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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Wednesday
What I've Finished Reading
There's a character in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet who bears a very strong resemblance to Kaylee from (the short-lived sci-fi show) Firefly, or rather to someone's lovingly crafted fan novel about Kaylee. Some people might object to this resemblance, but I liked Kaylee and was happy to see her barely-disguised twin enjoying herself in a story with few serious dangers and no shortage of engines to mess around with.
In addition to Kaylee Plus, there's a no-nonsense sexy reptile, a loveable AI and her human soulmate, a surly space racist with a secret, the conflicted host of a navigation-enabling brain parasite, and the captain, whose primary character trait is "captain." The author clearly enjoys spending time with all of them and has contrived an incredibly leisurely plot in order to maximize your enjoyment and hers. I expect opinions will vary a lot as to whether this book is obnoxiously self-indulgent or delightfully self-indulgent. I spent about the first seventy-five pages getting progressively more and more impatient with the never-ending introductions (with eager thought-bubbles of worldbuliding popping up over each one), then very suddenly forgave everything around page 100 and never looked back. It's fun.
What I Finished A Couple Weeks Ago But Didn't Get Around To Posting About
I loved The Haunting of Hill House. It was one of those books that I keep meaning to put down very soon and just don't. A professor and some unattractive "assistants" haunt a weird, unpleasant old house - it's the classic "let's stay at the haunted house to see how haunted it is" setup - outside of a grubby town. After I'd stopped reading it I wondered about the ending "landing," but this is 100% a vestigal artifact of thinking I have to have something to criticize about a perfect book; I didn't worry about it at all while I was reading it. This book is nuts in a good way.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is also nuts, but I don't know how I feel about it - I love the mostly useless narrator and the wonderful May Kasahara (not all manic pixie dream girls are an evil) and was mildly excited when it got all Orphic for a second, primarily because poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird is such a useless everyman Orpheus and I have an intermittent weak spot for useless everymen. I'm pretty unclear on what, if anything, I was supposed to get out of this mishmash of war crimes, ambiguous magic, and sandwich making, but what does anyone get out of this messy and confusing world, I guess? Haruki Murakami has a very definite sensibility and there's nothing wrong with that.
What I'm Reading Now
Maida's Little House is a children's book from 1921 - I bought it because I'd never heard of it. It's actually a sequel to Maida's Little Shop, though I didn't realize that when I bought it (naively assuming that "house" preceded "shop"). It's an extreme example of a kind of children's book that was fairly popular at one time, in which poor (or, in this case, just not-obscenely-wealthy) kids get a rich benefactor and are set up with a series of highly choreographed, expensive and safety-netted adventures.
In the earlier book (described at length in the first chapter of this one), Maida is a sickly little girl with a limp who mysteriously lives above a little shop; the neighborhood children all think she's lying about her father being a millionaire, because why would she live above a shop? But it turns out that the stories were all true and her millionaire father has set her up with this shop (and probably a guardian?) as a form of therapy and to give her an opportunity to make friends! And it works! By the beginning of Maida's Little House, Maida no longer limps and every single character is eagerly anticipating her return. Then Maida announces that she has a surprise for all of them! They are going to join her at her massive summer property, where in addition to a pond, a herd of imported English deer, and a bunch of rich-person buildings, she has HER OWN HOUSE, a fully functional playmansion with a real kitchen, a telephone to the main mansion, and a friendly "colored pair" living in as a (mostly) silent grown-up support team. So far the closest thing to a plot is the kids' possibly-imaginary beef with some kids in the gypsy encampment that Millionaire Dad magnanimously invites onto his property every summer. Mostly it's stuff like . . . the kids plan a massive picnic, but forget the salt! so the next time there's a picnic, they bring way too much salt!! and loving descriptions of all the different healthy outdoor activities money can buy. In one chapter, they kidnap a large turtle out of the ocean and tie it up by the pond. Then they wake up the next day and realize this is cruel, so one of the adults has to drive the turtle all the way back to the beach.
Also: this book called Hard Feelings that I got from a LFL because the back cover called its narrator "this generation's Holden Caulfield" (this generation = circa 1978) and hey, I like that mixed-up Caulfied kid. Bernie Hergruter is not as loveable or as mixed-up; he's mostly a normally stressed-out teenager who starts the book by winning a bet with his friend on which one of them is going to get laid first, but the circumstances are embarrassing. There's also a deranged bully after him (unrelated to the sex adventure) so he runs away to Cleveland to stay with an aunt. So far it's not terrible, not spectacular.
Is This Going to Be A Once-a-Month Thing From Now On?
Possibly for a while. I'm not all that busy, even, just constantly distracted.
There's a character in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet who bears a very strong resemblance to Kaylee from (the short-lived sci-fi show) Firefly, or rather to someone's lovingly crafted fan novel about Kaylee. Some people might object to this resemblance, but I liked Kaylee and was happy to see her barely-disguised twin enjoying herself in a story with few serious dangers and no shortage of engines to mess around with.
