Teaser Tuesday: Time to be in Earnest

Tuesday rolls around, and I am reading something new, yes, although sadly not because I finished the last book. I love Riddle-Master, but I have decided that for that book, I need a good stretch of time to read it, not the little snatches of time I get throughout a busy work week while trying to get everything else done. Because it's too beautiful to treat badly, if that makes any sense. I think I will save it for September, when I go on vacation again finally.

Plus, I'm visiting my grandmother this week and have borrowed a book from her that I really should return -- P.D. James' diary of her seventy-eighth year, Time to be in Earnest. So today, a teaser from there. So far, I'm enjoying it, although after her very first diary entry I've decided that she and I might have had a pretty good argument about something she states at the end of it. The writing is excellent, though.

From Time to be in Earnest by P.D. James, p153:

It was impossible not to begin reading at once and just as impossible to stop once I'd begun. Inevitably one's response to the poems is influenced by the joint tragedies; how could it be otherwise?

Teaser Tuesdays are hosted by Should Be Reading. It works as follows:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers!
• Include the title and author.

The Naming by Alison Croggon

I was utterly amazed at how wrapped up I got in this book, although I probably shouldn't have been. It's definitely my sort of thing -- reading The Naming is a bit like coming home for me. My first reading love is fantasy and though I've been reading a wide range of things lately, The Naming is where my love of reading started: a strong female protagonist on a fantastical quest to save the world. And I must, before I go any further, thank Darla wholeheartedly for introducing me to this series because I hadn't heard of it, and would probably have overlooked it for far too long otherwise. I highly recommend reading her brilliant review of this book - reading her review again after I'd finished this one, I realized she covers things I don't, and noticed things I didn't, which is part of the fun of book blogging!

Maerad (pronounced, Croggon tells us in a handy pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book, as MY-rad) is a slave, sixteen years old and facing a lifetime of bonebreaking labour and beatings in the small and repulsive "village" of Gilman's Cot. She is an orphan, and her only solace is music -- she is permitted, and forced, to play her mother's harp for the entertainment of Gilman and his cronies. Until one day, a stranger shows up in the cow barn -- and she is spirited out of the Cot and into a new adventure, one that will see her facing enemies she didn't know existed, finding friends she didn't know existed, discovering her history and her heritage, and yes, saving the world.

And yes, that is a fairly standard fantasy plot. It's a plot I actually really like, if done well, and Croggon more than does it well. Within the first few pages I was attached to Maerad, and I think Croggon's biggest triumph is in her characters. It's not just Maerad we grow fond of -- it's the supporting characters around her, even those who seem to flit in and out of the story such that we hardly get to know them before they're gone again. These characters are brave, smart, kind people we care about, who are about to be put through hell. But Maerad is the glue of the story, and she's a wonderfully courageous, practical, and intelligent character. She's also a little uneven in the way a sixteen-year-old would be expected to be uneven, with slightly irrational moods and angers, which peter out just as quickly. And she's mature enough to know when to cut it out. It's very well done.

The action is exciting too. There are battles and councils and desperate flights in the middle of the night; the reader, like Maerad, just gets a chance to catch her breath and then we're off again. This pace is fast, although not completely breakneck such that it was uncomfortable, and it's punctuated by respites that made Maerad's quest all the more urgent so that those gentle, beautiful respites could be the norm and not the exception in the future of her people. The 466 pages of the story flew by, though I'll admit to being a bit daunted by the size of the book before I started. There's a twist towards the end that I only half saw coming (I suspected one part of it, and completely did not see the other - very satisfying) and any events that might have seemed a little deus ex machina in the hands of a lesser author were skillfully woven into the plot such that they were believable. And rather than being completely thrilled with these events, the reader is left with the uneasy feeling that there is going to be a price paid, if not immediately, certainly in the future.

Though I'm tremendously enthusiastic about this book, it is a little uneven in places. There are occasionally bits of writing that are a bit jarring -- Maerad and other characters gasp an awful lot, for example, or things seem a little blunt-object-obvious. These gripes are fairly few and far between. The other thing is that though the world is well-described, with a rich and varied history, it's unfortunately in places very reminiscint of Tolkein. I say it's unfortunate because to me, Croggon doesn't quite stand up. The historical background sometimes just seems a little thin, or pulled directly from Tolkein or other fantasy masters, or expected and therefore bland. But something Croggon does pull off extremely well is poetry.

