Sunday Salon: On Letting Books Go

This past week has been a lovely week for reading. I read and reviewed King Solomon's Mines (review), The Hunger Games (review), and The Evil Genius (review). Either late last night or early this morning (there is no clock in my bedroom), I finished reading The Eyes of the Dragon, a well written fairy tale by Stephen King; I'll review it later today.

I also finished taking my weeded out books to the used bookstore, finally. I have taken books there two and three times a week for several weeks now, and have weeded my library down to, if not a tenth, then certainly a twentieth of it's former glory. Thousands of books have left. I've received so many hundreds of dollars in trade you fellow bibliophiles would be sick if you knew the amount, and about half those hundreds in cash that came in very handy for various things. I still have a few boxes that need to be donated: old well worn copies or library rejects that the bookstore won't take. I've been taking a crate or two of those with me as I go, and putting them in the "free books" bin as well. The longer they sit in the house, the more tempted I am. I've pulled out a few, replaced a few, pulled out a few more.

We have to downsize. It's of the utmost importance on so many levels, and it's not just books that are being purged. Books are just the hardest to let go of for me.

I (and my husband too) tended to collect books as much for the fact that they were books as for the chance that I might eventually read them. The books I purged were books that had been in my home at least two years and that I had never made the slightest move toward reading. Thousands.

Yes, I purged a lot that I had already read and knew that I wouldn't be in danger of suddenly wanting to reread and not having, or classics that I can get for free from Project Gutenberg or on my Kindle. That was how I started.

But so many were collected just because I collected. Because books are my "thing". Because I love the way a book looks, the dust jacket, the pages, the font, the illustrations.

Oh it has been hard. Sometimes painful. But freeing too. When I took those first boxes, when I realized that I didn't have to actually own the book to still love it, when I realized that I was actually sharing my love of books with others this way, it was as if walls came down.

We still have hundreds, and always will. As long as I have enough walls for shelves, there will be books, but in moderation now. I'll keep the gems, the special ones, the comfort-food books--the wheat of my books, if you will--and I'll let the chaff go. I don't have to actually own a book to love it. I can share it with someone else, and have only the memory of it, and that's just a good. It's been an amazing lesson.

~the Sunday Salon~

Disappointing

Contact And Commune by L. Neil Smith

L. Neil Smith was recommended to me as a great Sci-Fi author who injects a libertarian subtext to his work. The first book I was able to get my hands on was Pallas, a great read with succulent libertarian flavor. Contact And Commune was the second, and is officially The Worst Book I Ever Finished.

To be fair, Contact And Commune was written more than twenty years ago. Perhaps Mr Smith's work has vastly improved, and I intend to read more, based on my positive experience with Pallas. But enough qualification, let's get to the reason I forced myself to finish: the review.

Contact And Commune is a mess. It's a mishmash of great ideas and stupefyingly boring dialogue, of likable aliens and cliched humans, of an asteroid with a gooey Earth-like center and why didn't they just go to Mars?

The USA has been absorbed into the United World Soviet. The entire world has sunk into a grim, gray, industrial Communism. To cheer up the proletariat, a space mission is launched to ... well, some undistinguished asteroid. It's like using Excalibur to crack walnuts - but Communists are not renowned for making a lot of economic sense.

Turns out this asteroid is inhabited. It's actually a spaceship! Or a time machine. Or an inter-dimensional conveyance. It's never really explained. The intelligent creatures on board are evolved from lower orders of Earth life - flowers, insects, multi-tentacled deep-sea snails - everything but humans.

One of the humans is murdered. one of the "aliens" goes missing. An interminable investigation follows. There is an Atlantis angle. There is a professional military officer who goes comatose, then lunatic, when she sees the "aliens". There is a surprise ending so implausible that I would have gone back to read the clues again if I had cared.

This book reads as if a talented sci-fi writer outlined it, and hired a hack pulp romance grinder to fill it out. The dialogue is stilted and embarrassing. The situations are contrived. The characters are mostly uninteresting, unlikable, and unbelievable. Even the parts that could have showcased the author's Libertarian arguments are instead crouched in pseudo-religious lectures that I mostly skimmed.

Frankly, I skimmed the last quarter of the book, once I figured out that Contact And Commune is a journey to nowhere. The aliens never revealed why they came (or came back, or sideways) that I noticed, and if they did, that part of the plot was never developed. According to another review on Amazon, this is the first part of a trilogy, and those questions are answered later.

Me, I'll pass. While I intend to take another ride with L. Neil Smith, it won't be anywhere near the world of Contact And Commune.

