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#91: The Cards of Grief by Jane Yolan

8/23/2014

This book was a confection, pure reading pleasure, even with fairly non-sympathetic characters. Jane Yolan is another writer from my adolescence, and now I know why she had such a strong pull on me. I wish I could write with her movie star clarity and poetic poignancy. This is another story that looks at euthanasia, but not as dystopia.

“A Queen knows everything. I know past and present and future. I see so clearly I see the shadows. Do you know that I am called Queen of Shadows?” Perfect. And points for a three hundred pound heroine.

But the tricky question is: how do you get this to paper? The writing here feels real, it makes you feel like you are there. The best I can come up with is that the writer needs to feel like she is there when she’s writing. How else could this be conveyed?

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#90: When The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells

8/23/2014

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I chose this story instead of better known classics like The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, because this is the book that is quoted often by Frank Herbert in Dune. I’d never known where “The Sleeper Wakes” had come from, but I could feel the resonance, the power, in it. It came from this book.

It is not a good book. Frank Herbert must have taken on its mantle because he could feel the strength of the ideas within yearning to be better articulated – a person becomes a pawn for two governments vying for dominance in a crowded, industrial London. There is no doubt that this book laid the ground for the dystopias that followed it, and there were chill ideas that pleased me, such as “euthanasy.” But this is very much a Victorian story, with lots of fainting and gasping; I had to quickly skim the last third of it just to get through.

Okay, so it IS possible for a character to be TOO emotional.

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#89: The Disappearance by Philip Wylie

8/23/2014

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“Wondering itself was never weighed.”

Often writers will make their protagonist a writer, but in the book, the writer makes the protagonist a philosopher. There is an obvious reason for this.

I had read this book before in my early teens, one of the wonderful books Taryn gave me. One day, all women disappear. In an alternate universe, all men disappear. The story has not lost its glimmer after thirty years, even through the tarnish left by its time of blind racism and condescension towards homosexuals. Unlike the books that followed this 1951 story, the characters here are not in any way caricatures of men and women; it deeply examines men and women... because the author is clearly a philosopher.

And also a fine writer. Points for this description: “His black Vandyke bristles as if its follicles were capable of pointing their separate hairs.” Extra points for the mandola-church built by the philosopher’s neighbor and its possible influence on Vonnegut’s Bokononism. Extra credit for making me almost cry in the Yuma Holiday Inn restaurant as I ate breakfast and read the ending because I was so grateful the main characters were reunited.

The real strength of this book was not its discussion and analysis of how people work but much more the great hardships the characters went through that were so grueling that it was their emotional state that was both changed and transformed by the ending as they were brought back together. How do events effect people’s emotions? How do emotions effect people’s characters? Important lessons.

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#88: The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

8/23/2014

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Kirvin Engle (named after Madeleine L’Engle I hope) is a precocious young historian traveling back through time to the 1300s. This book won both a Hugo and Nebula, with accolades from writers no less than Roger Zelazny himself, whiny old Harlan Ellison, and Gardner Dozois

For most of the book, I didn’t get it. Yes, the medieval culture is fascinating, and the epidemiology predicts our bird-flu panic almost fifteen years before its time, but this book is more than twice as long as it should have been. The pacing is interminable, repetitive, and very, very frustrating. Kirvin doesn’t get to the 1300's until page 80, and is sick in bed until page 171. What the characters learns comes long after a reader has known it and has been screaming for it for a 100 pages. Kirvin is likable, as is her worried professor, Dr. Dunworthy, but you never feel like you are in their heads.

Do award winners really just have to present a good scientific premise and a hint of a really nice theme (God would have never sent his Son to Earth if He had known what would have happened to him), or was this the science fiction community propping up one of their own?

Perhaps they were won over by the saving grace of this book: the relationships between the characters. This story became very touching as Kivrin cared for the noble children Agnes and Rosemund, and the poor priest named Roche. As all the characters try to save each other from the forbidding black tower of bubonic plague, I liked this book very much at its end.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night, angry at how emotionally manipulative the ending was. Okay, the lessons: (1) Don’t dawdle, don’t repeat things over and over, (2) premise and theme, learn it and love it, (3) characters’ relationships are endearing, but it may not be enough in the end.

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#91: The Cards of Grief by Jane Yolan

#90: When The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells

#89: The Disappearance by Philip Wylie

#88: The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

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