I usually hate poetry in fantasies, particularly when it's poetry that's supposed to be part of the oral history of the book's inner culture. Tolkien I could usually bear, although not always. Other authors often leave me feeling that it's boring, or bad, or at its worst completely and utterly mortifying to read. Croggon's poetry, her ballads and verses and so forth, were really good, and became something I looked forward to reading in the book, and that is a reversal I was really pleased to see. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, because I understand that Croggon is a poet first. And I think, with the aid of her poetry and another book or two to get into the history, I will probably find that my feeling about the history changes. I expect the history will deepen, and feel richer, the more I've steeped myself in it.

As a testiment to how much I enjoyed this book, I am still considering turning right back to the beginning and reading it again, because I'm pretty sure it would be better a second run through. I'm going to control myself, though, and wait until I've read the full series, and then read the whole thing through again. They will be my own copies, because though I got this out of the library I am going to buy the books to keep for myself. I know I'll read them multiple times. Next in the series is The Riddle, and I'm expecting it to be at my library when I get there for my Friday shift...

Teaser Tuesday: Riddle-Master

I wasn't going to do a teaser post today, because I was finding it hard to get into anything on my TBR list. I was considering making it a job for Terry Pratchett again, with Mort, and I know that will work, but I decided to go back instead to an old favourite, a book I've read many many times and that I always love. I haven't read Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master in a while, though, and so I'm looking forward to seeing how much it has changed for me. And I'm also experiencing that slight concern that maybe it won't be as good as I remember.

Riddle-Master is an omnibus edition of McKillip's high fantasy trilogy, The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind. It is a timeless and beautiful piece of writing and I am so glad I picked this book up when I stumbled on it in a bookstore long ago. It was my first McKillip experience, and I was floored by how incredible this book is; I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of McKillip before.

I'm going to include more than two sentences today, mostly because the section I randomly picked makes no sense without a few extra sentences.

From Riddle-Master by Patricia A. McKillip, p181:

"The Great Shout of the body is unteachable; you simply have to be inspired." He paused, added thoughtfully, "The last time I heard it was at the marriage between Mathom of An and Cyone, Raederle's mother. Cyone shouted a shout that harvested an entire crop of half-ripe nuts and snapped all the harp strings in the hall. Luckily I heard it from a mile away; I was the only harpist able to play that day."

Teaser Tuesdays are hosted by Should Be Reading. It works as follows:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers!
• Include the title and author.

The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell

I am managing to peel myself away from my next read for long enough to write this review. It's not that I don't want to recommend The Overloaded Ark; quite the opposite, in fact. But my next book is really, really good and very gripping, and I've been having the privilege of multiple consecutive uninterrupted hours to read it.

But enough about other books.

The Overloaded Ark is the first of a great number of autobiographical tales written by Gerald M. Durrell. Many years ago, in my pre-teens and teens, I read everything by Durrell I could get my hands on. Which I am realizing wasn't that much, looking at his bibliography. I'd never heard of The Overloaded Ark, but I was feeling nostalgic the other day, so I looked up Durrell and settled on reading all his autobiographies, in publication order.

To understand this book, I think it's really important to first put it in context. Durrell went on several "collecting" expeditions for British zoos in his life. As far as I understand, this sort of expedition just doesn't happen anymore and for very good reason. It's not considered good zoo behaviour to be sending minions out to pull live specimens out of their habitat, unless it's to establish captive breeding programs for a seriously endangered species. But back in the 1940s, when Durrell's first expedition took place, it was a commonplace activity. And as Durrell says in his prologue, part of what he is trying to do with this book is set the record straight -- collecting expeditions were neither unending drudgery nor unending danger.