The Evil Genius: a Domestic Story

The Evil Genius: a Domestic Story
Wilkie Collins
originally published 1886
5/5 stars

(Project Gutenberg has a free eBook version)

Wilkie Collins is best known as a writer of sensationalist fiction: supernatural suspense, terrifying drama, complex mysteries, and all often used as a vehicle for his complaints against social injustices. The Evil Genius doesn't fall into that category by today's standards, but for Victorians, it's very subject matter was sensational and taboo. The Evil Genius  is novel of marital infidelity, Divorce (yes, with a capital "D"!) and the scandal and injustice that often (in Collins' times) surrounds these issues.

Sydney, a young governess raised without parents to guide her in correct ways, finds her gratitude for her employer gradually slide into infatuation. Mr. Linley (the employer), finds his enchantment of Sydney returned by her infatuation, and an indiscretion is made and immediately regretted. Sydney loves Mrs. Catherine Linley, and considers her a dear friend, and she loves her pupil, Kitty with deep affection. They agree that Sydney must leave and Linley will confess all to Catherine. Catherine forgives, Sydney leaves for another position, and all would have returned to normal except that Kitty became grievously ill and wouldn't rest until she could see her dear Syd again. Accidentally alone, Sydney and Linley renew their forbidden love and are witnessed by Catherine. This time she can not forgive, and she banishes them both.

What follows in the meat of the novel is a, not always under the surface, discussion of the unfairness of the law and society toward women in this situation. For example, as long as they are married, Linley only is the guardian of the child, by law. Only if a Divorce occurs does legal parental guardianship go to the mother. One character, Catherine's lawyer, expresses hope that the future may see a change in this law.

When it is discovered by the residents of a small seaside resort that Catherine is Divorced, despite the fact it was her husband's infidelity, she and her daughter are shunned. Dear friends that are (as Collins puts it) "deeply religious", see any potential remarriage as a sin, in spite of the fact that (again, as Collins notes) the very verse they are quoting follows a verse that presumes the Divorced woman to have been the unfaithful one.

Collins is really stepping out of the Victorian mores and making some controversial statements with this novel, and yet it doesn't read like a morality tale. The prose is excellent and the point of view shifts gently, sometimes so subtly as to be nearly undetectable, between main characters and causes the reader to change views of the characters as the point of view shifts. While melodramatic by today's standards, the story is still tense and interesting. Granted, Collins found a bit of an easy way out with the ending, and one that I (as a non-Victorian reader) was not quite comfortable with as a resolution. This isn't a fault of either novel or novelist, though, it's just a symptom of the times, and shows that Collins, while revolutionary in some ways, was still a Victorian gentleman.

Collins has been one of my favorite novelist for many years, and The Evil Genius only increased my admiration for his talents.

~~Read for the Victorian Literature Challenge
and for the What's in a Name Challenge.~~

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
3/5 stars


The Hunger Games takes place in a future dystopic North America, where (as penalty for a previous rebellion) each of the twelve districts is required to give up two randomly selected teenagers to the participate in a televised fight to the death. The story is told, in a first person point of view, by Katniss, the female competitor from the poor District 12. She and her fellow competitor, Peeta, are wined and dined in the Capitol, primped and preened for the audience, and then finally dropped into the arena to kill and hopefully survive. Various alliances are formed, competitors are brutally murdered, and in the end a rebellious statement is made to the ruling Capitol.

The plot is generally compelling, and I found myself reading on even as I was unconvinced by it. (For example, District 12 has around 8000 people, the size of a small town, and yet it digs enough coal to fuel all 12 Districts and the Capitol?) There is enough drama, brutality and anxiety to make even a slightly interested reader curious as to the outcome, but our heroes kept getting off easy, not having to make the compelling life and death decisions that the other contestants were making; things just worked out around them. Then comes the end and it's a cliffhanger of sorts, a "buy my next book" ending, if you will, instead of just wrapping it up. I didn't appreciate that obvious ploy.

I have never been a fan of stories told in the "simple present" verb tense, and the author shifts subtly here and there, unable to keep it up herself, creating a distracting method of storytelling that takes away from the actual story. Granted, this is a YA book, and the intended audience might not be so grammatically picky, but it was a problem for this reader.

Katniss herself was not, to me, a sympathetic character. Her moods and personalities were too extreme; she felt like a larger than life character, rather than a believable hero. Peeta was easier for me to sympathize with, even though he is only seen through the eyes of Katniss. He came across less of a stock character and more real. Many other characters (just for instance: Prim, beloved by everyone; Gale, the boy that is good at everything; Rue, the ethereal fairy child) seemed very much like stock characters, seen in most fantasies, fairy tales and moral stories.

Overall, the story Ms. Collins is telling is certainly an interesting one, but there were just enough snags in it to keep me from finding it a good read.

Side Note: My husband disagreed.

Note: This is my opinion; on Amazon, 72% of the reviews are 5 stars.

