Knockdown by Dick Francis

Back to reading two books at once - and both on paper. I need to get back to my Kindle, because I am losing ground on my current crochet project. I can't hold a book and crochet at the same time, but I can push the page turn button from time to time.

Francis wrote to a formula, but he always managed to vary it enough to ensure that the books don't blur together in similarity. This time we have a guy who ought to be depressed, but doesn't seem to be. He has an alcoholic brother, and trick shoulder that took him out of racing, and is just getting by as a bloodstock agent. He meets a woman that he would like to marry, but realizes that, although she is willing to carry on a long term relationship, marriage is simply a non-starter.

He is attacked and his business is attacked for no apparent reason, and typical of Francis's heroes, he decides to fight back. A number of people end up dead, but no horses this time. Well, a couple of horses, but they were killed long before the beginning of this story.

This one ends sort of inconclusively. The uberbads are dead, but nothing in Jonah's life is resolved.

Savannah Purchase by Jane Aiken Hodge

This was on the freebie table, someone had apparently rescued it when it was discarded by the local high school library then passed it on. I suppose these aren't racy enough for high school students today, but I loved them - there are still a number of them on my shelves although I haven't read them in years.

I've always remembered them as gothic romances - but this wasn't terribly gothic. The initial situation could easily have fit the genre, but it really played out as a complicated situational romance. It opens with a young woman at the point of destitution in her ramshackle home after the death of her father realizing that his debts have left her with no resources at all. In sweeps her long lost cousin with a proposition. The resemblance between the two has always been remarkable and Juliet is to take Josephine's place in Savannah society (including with her unsuspecting husband) while Josephine goes off to try to arrange for the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena.

Only the nurse/maid who cared for them both as children in France is in the know. The husband is indifferent and a complete brute. Besides, if Juliet doesn't go along with the masquerade, she is likely to be imprisoned because her father made her party to his debts.

Predictably, Juliet immediately falls for her cousin's husband and falls afoul of her lover. It is pleasant and entertaining, the sort of book where you know from the beginning that everything will work out in the end.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

This book has been banned by the public schools in another city in this state. According to the wire service article that I read "a parent pointed out a passage in Neverwhere that describes a sexual encounter and uses a curse word." This apparently is the first complaint in the nine years that the book has been in the curriculum. I am a devoted fan of banned books, so I decided immediately to read it and discover what the fuss was all about. I believe that someone said "hell" somewhere in the first few pages, but I did not find "graphic detail - an intimate situation between two adults." Well -- he did kiss a succubus, but was rescued before things got too far along. Apparently the torture and butchery of several people, succubi, a fallen angel, and such were less disturbing to the parent than the kiss. Or perhaps the parent in question had not actually read the book and took the word of her daughter who had maybe fallen behind in the assigned reading. Maybe I should read it again concentrating on locating the prurient material.

Seriously, I probably won't reread it any time soon. It has all the Gaiman blending of the real and unreal leaving the distinct impression that the unreal is more real than the real - but it seems to lack the light touch and quirkiness that I have come to associate with Gaiman's work. However, I did not find material likely to corrupt the minds of American teenagers.

A rather boring young man, Richard Mayhew, through an act of humanity, stumbles into a shadow world imposed on modern London. The denizens of this world refer to it as London Below, and it does exist in part in the tunnels and sewers and such below the city proper, but it also overlaps "London Above." Inhabitants of London Below are not seen or noticed by those living in London Above - but they are there. Metaphor, perhaps, for the invisible people inhabiting our own world or for the human talent for ignoring that which makes us uncomfortable.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Okay - I just finished this late last night, so (assuming I manage to get it posted today) I am officially caught up again.

In some ways this is similar to The Casual Vacancy by Rowling, but it is much better done. There is not an awful lot of plot, it is all character - and all of the characters revolve around the guy that died before the story actually began. Unlike the Rowling book, many, even most, of these characters are likeable. The situations are unusual, but the characters work through them and with each other effectively.

The magician dies before the story begins and his assistant of twenty-some years (and wife of six months or so) is central. He married her after his gay partner of many years dies, because he has AIDS also and wants to care for her future.

Enclosed with the magician's will leaving the bulk of his not inconsiderable estate to Sabine, the assistant/wife, is a document establishing a trust for his mother and two sisters. Sabine was completely unaware of the existence of these people. Everything he told her about his life was fiction.

Sabine is a true Californian; her family brought her there as a small child from Israel. The magician's family is a blue-collar bunch living in small-town Nebraska. The development of their relationship is the meat of the story.

As in Bel Canto, Patchett has brought together characters from almost unimaginably diverse backgrounds and lets them all grow through their interactions. Most enjoyable.

Imager's Intrigue by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

The opening line could be "five years later." Rhennthyl and Seliora are married and the proud parents of three-year-old Diestrya - named, apparently, for Seliora's grandmother. They live in master's quarters on Imagisle and Rhennthyl is now a Captain of the Civic Patrol - punishment for his successes in the previous book.

Solidaran politics have been a major theme throughout and this time are central - along with the activities of those pesky Ferrans, who seem to be intent on taking over the world. Solidar is the only country in their world which includes imagers in their society, they are distrusted everywhere else - and in some places subject to being killed on sight. The Solidaran system of society and government is feudal in some respects. High Holders are their aristocracy, guilds manage most manufacturing and trade, and there are the taudis where people individually scratch out such living as they can. On the other hand, they are governed by a council which is composed of representatives of most groups (with the obvious exception of the very poor). There is even an Imager representative.

Sounds better than the theocracies and oligarchies and what all that govern all the other countries, but it has fallen prey to maintaining the status quo and that has left Solidar open to corruption at all levels.

