k – Page 14 – Triple Take

The Sharing Knife: Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight […]

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight a surprisingly strong malice, and Fawn is left at camp for a time to fend for herself. The pair are finally reunited after several harrowing experiences that still don’t convince the Lakewalkers of Fawn’s worth as a person. In the end, Dag and Fawn break ties with the camp and set off on their own.

My Thoughts
In the first book, very little about the Lakewalker home life is revealed to the reader, and the reader is left to draw conclusions based on inference and a tiny bit of actual information. It’s very easy to fall into the assumption, which I freely admit doing, that because the Lakewalkers presented such a contrast to the farmers in how they viewed and treated women, their culture must be more liberal and open. We discover pretty quickly in Legacy that such is not the case. In fact, the Lakewalkers are mostly a bunch of dicks.

Dag begins the book immediately on the defensive, much to Fawn’s dismay. She feels that his family (and culture in general) can’t really be that bad, and that she’ll have a shot at winning them over in the way he did most of her family. Resulting events suggest that he was correct, though it’s not clear to me that the outcome was completely inevitable. All the same, it was not very evitable and the sequence of events did not strain my view of the characters or their world very much.

We spend the first third of the book dealing with Fawn and Dag’s arrival at Hickory Lake camp and the assorted reactions of the Lakewalkers to their marriage. It’s here that the arrogance and calcification of the Lakewalker world view becomes clear. We learn more about the background of the world, which is apparently post-apocalyptic: at some point in the distant, distant past, a group of genetically enhanced “Lords” caused a disaster from which sprang the seeds that grow into malices. This disaster also drastically reduced the human population and led to the loss of most advanced technology and historical records from that time. The Lakewalkers, with their abilities to see and manipulate ground, feel that they are the descendants of these enhanced beings, and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their decision not to rule over the inferior farmers.

It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the Lakewalkers, in separating themselves from the farmers, have completely lost touch with the reality of the world and are falling behind technologically. Though Dag attempts to cast the problem in terms of Malice threat — what if the Malice comes up in a farmer city with well-trained craftsmen — it isn’t hard to extrapolate that pretty soon the farmers are going to lose their last thread of patience with the Lakewalkers’ bad attitude and may be fed up enough to attempt to rid themselves of their presence. This, of course, would be a disaster for everyone, but the farmers don’t know it and the Lakewalkers are too full of themselves to pass this information along.

This problem eventually comes to a head when, after several situations where Fawn again and again proves herself as capable and smart as Lakewalkers, Dag’s mother and brother make a last maneuver to try and get her thrown out of the camp and the marriage annulled. Dag has had enough, and realizes that he’s never going to figure out how to solve the problem of Lakewalker/Farmer friction if he stays in camp, so tells everyone off and then declares that he’s getting the hell out. The Lakewalkers are shocked, since their worldview does not permit even the idea that someone would prefer to live other than with their awesomeness.

After this scene, it became clear to me that the whole book had been working up to this point, and that what I thought was the goal — for Fawn and Dag to work within the Lakewalkers to effect change — was never the point at all. Dag needed to see that a single pair within the camp was simply not enough pressure to dislodge their very entrenched attitudes. So they leave in search of more leverage, though I couldn’t figure at that point what it might be.

Throughout the book an additional sub plot continues with Dag’s exploration of grounds, healing, and the relationship between what malicies do and what the Lakewalkers do. It seems mostly incidental here in spite of Dag’s vague angst about it all, but will probably be important later.

In Short
I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as the first one. The romance seemed to take a backseat to the description of Lakewalker society and attitudes. While all of the information is useful and important to the continuing series plot, it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the character development of Fawn and Dag as individuals and more importantly the development of them as a couple. I find them far more compelling when they’re together and operating as a team than when they are apart, and it felt like they spent a great deal of this book divided. On the other hand, a weak Bujold is still much better than most other books, and this one was necessary in many ways to further the actual plot now that the romance was solidly established.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Fawn Bluefield, young, unmarried, and unhappily pregnant, has left her family’s farm and headed for the “big city” in search of a less embarrassing and painful future. She runs into more trouble than expected on the road, and finds herself being chased by a malice, or blight bogle. Dag Redwing, a Lakewalker […]

The Plot
Fawn Bluefield, young, unmarried, and unhappily pregnant, has left her family’s farm and headed for the “big city” in search of a less embarrassing and painful future. She runs into more trouble than expected on the road, and finds herself being chased by a malice, or blight bogle. Dag Redwing, a Lakewalker patroller in pursuit of the same malice, rescues her once, and then assists her in killing the malice. The experience unfortunately costs the life of Fawn’s fetus and causes something strange to happen to a Sharing Knife belonging to Dag. The two soon succumb to mutual attraction in spite of the sure objections of both of their peoples.

My Thoughts
Bujold is one of the few authors I can read most anything by. I’m a big fan of her Vorkosigan series, but I also liked Chalion, and the other random short stories I’ve read. So I was pre-disposed to like this series as well. In fact, the chance of win was 99.999999%, and because of her own statements that the books were pretty closely linked and would definitely be coming out one after the other, I decided to wait until all were released before reading any of them.