In addition to Kaylee Plus, there's a no-nonsense sexy reptile, a loveable AI and her human soulmate, a surly space racist with a secret, the conflicted host of a navigation-enabling brain parasite, and the captain, whose primary character trait is "captain." The author clearly enjoys spending time with all of them and has contrived an incredibly leisurely plot in order to maximize your enjoyment and hers. I expect opinions will vary a lot as to whether this book is obnoxiously self-indulgent or delightfully self-indulgent. I spent about the first seventy-five pages getting progressively more and more impatient with the never-ending introductions (with eager thought-bubbles of worldbuliding popping up over each one), then very suddenly forgave everything around page 100 and never looked back. It's fun.
What I Finished A Couple Weeks Ago But Didn't Get Around To Posting About
I loved The Haunting of Hill House. It was one of those books that I keep meaning to put down very soon and just don't. A professor and some unattractive "assistants" haunt a weird, unpleasant old house - it's the classic "let's stay at the haunted house to see how haunted it is" setup - outside of a grubby town. After I'd stopped reading it I wondered about the ending "landing," but this is 100% a vestigal artifact of thinking I have to have something to criticize about a perfect book; I didn't worry about it at all while I was reading it. This book is nuts in a good way.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is also nuts, but I don't know how I feel about it - I love the mostly useless narrator and the wonderful May Kasahara (not all manic pixie dream girls are an evil) and was mildly excited when it got all Orphic for a second, primarily because poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird is such a useless everyman Orpheus and I have an intermittent weak spot for useless everymen. I'm pretty unclear on what, if anything, I was supposed to get out of this mishmash of war crimes, ambiguous magic, and sandwich making, but what does anyone get out of this messy and confusing world, I guess? Haruki Murakami has a very definite sensibility and there's nothing wrong with that.
What I'm Reading Now
Maida's Little House is a children's book from 1921 - I bought it because I'd never heard of it. It's actually a sequel to Maida's Little Shop, though I didn't realize that when I bought it (naively assuming that "house" preceded "shop"). It's an extreme example of a kind of children's book that was fairly popular at one time, in which poor (or, in this case, just not-obscenely-wealthy) kids get a rich benefactor and are set up with a series of highly choreographed, expensive and safety-netted adventures.
In the earlier book (described at length in the first chapter of this one), Maida is a sickly little girl with a limp who mysteriously lives above a little shop; the neighborhood children all think she's lying about her father being a millionaire, because why would she live above a shop? But it turns out that the stories were all true and her millionaire father has set her up with this shop (and probably a guardian?) as a form of therapy and to give her an opportunity to make friends! And it works! By the beginning of Maida's Little House, Maida no longer limps and every single character is eagerly anticipating her return. Then Maida announces that she has a surprise for all of them! They are going to join her at her massive summer property, where in addition to a pond, a herd of imported English deer, and a bunch of rich-person buildings, she has HER OWN HOUSE, a fully functional playmansion with a real kitchen, a telephone to the main mansion, and a friendly "colored pair" living in as a (mostly) silent grown-up support team. So far the closest thing to a plot is the kids' possibly-imaginary beef with some kids in the gypsy encampment that Millionaire Dad magnanimously invites onto his property every summer. Mostly it's stuff like . . . the kids plan a massive picnic, but forget the salt! so the next time there's a picnic, they bring way too much salt!! and loving descriptions of all the different healthy outdoor activities money can buy. In one chapter, they kidnap a large turtle out of the ocean and tie it up by the pond. Then they wake up the next day and realize this is cruel, so one of the adults has to drive the turtle all the way back to the beach.
Also: this book called Hard Feelings that I got from a LFL because the back cover called its narrator "this generation's Holden Caulfield" (this generation = circa 1978) and hey, I like that mixed-up Caulfied kid. Bernie Hergruter is not as loveable or as mixed-up; he's mostly a normally stressed-out teenager who starts the book by winning a bet with his friend on which one of them is going to get laid first, but the circumstances are embarrassing. There's also a deranged bully after him (unrelated to the sex adventure) so he runs away to Cleveland to stay with an aunt. So far it's not terrible, not spectacular.
Is This Going to Be A Once-a-Month Thing From Now On?
Possibly for a while. I'm not all that busy, even, just constantly distracted.
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I have been on the fence about A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet for a while now. Kaylee Plus sounds like... well, a plus, but I read somewhere (spoilers! potentially!) that there is a Shocking Character Death near the end, and my enthusiasm for Shocking Character Deaths is very low these days. Is this actually something that happens?
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I can't figure out how to do a spoiler cut in here, but there is a character death in The Long Way. I wouldn't say it's shocking, but it is a major tearjerker.
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(The one that does have an actual shocking death, though, is #3, so don't read that one instead!)
I'm so crpytic I don't know if this is helpful at all...
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(I may also just be personally susceptable to this specific genre of character annihilation. . .I didn't even especially love the character in question before the thing happened, but when it did I cried buckets).
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It was fun! I never quite got over the lack of the plot, but the world-building was really fascinating. The second one worked by the far the best, for me, of those of hers I've read. It was a much more contained setting and premise and fitted her strengths perfectly. Whereas I was not at all surprised to learn in the notes at the end that Long way was effectively a Kickstarter novel. It read exactly like something that had been crowd-sourced on tumblr, in mostly good, but also slightly frustrating ways. I enjoy them but... except for #2 which I just enjoyed thoroughly.
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She's one of the reasons I haven't made a reading post in ages - I've read three of hers and enjoyed them and would sound very negative if I talked about them. I think because they are really good but they're so almost something even better maybe?