King Solomon's Mines

King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
originally published 1885
5/5 stars

H. Rider Haggard lived in (what is now) South Africa from 1875 until he returned to London in 1882. He published his first novel, King Solomon's Mines in 1885, a fantastic adventure beginning in Durbin, South Africa and reaching to unexplored territories. It became an immediate best seller, and rightfully so.

The story is told in first person by Allan Quatermain, written as a manuscript for his son, though occasionally (a first novel mistake, it would seem), Quatermain addresses "Reader", instead of his son as he does throughout most of the novel. In the manuscript, Quatermain tells of meeting with Sir Henry Curtis and Sir Henry's friend Good, who had come to Africa in search of Sir Henry's missing brother. The last heard of him had been that he was going to Durbin in search of treasure. Quatermain was able to tell Sir Henry of a man that fit the description, a man Quatermain had given directions that might have helped him find King Solomon's mines. Sir Henry persuades Quatermain to join them as guide, and what follows is an adventure tale of fast friendship, narrow escapes, devoted love, true evil and, of course, treasure.

While it is dated in some ways, King Solomon's Mines remains an magnificent yarn, drawing in the reader with an exciting plot and lovely descriptions and interesting characters. It remains a fun read, even some 125 years later.

Haggard shows a surprising sympathy for the African native, in relation to his era, and explains some tribal practices with a very tolerant touch. While it is still obvious to a modern reader that Haggard considers the white European to be superior, the African characters are not stereotyped or portrayed as ignorant or evil, though superstition is a characteristic. Haggard makes no denial of the beauty of the African women, but does make his point "can the sun mate with the darkness or the white with the black?" on a few occasions.  Let me stress, though, that this is a Victorian novel and will therefore contain Victorian opinions.  The sensible thing to do is to pass over these views and focus instead on the excellence of the rest.

While the three main characters are white Europeans, there are three less major heroes who are African: Ignosi, Infadoos and the lovely Foulata, and these characters have equally important parts to play as Quatermain, Sir Henry and Good. Overall, Haggard kept his African characters in the area between the prejudiced portrayal and the equally insulting "noble savage", seemingly ahead of his time.

While King Solomon's Mines is not a quick fluff read, it is still a somewhat light swashbuckling tale, full of humor and excitement and solid writing.

(Completely aside, I had to wonder just how titillating Haggard's many references to the mountains, Sheba's Breast, were to Victorians, especially given how often he described the "nipples" of these mountains, and their "firm roundness".)
_____________
Read for the Victorian Reading Challenge, as well as for pleasure.

Victorian Literature Challenge Update

Here are the five I've chosen to read for this challenge. There may be different ones added as I go, but these five or ones I've been planning to read this year any way. :) (FYI: Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901, though the era didn't begin exactly with her ascent or end with her death.)

1. King Solomon's Mines, published 1885 (This is a cheat, in a way, as I started it before I joined this challenge.)

2. The Leavenworth Case, published 1878. Mrs. Green was one of the first writers of detective fiction in the U.S. and is given credit for shaping the genre into it's classic form, including the recurring series detective.

3. The Evil Genius, published 1886. Collins has long been a favorite of mine, I've not yet read this one and it will cross over to my What's in a Name Challenge for "a book with evil in the title".

4. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published c.1889 (I get differing reports of anywhere from 1886-1889). It was the most popular mystery of that century and prompted Doyle to try his hand at the genre.

5. Lilth, published 1895. I have long been planning to make time to reread this favorite.

Africa! Pip-pip!

King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard

There are so many classic books in the world, one person will never be able to read them all. I'm glad, therefore, that King Solomon's Mines is one that I did read.

This isn't a modern thriller, full of twists and turns and finished in an afternoon. King Solomon's Mines is a solid book, full of the work of a professional wordsmith, and is the foundation of a wonderful reputation and legacy. Haggard inspired generations of writers - Allan Quatermain is said to be one of the ancestors of Indiana Jones, and Haggard's influence can easily be seen in the work of Wilbur Smith.

An Englishman disappears into darkest Africa, and his brother sets up an expedition to track him down. Our hero, Quatermain, remembers sending the missing man a message that might lead to an ancient treasure. The reasoning is simple - find the treasure, and we'll find the prodigal.

Of course, it's never that simple, is it?

Our intrepid Englishmen dance the white man's burden to the tune of Bwana and Sahib all the way into ne plus ultra, fight in a tribal war, find (and lose) pure love, set a rightful king on a throne, and come away with a pocketful of diamonds. All in a days work, when you have an old school tie and a stiff upper lip.

King Solomon's Mines is great fun and a good read. Put away your misconceptions of fusty Victorians and read a gem whose luster will never fade.