After reading two novels with footnotes back to back, I realized that this is a technique that I generally like (that is, all other things equal, the presence of the narrative footnote increases my enjoyment of a novel). Some novels with footnotes you might already be familiar with include Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Pale Fire, Infinite Jest, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and books by Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde. (If you're not familiar with these books, I can recommend all of them...though I find that Terry Pratchett is best experienced sparingly and in small doses.)
The books I just read, listed with some half-assed comments because if I wait to be motivated to write the absolute full ass, I will never do it:
(1) The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud
This is the first book of a children's modern fantasy trilogy (already published, no waiting!) about a precocious 12-year-old apprentice magician and the demon he summons. The kid character is rather blah, though he is not uniformly awesome or anything, which I like -- he's arrogant, naive, pushy, and (erroneously) convinced of his virtue both individually and as a member of the magician class. The kid and his point-of-view narrative is essential to the story, but man, the demon Bartimaeus is a show stealer. He's the Tyrion Lannister of this universe in a way: intelligent, wry, morally skewed, but hugely likeable.
The footnotes appear in the chapters in which Bartimaeus is narrating -- he uses footnotes to attempt to approximate for us lowly humans how he is able to think on multiple levels simultaneously. They are generally hilarious.
(2) The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara
This is a book I would never have picked up on the basis of its cover. It is hideous.
But I read a positive review of it somewhere and ordered it from the library sight unseen. It sat in my stack of books for a while because...ugh, that cover.
Eventually, it was the only book I had left from the library. I waited long enough that the combination of waiting my turn to get it from the library and waiting to be sufficiently desperate to pick it up meant I had absolutely no idea what it was about. But I gave it a shot.
Awesomeness ensued.
The novel is presented as the memoir of a decidedly unpleasant doctor who became famous after his discovery of a way to greatly extend human life on an isolated Micronesian island and who became infamous after being convicted of doing bad stuff and going to prison. The footnotes are written by the doctor's editor/ex-colleague/confidante/generalized cheerleader/#1 Fan/BFF.
It is hard to describe how strangely compelling the story was for me from the beginning, even the banal background of the doctor's upbringing and so forth, because of the narrator's powerful voice and increasingly-obviously loathsome yet complex personality. There is no Tyrion/Bartimaeus charm at play here, but he is a very interesting and well-realized character. The pacing at the start is pretty slow (probably too slow), but then the plot itself picks up and there's all kinds of reasons to be engrossed in the tale.
However, be warned that the narrator has done some bad shit that is uncomfortable to think about -- but there are no graphic descriptions of any of it, so it's not so difficult to read about, if that distinction makes sense.
This is the rare book that I really, really enjoyed reading and really, really wanted to keep reading. It's an example of what I think of as a 5 1/2 star book. Other recent 5 1/2 star books: The Goldfinch, The Silkworm. READ THESE BOOKS. They are 5 1/2 star books without disturbing content. I mean, unless, you know, murder and silly shit like that bothers you. Actually, before you read The Silkworm, you need to read the first in the series, Cuckoo's Calling. That J. K. Rowling is a really good author when she pretends to be someone else!
The Book of Life
The A/C in our apartment complex isn't working right (the air is coming out of the vent tepid at best) so it's up to 82 degrees in here today. Bah! This afternoon, I changed into a golf skort and a sleeveless exercise top because I was sweating in my t-shirt and jeans from all this strenuous blog writing, Ocean Express playing, cole slaw eating, and book reading.
My current book is The Book of Life, the last book in a modern fantasy trilogy (the All Souls trilogy by Deborah Harkness). I'm about a third of the way through it [correction: over half way through it], and seriously, I am not feeling it. At all. I enjoyed the first and second books in this series quite a bit (not 5 1/2 star enjoyed, but definitely 4+ stars) but this one is not doing it for me.
