Wheel of Time Reread (Books 1-4) by Leigh Butler

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry - mea culpa, mea maxima culpa - and all that sort of stuff ---

I tried, I really did, but when I found myself postponing reading to get back to cleaning house - cleaning house!?! -- I realized that it was time to give it up. Maybe if I had actually read WOT (as Butler refers to the entire 15,000 page monster) - but wait! I did. Well, I read the first three volumes, anyway. I suppose it doesn't really count because, as usual, I really didn't remember anything about it.

I don't think I have ever before posted about something that I didn't actually finish reading. On those fairly rare occasions usually I just sort of quit and try to forget it ever happened, but this time I invested a week of my reading time in this - and my house is cleaner than it has been in years. Still, I spent enough time with it that I felt that I owed myself a notation in the record to address what had been going on during that period of time.

Frankly, Butler's blog style is entertaining and very well done. Few manage that light conversational mode without obvious effort - which makes it apparent that no effort has been spared to make it seem effortless - and I strongly approve of people that spend the effort on their writing to spare their readers the effort. Have I used that word enough times in the last sentence? I would like to read something of hers that I cared about reading --- Leigh, sweetie, would you please, please, please write a novel --- or have you, and I just haven't found it ...

She Who Remembers by Linda Lay Shuler

I'm reasonably sure that I read this many years ago. It came out in 1988 while we were still overseas, but they kept the fiction on the shelves at the BX pretty current. Doesn't really matter. It is inevitable, I suppose, to compare it to the Jean Auel Clan of the Cave Bear series - prehistory, native tribes and all that. It has been a long time since I read the Auel books, but it seems to me that they were set much earlier in prehistory than this one. Again, I seem to remember that they were back ice age and Bering land bridge sort of setting - hominids had not quite settled down to homo sapiens yet, neanderthals and such running about. This is up in the thirteenth century CE, with European invasions already in progress - well, at least the vikings.

It is clearly set in the desert southwest - it is probably possible to recognize the landmarks and the layout of the cliff dwellings and pueblos where the action takes place. The descriptions certainly sounded familiar to me. Certainly in that aspect, Shuler's research is impeccable. It is set before the disappearance of the Anasazi, and she has set things up in line with the most logical explanation of their departure. No alien spaceships or plagues, just climate shift and poor crop management, but all of that is in the future for the folks in the story.

The general descriptions of life on the mesas is as well-done as the geography and physical setting - all very much in line with what is known about the pueblo cultures of the period - made fascinating reading. To me, more fascinating than the rather improbable story of Kwani and Kokopelli, but I guess you can't have everything. It was an interesting treatment of the mythic Kokopelli; she made him a Toltec wanderer who was unwilling to settle down back in Mexico.

I never got around to reading the other two books in the series back in the whenevers, but I got them this time - Kindle cheap books are hard to resist - but I don't feel any particular urgency about "what happens next" so it may be a while before I get back to them.

Banker Dick Francis

Mild-mannered, thirty-something merchant banker (that would be an investment banker to us Yanks), Tim Ekaterin, a junior in the bank that carries his family name is instrumental in negotiating the loan of five million pounds for the purchase of Sandcastle, the horse of the year, to stand at stud. We also have a horse-whisperer/healer and the miscellaneous people surrounding the stud, the bank, and the "clinic." Lots of characters, but not overwhelming.

Tim is hopelessly in love with his boss's wife, and she with him, but both are too honorable to follow through. Francis does tend to handle romance with a very light touch. It seemed early in the series that he was going to make a thing of his heroes and very much younger girls, but he reverses that here. The boss's wife is several years older than Tim - and the most interesting woman character is friend of the wife's who is probably another ten years older still. Pen, short for Penelope, is a pharmacist with a very perceptive way of seeing what is around her; she and Tim become good friends as well. Her profession is also critical to the solution of the mystery. There is a young girl, the daughter of the stud owner; Tim and Ginnie become very close, but theirs is definitely not a romantic relationship at all.

There are a couple of story lines that could have been further developed. There was Tim's fellow junior at the bank who was deeply offended by Tim's advancement and worked to undercut him by, in part, informing customers that Tim had only been promoted because of his name and family connections; and another who made a practice of leaking information to the banking scandal rag. Either one could have made a story in its own right, but they both rather took the position of things that didn't kill Tim outright, thus making him stronger - and enhanced his position in the eyes of the senior executives. Thereby showing Tim himself maturing through the course of the story.

I remember vaguely back when I first read this that I was ambivalent about the changes in Francis's style. Looking at the dates, it came out in paper the year we moved overseas; I was rather preoccupied with a great many things that year. At this reading, I am finding that I am enjoying these later books more than I expected to based on my earlier impressions. Maybe it is age making the difference or maybe I was just so busy that I simply don't remember them well.

Twice Shy by Dick Francis

This is the first of what I think of as second stage Dick Francis. Whip Hand and Reflex are sort of transitional. One of the changes is simply the length of the novels. He had been running consistently between 200 and 250 pages and suddenly they are over 300. There seems to be more character development and fewer brutal beatings.

There is also a lot of technical data in some field or other, usually the career of the protagonist. In Reflex, of course, he is a photographer. So am I - and there was some information that I would not have even been able to guess at the meaning of if I hadn't spent those years at the gallery school learning and teaching alternate photoprocesses and such. In this one, it is computer geekery, extremely dated computer geekery. Perhaps not so dated for the early eighties when the book came out - on the other hand, I had been working in the field for a good few years by then and the processes he described were definitely old school even then. And he inserts a fourteen year gap while the big bad is, as they say, out of circulation, and at the end of that time his computer geeks are chunking away pretty much in exactly the same way. And we all know better than that.

Aside from that, this was a rather good fantasy. It all centers around a system for betting on horse races - that works. Francis might be considered to have cheated on his "longer story" thing here because approximately half the story is narrated by Jonathan Derry, a physics teacher who accidently stumbles onto the gambling system through the stupidity of a friend. The second part is narrated by his much younger brother, William, who, although he is legitimately involved with horse racing, gets caught up in it because the big bad is too stupid to realize that he is not his brother.

The big bad is almost more like the troll under the bridge than a human being - no character development there. The rest of the characters sit around and try to rationalize the existence of such a monster, but really don't get very far with the project.

The Price of Peace by Mike Moscoe

Definitely more story and less military action in this one, an improvement. I'm a little nervous about starting book three, though, in case he alternates - actually I suspect the next is going to involve a lot of dirty politics - almost worse. I think I'll let it wait for a while - but not so long that I will need to reread the first two. I expect that it will encompass activities which result in Grampa Ray getting elected King.

We now have two sets of Kris's great-grandparents set up. Both of the paternal units still in action in book leventy-whatever of the Kris series. The plot of this consists largely of drugs, slavery, and general mayhem with a focus on getting Grampa Trouble and Gramma Ruth hooked up, since in the previous entrant we got Grampa Ray and Gramma Rita together - and pregnant. By the way, not much time has passed, since Gramma Rita is only four months along when she enters the scene in this one and still hasn't had the baby at the end.