The time period is part of what makes this book so fascinating, but it also causes some serious cringing on my part. There's overtones of -- and sometimes overt -- racist colonialism and even hints of sexism, all of which at the time would have been considered normal for a white, British man visiting British Cameroon at the time the book was written. Much of the time I think Durrell was ahead of his time as far as racism and environmental concerns, but sometimes he'll write something really jarring in an otherwise splendid book. So my suggestion would be to read this book, but read it with the historical context in mind. It doesn't make any of the colonial overtones right, but it is an interesting historical exercise to read this book and realize just how deeply embedded some of this objectionable stuff was in society.

Moving past the issues (which I will admit was, for me, very hard to do at first; I don't read a lot from this time period and so it was an exercise in not being massively put off), Durrell is underrated as a writer, I think. His style is poetic, often quite funny (usually at his own expense), and thoughtful. He wants his readers to fall in love with the African jungle, and with passages like the following, how could I not?

The most notable feature of the forest was the innumerable tiny streams, shallow and clear, that meanered their way in an intricate and complicated pattern across its floor. Glinting and coiling around the smooth brown boulders, sweeping in curves to form the snow-white sandbanks, busily hollowing out the earth from under the grasping tree roots, shimmering and chuckling, they went into the dark depths of the forest. They chattered and frothed importantly over diminutive waterfalls, and scooped out deep placid pools in the sandstone, where the blue and red fish, the pink crabs, and the small gaudy frogs lived.

He has a turn of phrase that is both dryly amusing and wonderfully descriptive, as when describing a bicycle trip he takes with one of his assistants sitting on the handlebars, where they "shot out onto the high road like a drunken snipe." Or that section I mentioned in my teaser, with the naked ant battle. Actually, Durrell seemed to have a number of naked encounters... another one I laughed at went as follows:

It stood quite still, regarding me thoughtfully, and the tip of its tail moved very gently among the grass stalks. I had seen domestic cats looking like this at sparrows, twitching their tails, and I did not feel very happy about it. Also, I was stark naked, and I have found that in moments of crisis to have no clothes on gives one a terribly unprotected feeling. I glared at the Serval, wishing that I had my shorts on and that I could think of some way of capturing it without the risk of being disembowled.

Because yes, Durrell goes to some enormous lengths to catch his critters. It's always top of mind -- even when staring down large cats, or faced with a Gaboon Viper (a rather deadly snake, as he might say) in his living quarters, or falling down a hillside onto the back of an enormous Monitor Lizard which has already taken a nasty strips out of a dog. What amazes me most about this book, though, is that one never ever loses sight of the fact that Durrell loves these animals. He loves the forest, he loves the flowers, the beetles, the birds, reptiles, mammals -- he loves it all. And to him, capturing and attempting to keep these animals alive is part of loving them. One doesn't have to agree with his methods, but I know that love of nature. I have it myself.

He includes a couple of notes about failure, too. He's very conscious of mentioning that though he's included the exciting bits in the book, most of his time on a collecting trip is spent in animal care. And much of that is quite boring. He also tells us where things go wrong, as with animals he simply can't figure out how to keep alive in captivity; and there's one really lovely, touching chapter about Chumly the chimpanzee. It's a very sad story, and he never lays blame or points fingers for Chumly's demise, and leaves the conclusions to the reader -- and this reader came out feeling really horrified by human stupidity and laziness.

There are a lot of things about this book to recommend it, if you are aware of the time period it's written in and prepared to take that as it comes. I am going to continue with my plan to read Durrell's autobiographical works in order, but I'm also thinking I might throw his book The Stationary Ark in there as well, in which he talks about zoos and their relationship to the natural world, and his philosophy of effective and ethical zoo management. I've never read it, but heard good things.

If you're reading Durrell for the first time, I don't know that I'd start here. It's his first published novel and it's not quite as polished as some of the others, although at points it is really, blindingly beautiful. So, very recommended, with caveats.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Before I started Eat, Pray, Love I was a little worried it might be too God-y for me. I have a very complicated relationship with organized religion, and in many ways my experiences have not been terribly good. And currently, though not forever, I feel it's best to leave it at that. And so when I'm reading anything, significant amounts of God tend to turn me off. But, my mother's recommendation aside, Elizabeth Gilbert herself convinced me to give things a try, because I like the way she thinks. From her introduction:

And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded word -- GOD -- into my book and since this is a word which will appear many times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.

