Which Rebus also is not. In none of his stories did he pull a gun. He doesn’t live the mean streets of Edinburgh, despite the blurb on the back cover of the book. He’s a worldly detective. So I rather liked those stories.

The non-Rebus stories were a bit more of a mixed bag though. There were a few hard-boiled characters there. One is a story of a hit-man who methodically handles a scene, only to be revealed later as the detective who will investigate the crime. Another is a tale of a comedian who owes money to the mob. But since he’s not very funny he can’t repay them and goes on the run. One day the mob shows up at a club he’s working, and he becomes the funniest he’s ever been, under pressure. Another tells the story of a man who murders his wife and frames a womanizing friend who might have been involved with his wife, only to find out he’s secretly gay. Which puts a crimp on his frame job. One is set in the world of caddies in Edinburgh in the 1700s. Caddies being helpers I guess. He’s asked to find a book, but subcontracts out to another caddie because the money is so good. Only his fellow caddie soon ends up dead, and he may be next on the list. I loved this story because it used coincidence in a coincidental way, not as a way to conveniently tie all the plots together. In this case, what looks to be purposeful turns out to be mere coincidence.

Still, my main thought while reading the stories was not of brilliance but of workmanship. Most of the stories were pretty good, but none struck me with the wow factor. They didn’t have the grab-hold-of-me quality that a Crumley or a Xiaolong story does. But every single story was well-crafted and interesting. There wasn’t anything in any of the stories that made me cringe like I get from many mysteries. All in all, a good read. And nice that they are short stories so you can fit one in on a lunch break or in other narrowly confined schedules.

Title: Beggars banquet
Author: Ian Rankin
Series: Inspector Rebus
Imprint / publisher: Orion
Format: Paperback
Length: 376 p.
Publication date: March 2003
ISBN-10: 0-75284-959-X
Subject: Detective and mystery stories, English
Subject: Rebus, Inspector (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Scotland — Edinburgh — Fiction
Subject: Edinburgh (Scotland) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6068.A57 B44 2002

I’m staying a couple of years behind everyone else in reading J. K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter series. I remember being at Sara’s wedding a couple of years ago just after this came out, and the kids there were hiding out in one room reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix whenever their parents didn’t want them posing for pictures or behaving child-like for the various grandparents and relatives floating around. At the time I thought, Good god that’s a thick book for children. And indeed it is.

But other than being overly long, I enjoyed it very much. Ms. Rowling’s writing has improved. Harry Potter behaves more and more like a recognizable child with every book (so far). I think he was acting a bit too old in the earlier books but he fits his ostensible age much better now.

This entry in the series has Harry in his 5th year at Hogwarts. The Order of the Phoenix is the group Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, has put together to oppose Voldemort. Rather than look bad, the Ministry of Magic pretends that Voldemort has not returned, and does everything in its power in a P.R. effort to hide the evidence. Including putting in place extra control over Hogwarts, in the person of Professor Umbridge, who delights in punishing Harry Potter even more than Professor Snape. Meanwhile, Voldemort uses a newly discovered connection with Harry Potter to inject his thoughts into Harry’s dreams.

Most of the book is sub-plot concerning Harry vs. Umbridge and the Ministry of Magic. It distracts us, and Harry, from his duel with Voldemort. A little less of that and it would be a 5 star book in my view. A big government ministry, even one in a fictional magical world, spending so much effort with running a school day to day seems kind of odd to me. The animosity was needed, but I think I would have done it with the Ministry being more removed, and perhaps having the Malfoys take a larger role as Harry’s foils.

Also, one other good thing is that Rowling seems to finally be advancing some of the other kids in the book. They are less of caricatures than in the past. Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley in particular stood out for me. Longbottom because he was less of an abject failure and Weasley because she stops being the mooning little sister. In previous books it was primarily Harry Potter doing the saving, with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger taking supporting roles. This time around it was really all the other kids taking and equal or greater role than Harry.

All in all a good effort.

Author: J. K. Rowling
Illustrator: Mary GrandPré
Imprint / publisher: Scholastic
Format: Paperback
Publication date: September 2004 (Jul 2003 in hardback)
Length: xi, 870 p.
ISBN-10: 0-439-35807-8
Subject: Wizards — Fiction
Subject: Magic — Fiction
Subject: Schools — Fiction
Subject: Coming of age — Fiction
Subject: England — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.R79835 Halm 2003