I can't tell how much of this is the laborious pacing, how much is the plot itself (which seems to be going nowhere -- tedium interrupted by pointless feeling emergencies, the reintroduction of characters from the first two books for no apparent reason, and abrupt unacknowledged about-faces from the earlier books), and how much is that I am just DONE with these characters. No more dull vampire family drama, please, Jesus have mercy! It's weird how these boring details re: this person's "sire" and this person's "grandson" and the proper way to address this person (in French) is X not Y ... how all this takes up so much space in the story. I mean, I don't doubt that an interesting comedy of manners could be written about the blending of a vampire and witch family, but this is not that book. For one, the humor is almost completely non-existent. (I almost wept with relief when one of the very few human characters name checked Spike from Buffy -- it wasn't even that funny.) And this story is supposed to be about what the hell is up with the magical tome found in the library in like the first chapter of the first book. I want to know -- get one with it!
But....well, if the 2 star reviews I just now read at Amazon are accurate, we don't really ever find out in any satisfying way what is up with that alchemical manuscript. So you know what? Fuck it. I'm not putting any more time into that damn book.
You know, maybe all that sweating while reading this book wasn't quite as ludicrous as I originally thought. Getting through those pages was major heavy lifting. (Hah, this reminds me: one pointless thing in the book is there is a page from the magical manuscript that is extra heavy and changes weight over time -- another thing that is not explained/wrapped up in any way, according to the reviews at Amazon. In the case of The Book of Life, perhaps the book gets heavier the more boring the story is at the point the reader has reached.)
This is far from the first time that I have been disappointed by the third book in a trilogy. Sometimes the writer seems to not really have a way to finish off their story (which may or may not be the case here) but often these last books seem to suffer from mission drift and generalized bloat (definitely the case here). Is it some kind of rule that when people write trilogies, they think this gives them the freedom to expand a 1 1/2 to 2 book plot (come on, sometimes a 1 book plot) into 3 (sometimes mind-numbingly long) books? (Neal Stephenson and the Baroque Cycle, I'm looking at you! Your trilogy was a bloated slog from Book 1.)
So I stipulate: Third books of trilogies suck. Please offer evidence/opinions in the comments about series you've read that conform to or contradict this premise.
7 comments:
The third book in the Girl With the Dragon Tatoo series was excellent. It finished the story from the second book.
Agreed -- I am sorry that we won't have more of those books to read! I think perhaps ongoing series fare better than planned trilogies. They have a continuing storyline with the characters they are building but often stand-alone stories within each book. The Dragon Tattoo one is unusual in that it finished the story from the previous book and maintained an excellent pace.
Hmm. The third book of the Uglies series (which may have gone beyond 3 now, so maybe it's not a trilogy) was OK as best I can recall. I didn't enjoy the 3rd Divergence book very much. It must be hard to be under the pressure of writing the third book of a trilogy. Like, maybe you are already tired of the concept by then and your mind has moved on, plus pressure if your work has become popular, and maybe movie deals riding on it, and of course you have to wrap everything up somehow.
I really like when you review books, however shoddily, because I always need new book recommendations and I suck at finding out what I should be reading.
You know I'm not a huge novel reader, but I really enjoyed the entire Hunger Games trilogy. I never have finished the Baroque Cycle, as much as I wanted to love it :(
I completely agree with you, Sally, on the Book of Life. I started reading and couldn't get into it at all and took it back to the library, thinking I just need to read another time. Sounds like it would just be a waste of time.
Jen, yes, Hunger Games actually did very well at maintaining momentum until the end.
Tam, I also read the third book of the Uglies series, and thought it was OK.
I'm seeing a pattern here -- does YA fiction fare better than the stuff for adults? Maybe YA authors have to keep their page counts down? I thought that Allegiant (the third book of the Divergent series, whatever it was called) was not as good as books 1 and 2, but still kicked the ass out of Book of Life.
There's only two books in me, and I just wrote the third. Don't know how I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words. Spent my whole life diggin' up my writing's shallow grave for the two books in me and the third one I just made.
Post a Comment