For me, just the act of pointing out that "God" is a loaded word is enough. The last part of that sentence made me laugh out loud, because she covers all of us -- those who have very specific ideas of God, and those who don't want anything to do with God, and all of us in between. From that moment on, I decided to read this book because I felt I could read it as her experience, and not feel like she was preaching at me. And it never did feel preachy. Sometimes it felt like she was gently suggesting advice -- a good friend, an older sister -- but it never, ever felt like she was trying to convert me and I got behind that 100%.

Let's get this out of the way first: the last third of the book was a bit of a letdown for me, and I've been trying to figure out why. I've come to the conclusion that it feels, overall, as though Gilbert is finally withdrawing. Throughout the first two sections, we get all her pain and all her love and all her thoughts and failures and triumphs, bared to us in almost graphic clarity. The third section seems somehow less intimate, which is interesting given that significant portions of that third section are about sex. I was going to say "which is odd" but it occurs to me that sex, physical and emotional intimacy between two people (in this case, anyway), may be one of the hardest things to write about in a clear-eyed, no-holds-barred way -- breaking that bubble of intimacy so that the world can share in it through one's writing is perhaps not something Gilbert wants to do, or can do. And that's okay. So in the third section there is more of an outsider-looking-in feeling, than the incredible closeness that one feels to Gilbert in the first two sections.

The third section didn't ruin the book for me by any means. And part of what I have enjoyed about it so much is the way it makes me think, and examine my own thoughts and assumptions as well as the assumptions of others. My mother and I were discussing this criticism from her book club when they read this book: Gilbert is too self-indulgent. Mandy also mentioned that she's read reviews calling the book narcissistic -- here's some news, critics: it's a memoir. So yes. Narcissistic, if you want to be nasty about it. I like memoirs because I enjoy getting that very personal look at the world from someone else's perspective, and I get that in spades from Eat, Pray, Love.

But self-indulgent is something slightly different, and with respect to my mother's book club, I disagree with them. I even got a little ferocious when talking about it with Mom. I know a few things about depression, and one thing I do understand is that one doesn't get over a deep depression by denying oneself healing. In Gilbert's case (which I am admittedly looking at through her writing, one side of the story and all that) I suspect anything less than what might be called "self-indulgence" would have been fatal. In fact, one of the things I was most impressed with was that she had both the clarity to understand what she needed to do to dig herself out of her hole, and the guts to actually do it. When dealing with depression, one has to be selfish. Because, as Gilbert herself says at one point, being miserable not only hurts you, it hurts and inconveniences others around you, too. But our good Protestant culture here in North America very much frowns on some types of selfishness. It takes a brave, strong, and/or desperate soul to ignore society and visit Italy for four months to do nothing but eat, talk, and nap in order to begin healing.

Gilbert has a very distinct voice, and I really, really liked it. When Mom and I were talking about self-indulgence, I realized I was beginning to defend Gilbert as I would a friend; her writing style, and the things she opens up about in her book, make her seem familiar -- someone I could call up and have a great chat with. This doesn't happen to me very often with books, and I liked it. Part of it was that I found a lot of what Gilbert had to say completely relatable. Try this:

Instead of being amused, though, I'm only anxious. Instead of watching, I'm always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look, I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"

I know that brain-busy-anxious feeling all too well.

And on a lighter note:

Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. "We are ROOSTERS!" they holler. "We are the only ones who are ROOSTERS!"

It almost makes me like roosters. And finally, a piece of wisdom that I think is incredibly important, coming to us from her Guru via Gilbert:

She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fin weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's now how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

I don't think this book is for everyone, although I do wish it was. But I read it at a good time in my life to read it, a time when I am thinking about choices I have made and have yet to make, a time when I am finding myself sometimes treading water frantically just to keep my head out. It was, overall, a really interesting, beautiful, raw, and very worthwhile read for me. And I would advise trying it -- just trying it. Mom was surprised that she liked it as much as she did. My grandmother was surprised she liked it as much as she did. I was really surprised that I liked it as much as I did. But I tried it and I really enjoyed it, so I recommend trying it, and if it doesn't work the first time, wait five years and try it again. I suspect this book changes with time.