evelyn_b

I went out of town last week and visited some bookstores. I meant to unload a box of books and I did, but for various reasons I ended up coming back with approximately the same amount I brought in (though of different books). You win some and you lose some in the Game of Not Getting Crushed By Books.

Ever since The Clan of the Cave Bear, I've been looking for a novel about cavemen that isn't bizarrely disappointing. I may have found it in The Inheritors by William Golding. The prose is much evener, there are no National Geographic infodumps from an impossibly erudite narrator with weird theories about skull shape, and there is no big-eyed Daryl Hannah heroine to hold our hand and lead us through 20,000 years of technological change in a single season. It may be a little less memorable as a result. We'll see.

Beyond Varallan is the sequel to Stardoc. I was surprised, but very happy, to find it on the discount rack at "Austin's premiere feminist bookstore," Bookwoman. It's exactly as satisfyingly unchallenging a space opera as its predecessor, though I am sorry to report that the Unappealing Love Interest is back and just as unappealing as ever. Last time, he was brain-hijacked by a parasite and forced to rape Our Heroine, then spent the next forty pages being aggressively confused at her for having mixed feelings about him as a result, because he knows for a fact she was attracted to him so what difference does it make? (he's a psychic with terrible people skills). Now he's cornering her in the canteen and begging for a relationship, then getting mad because he senses she's just using him for sex. I wish he'd go away and let Cherijo go back to solving medical mysteries, not getting along with her coworkers, and being a genetically enhanced clone on the run from her mad-scientist father.

Some of the other things I bought: Snobbery With Violence by Colin Watson, lots of Sue Graftons, Ulysses (because I guess it's time to start reading Ulysses), and a three-in-one set of The Balkans Trilogy by Olivia Manning, which is up next (or close enough) in my 99 Novels roster.

Probably next week things will be back to normal, for a while.

What I've Finished Reading

Tarka the Otter is a remarkable book. It might actually be a little too resolutely non-anthropomorphic to be entertaining in the way you expect a novel written for humans to be entertaining, but it was also completely riveting, in a strange way, in that I was riveted even when I was bored.

Williamson set out to write a book about otters, and he didn't mean fantasy otters with language and a mythology, making plans and having conversations all day like a bunch of weirdly-shaped human dudes, he meant otters. Tarka and his kind spend their days eating, playing on the ground, learning to swim, playing in the water, learning to hunt, catching and eating fish, sleeping, running and hiding, raising cubs and forgetting them. The otters communicate in yips, hisses, licks and nips, but they don't converse. They don't analyze or wonder. They're otters. They occupy a disorientingly specific physical landscape, and they have a hell of a lot of fish to eat.

Did you know that there was an otter-hunting season? That people used to hunt otters with a pack of dogs? I didn't, but it's true. According to Wikipedia, the practice ended in the 1970s when otters got too scarce. I don't get the impression that Williamson is a fan, though he doesn't vilify the hunt, either. The dogs and the hunters are characters in this book, as much as any one of the animals is a character, and are treated exactly the same as the trees, fish, owls, badgers, roads, grasses, and so on, as features of the environment. A few of the more memorable otter-hounds, like the more memorable birds, get names; the humans don't, though they speak from time to time.

I was delighted to learn both that there is an audiobook narrated by David Attenborough, and that Gerry Durrell wrote the screenplay for a movie version.

C is for Corpse is an almost completely satisfying detective story right up through the brilliant reveal when all the pieces (including the title) come crashing into place. Unfortunately, this moment is immediately followed by Kinsey Millhone getting chased around a morgue by a syringe-wielding villain, who reveals his ax-craziness by, well, showing up with a syringe and chasing Kinsey around the morgue. It's all a little too Yakity Sax for me. The rest of the book is great, though, and Kinsey is great. I finished feeling glad that there are 24 more in the series.

If you like frequent reminders that a book was written in the 1980s, you'll find a yogurt-and-quiche-laden smorgasbord here: there are health food jokes, tracksuits as formal wear, microfilm-machine-induced nausea, "Chinese food syndrome," and my all-time favorite, the Obscene Phone Call.

What I'm Reading Now

Stardoc by S. L. Viehl. This is such a silly, exuberant space opera that I initially thought it was about thirty years older than it is (first published in 2000). That's not a criticism, it's exactly what I wanted out of a book called Stardoc. Cherijo Grey Veil is a young human physician who runs away from her overbearing mad-scientist father and a disappointingly space-racist future Earth to work in a SPACE HOSPITAL. The concept of a multi-species SPACE HOSPITAL was explored in some depth by James White's Sector General series, and the appeal of Stardoc is similar, though with less loving attention to alternative evolution and its discontents. Here there's a lot of focus on medical drama staples: red tape, interpersonal drama, and bizarre medical emergencies- but the asshole colleagues, gossipy nurses, administrative tools, and love interests are an assortment of non-humans, ranging in size from colossus to snail, all of whom have low expectations of Cherijo's ability to cope with diversity because she comes from the DNA-purity-obsessed space backwoods. In this world, Terrans are primarily known outside Terra for spitting on the ground when non-Terrans walk by. Cherijo is not a spitter, but her co-workers are wary just the same.

What I Plan to Read Next

Love and the Loveless is here! I also celebrated a minor book-reducing victory (all books off the floor, only two books lying flat on top of a row of shelved books) by immediately going out and buying three more books. One of them is A for Alibi by Sue Grafton.