Just a comment on the technology. It seems extremely odd to me that the author would have created a society which has trains (ironways) and mechanized sea power, but has neglected to invent any form of high speed or distance communication. I suppose this places them at the steam power level, maybe electricity hadn't quite happened yet.

The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

I suppose, in all fairness, that this should not really count as a book, but it was certainly interesting. This is an article/pamphlet based on a talk that Sayers gave at Oxford in 1947.

She deplores the degeneration of education into the teaching of subjects without teaching learning. She says it herself most eloquently. "For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.We who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spell-binder, we have the impudence to be astonished."

If she was horrified then, what would she think now - when in America even the "subject" is no longer taught, only the isolated facts which are "on the test."

Imager's Challenge by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

People keep trying to kill our hero of the unspellable and possibly unpronounceable name and he keeps getting better at killing them instead.

Modesitt plays language games, I suppose to try and make us all truly understand that this all takes place in a galaxy far, far away, but the roots are often very near the surface. For example, the days of the week in Solidar are Lundi, Mardi, Meredi, Jeudi, Vendrei, Samedi, and Solayi - which are almost the same as the days of the week in French (Wednesday is mercredi and Friday is vendredi and Sunday is dimanche). The names of the months are less directly stolen, but have enough similarities that they are recognizeable.

People's names are another game. Many are simply long and odd. The hero's name is Rhennthyl and his sweetie is Seliora. His boss's name is Dichartyn, and so on. On the other hand, his brother is named Roussel - which seems to fit until you try to pronounce it and it becomes "Russell." Many names fit that pattern - conventional name, peculiar spelling. Of course, in this day of odd spellings of names they don't seem quite so odd.

By the way, the name of the country out to destroy Solidar which has the highest dependence on mechanized technology in their world is named Ferrum. Think back to your high school Latin. And the name for the slum areas of the city where the gangs hang out is "taudis" - which a quick google identifies as the French word for hovel or slum. I think it is a safe bet that Mr. Modesitt took French in high school.

Our hero is busy courting his future wife and using her family's network of information sources to run things down. He also is assigned to walk a beat with the local cops and establishes a working relationship with a couple of the taudis gang leaders. He also is assigned to paint portraits of various important and senior imagers, which gives us an opportunity to get acquainted with them. And people keep shooting at him.

Dirt by Stuart Woods

The title could fit this story in more than one way, but if Woods cut out the gratuitous sex and concentrated on the story he would only have a rather short novella.

Someone is dishing the dirt on several society players via anonymous faxes to those well placed to damage their careers (such as they are). It seems rather silly that those who live by telling dirty tales on everyone else would be expected to live lives of high moral standards, so where is the shock value in learning that they do not?

At least, this book clarifies the issue Barrington's missing girl-friend in the next book, which I accidentally read out of sequence. In that one, she was absent so he could spend all his time in bed with the accused murderess. She is very much present in this one, occasionally she even has clothing on, but seldom for long.

"M" is for Malice by Sue Grafton

This summer I promised myself that, once I caught up with this, I would not fall behind again and here I am five books behind. Then - having written up this one and the next one - someone (almost certainly someone with four furry feet) turned off my computer by stepping on the switch for the plug strip and my files were gone. I keep reminding myself never to leave stuff unsaved on my desktop, but I never seem to pay attention for long.

This Grafton had a twist that was completely new in this series. We had a ghost. A real ghost - just imagine Kinsey Milhone and a ghost. It added a touch of weirdness to a piece that was pretty standard otherwise. I don't think the ghost contributed significantly to the solution to the mystery, but it was significantly strange.

Kinsey's cousin, Tasha, an estate attorney, brings Kinsey into this one. An old man dies and one of his four sons is missing, in fact, has been missing for almost twenty years after being cast off, the designated black sheep. The existing will still names him as an heir in spite of claims by all and sundry that the old man had disenherited him, so he must be found. Obviously, he is dead and one of the remaining brothers did the deed. Well, not so much - Kinsey finds him almost immediately with little effort and returns him to the bosom of his family.

The black sheep has reformed and is devoting his life to good works, and Kinsey finds him a much nicer person than any of his siblings. Naturally, he is promptly murdered and Kinsey determines to bring the murderer to justice.

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

Encouraged by The Cuckoo's Calling I charged right into this one for which Rowling declined to hide behind a nom de plume. She narrates well, I kept reading all the way to the end, but this is depressing enough to have been Russian.

It also has a few technical problems. First of all, there are no particularly likeable characters. Maybe the guy who dies in the first chapter would have been a good guy, but, as noted, he dies in the first chapter. Second, there are lots of characters and it was never clear to me which were central. Omniscience on the part of the author is all well and good, but when we are set to wandering around in the thought processes of a dozen or so characters, it can be difficult to follow the thread, assuming there is one - a point I am not willing to concede.

Third, and this is a problem which I have noted before although probably not in this setting, she is very dependent on phonetic representation of dialect, thus rendering much of the dialogue unintelligible to the average reader, certainly to the American reader - although I suspect it makes rough going for many British readers as well. It is also a problem in much of Mark Twain's writing although there the purpose was humor, and here it is to emphasize class distinctions (I think). I continually had to stop and sound out the letter groups on the page and still frequently could only guess from context what was being said.

Finally, the plot is amorphous at best. The title addresses a peculiarity of British local government. When someone dies in office, the result is known as a "casual vacancy." The guy who dies in the beginning was a councilman and the title, at least, refers to the seat left vacant and the candidates and electoral malfeasance surrounding the filling of the position.

The whole business is curiously unsatisfying. I suspect the idea was to show all the characters through their associations with and feelings about the dead guy. And - feel free to show me the error of my thinking - it doesn't quite come off.