Reading: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

Moving: walked 3.6 miles

House: packed bike stuff, discovered I gave the box to Goodwill, dug out an adapter for my Mac's speakers and another for the Discman so we can have some music in the house, since the stereo components will bypass the move entirely by being serviced for the foreseeable future.

16 May 2000: Books

This had some connection to something I read this weekend, but in the past few days I've been particularly bad at not jotting down whatever I want to remember.

I love Rosamund Pilcher's The Shell-Seekers and September (Going Home not so much at all); to read them is to nestle in a window seat wrapped in a warm quilt with a mug of hot chocolate and a quart of cold clear water and maybe Francie's dish of peppermint wafers. Lots of comforting details, Penelope and Violet to love, Noel and Lottie to despise, and these books are long. They last.

Pilcher resorts to one simple device to escape from plot corners, though, a device that might be left over from her earlier, worse books.

In fact I don't know that her earlier books are worse. I only know I couldn't read the one I tried while waiting for The Shell-Seekers to be returned. It was called Under Gemini, about identical twins separated at birth, unaware of each other, until one day the plain one walks into a cafe where someone mistakes her for the flashy one, which is where, at page 10 or so, I gave up.

And I don't know that all her books before The Shell-Seekers were as bad as Under Gemini, but they all--all that Phoebe offered--had similar Harlequin Romance-type covers. And I judge books by their covers, so that's my generalization.

So anyway, there I was, summer of 1990, reading The Shell-Seekers for the first time and loving every drop. La la la, I'm loving it, I'm almost at the end, and then someone ("Agnes") discovers an enlightening morsel about someone else ("Betsy") and wants to know more. Agnes can't ask Betsy because Agnes just found out about it after Betsy's funeral, but she knows someone else ("Cecilia") must know all about it and would tell her everything. Cecilia would know all about it because she and Betsy have been best friends for forty years, but Cecilia didn't come to Betsy's funeral because her husband was ill.

BLAAAAT! thank you for playing, but that is so not a credible reason for Agnes not to learn more. Agnes can't learn more because this is the right place for the book to end, but if Cecilia were there, Agnes would ask her right then and interrupt the pacing. So Pilcher invented a flimsy excuse for Cecilia's absence. The character behaved out of her own character, because the author had to extricate herself from a tangle. The author intrudes on her story more tangibly than John Fowles does in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles's whole point is his intrusion, so he's okay; Pilcher's whole point is Penelope, so she's not okay.

This incident cast bad light on another similar one earlier in the book which I might have overlooked had Pilcher's petticoat not slipped so grievously later. Someone marries a wrong man. Later repining, she ("Dido") thinks that maybe she wouldn't've if her parents, who know and love her so well, had met him before they married. Why didn't her parents even come to the wedding? Because her father was taken badly ill. How convenient!

Again in September, someone has to be got rid of. I read this Christmas of 1991, by this time wise to the artificial plot manipulation of Shell-Seekers. The sentence, "You see, [she] had terminal cancer," rings as false as Nellie Olesen. I have to skip that whole paragraph, because if my eye fell on that line even accidentally I would writhe in pain before shortly turning to stone.

I made up names because everyone should read these when she's home sick in bed because they are still the best cuddly reads ever. You just cringe for three sentences in two books and forget about it.

In other news, this past Saturday morning I read We Dare Not Go A-Hunting, whose title I find only slightly more related to the book than Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. This is a great book. Strong heroine (more on that later), boats, summer people sucking, and a really good ear for coastal New England dialogue. This title was so familiar to me, as was its cover, that I know I came across it often in Phoebe yet I know just as well that I never read it. Why? I liked strong heroines and boats when I was younger and hated summer people a lot more (now that I am one, instead of an adolescent resident of a summer town, conveniently my loyalties change). The only reason I can come up with is the mystery sticker on the spine. If DPL put such a sticker on its copy, then I bet Phoebe put one on hers.

Did I avoid mysteries even as a child? I loved The Westing Game. I don't disdain the genre, but it's never appealed to me. I read And Then There Were None when CLH was reading Agatha Christie and I read Early Autumn after I met PSA, who loved Robert B. Parker. I read a couple of Robert Barnard because one of his titles caught my eye: Death of a Perfect Mother. People've recommended Ellis Peters to me because of the medieval setting, yet even with Derek Jacobi playing Brother Cadfael I've never bothered even watching the series. (However, I do plan to read The Name of the Rose someday. Medieval murder mystery and so much more.) Mysteries don't thrill me.

So anyway. If my dispassion for mysteries is that long-standing, then my similar dispassion for sf might be just as long-standing, however many times I've read and enjoyed sf or fantasy titles. I can think of no reason for my never having read The Blue Sword, sf sticker or not, which is just fantabulous. Talk about a strong heroine. Perhaps the incongruous font of the title on the cover, which smacks of the "futuristic" fonts that were such the Tron-era (1982) trend, plus the sf sticker, which Phoebe applied to fantasy books as well, added up to my making a serious misjudgment of this book's cover.

(I knew judging books by their covers would get me in trouble some day.)

It's reminiscent of Dune, of course; that's unavoidable for any fantasy written after 1965 about a para-desert society of strong warriors. Also of Tolkien: the character Luthe is very much Tom Bombadil. Luthe is aware of war, which Tom, as I recall, was not, and Tom ate and served no flesh, unlike Luthe, but still there are similarities. Both men are a little more than men. In the houses of both, visitors feel peaceful and languorous. Both places are respites from the expectations of the Real World.

Plus Robin McKinley discusses thoughts as if they're tangible, which I like. Luthe is going to read Harry's thought, but she (Harry's a girl) pulls it back and tucks it behind her eyes. She wants to put her hands on her thoughts and rearrange them. I like that.

And then there's her horse, given the same slightly embarrassing kind of name

as the other horses: Sungold (and Fireheart, Windrider...) This reminds me of an advertisement I'd hoped I'd long since forgotten: "Your Windsong stays on my mind." I prefer his name translated to another language of the book: Tsornin.

"Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one front foot. [Harry] booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole."

That delights me. Tsornin, like all the other Hill horses, is so sublime a piece of horseflesh that a colonel of another people says he would give an arm to ride such a one just once. He and Harry communicate about as well without words as Bree and Shasta do with words. Just a small hole.