In this series, Bujold decided to try something different. These first two books were written without a contract, without a deadline or any sort of external publishing force requiring her to stick to a certain subject or theme. So she was able to write what she wanted and experiment — or not experiment, as the case may have been — with themes and conflicts she found interesting. And, if one is familiar with her earlier work, the subjects she returns to here should not be especially surprising. Emotional battery, women’s health and fertility, and disability have all been explored by her in previous efforts, and they are again important in Beguilement. [Bujold herself has written a bit about her motivations in writing this series, both on

Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. […]

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. Ben’s friend Alice, a perpetual grad-student lesbian, eventually decides to head to New York as well, after the San Francisco area starts to wear on her.

My Thoughts
This 2007 graphic novel comes from author Adrian Tomine, who is apparently known more for short stories than longer fiction. This means little to me, since I had never heard of this person until now and have read nothing else written by them. [I had to stop here and look the author up, because the androgynous name made me uncertain of his gender. It’s a guy.] The subject matter is not really my cup of tea; I can’t say I’m a fan of whiny slackers, regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation. If this hadn’t been a graphic novel, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to read this in the first place.

The graphics of the graphic novel are not really that groundbreaking. The artist has chosen to stick strictly to panels and keep all of the art within each panel. The size shifted between a 1/6th size box and a 1/9th size box. Your average Calvin & Hobbes strip showed more dynamic art and experimentation with the form than you’re going to find here. There were, at least, no giant deformed hands showing up in the panels, and everyone was pretty much proportional.

I found the characters themselves as lackluster as the graphic depiction of them. Ben, the main character, always behaved and looked as if he was sleepwalking, no matter what the situation he found himself in. Everyone else generally sported a tired and slumped air as well. An aura of boredom with life just oozed from every situation and conversation.

There’s very little plot to support these situations and conversations, unfortunately, as we become spectators in a short period of the life of Ben. He drifts from home to work to hanging out with Alice and back again without really making any connection at all with the reader, either to engage their sympathy or to rile them or anything. He is as blah as his existance, and the only real emotion he can create is impatience with his passivity.

There were a couple of positive points amidst all this mediocrity, however. I like the author’s choice to include several conversations in non-English (one in Korean and a few bits in Japanese). I’m not crazy about the fact that translations don’t seem to be readily available, because though I was able to ferret out more or less what was going on in the Japanese, the Korean was beyond me, and I’d like to know what was said. Another choice I liked was the author’s tendency to skip through time without waiting for it to be a new page or creating a new chapter or even feeling the need to put up a little tag in the next panel stating “Later”, like so many others might have done. It was made clear through the conversation or the art that time had passed. There was also no forced exposition describing what we’d missed — everything was not spelled out, so the reader was left to draw their own conclusions about the resolution of several situations.

In Short
Overall, I didn’t find this graphic novel to be anything special. It was decidedly middle of the road in terms of the drawings and the plot. The artistic effort was adequate, but I don’t feel like it broke any new ground or dazzled me with its brilliance. The writing ditto. I find it ironic that the complaint of one of the characters — about bad movies being praised simply because they were created by an Asian American — may also apply to this graphic novel, because I don’t quite understand why it’s considered so great. The relationship issues explored here have been done before, if not with this particular cast of characters. I definitely would not call this a must read, but neither do I feel annoyed that I spent the time to read it.

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (L. Frank Baum)

The Plot
One day, a human infant is discovered by the immortals living in the Forest of Burzee. A wood nymph named Necile finds herself drawn to him and ends up taking responsibility for his care. Once he grows up, the young man, known as Claus, settles in a valley just outside the forest. […]

The Plot
One day, a human infant is discovered by the immortals living in the Forest of Burzee. A wood nymph named Necile finds herself drawn to him and ends up taking responsibility for his care. Once he grows up, the young man, known as Claus, settles in a valley just outside the forest. He visits nearby human villages and becomes friends with all the children there. He carves wooden toys for them to play with and eventually finds his purpose in life by bringing toys and treats to all the children of the world. Eventually, the immortals decide to let him join their number so that he can continue his efforts forever.

My Thoughts
L. Frank Baum, the author of this book, is much more well known for one of his other inventions: Oz. This one sort of overlaps with those, as Santa makes a brief visit to the Emerald City for Ozma’s birthday party in The Road to Oz, but otherwise this tale, taking place as it does on “Earth” of the far distant past, is separate and self-contained when compared to the mainline Oz and even some of the other books set in the Baum universe. This is fortunate, because the Oz books especially suffer very much from revisionist history syndrome, with the backstory changing frequently and contradictions arising all over the place. They are still lovely stories (I did name my daughter Dorothy, after all), but they are not internally consistent.

This particular tale by Baum, originally published in 1902 (and consequently out of copyright), is also more well known in another form — it served as the basis for a Rankin and Bass stop motion Christmas special. It was on my memory of this special that I’d long ago formed the intention of reading the original book. I had hoped to catch it on television this year so I could refresh my mind and compare the two, but I managed to miss the lone airing it got on ABC Family one early morning. BitTorrent was also a wash, but YouTube came to my rescue. And, as it turns out, I was confusing this special with another one called “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”! The actual special and the book’s plot are fairly close, though the former is simplified and several characters are composites or added to provide an easy method of exposition.

The book is divided into three parts: Claus’s youth in the forest with the Wood Nymphs, his early adulthood and the trials he faced in establishing himself, and finally his mature years, where he dealt with the dual problems of running a global business and serving an increasing population.

In the first section, Baum takes the approach of having Claus raised away from mankind, thus remaining innocent of the world and its problems until he is grown. Even after he comes into contact with other humans, he retains a childlike quality, allowing him to remain detached from the economic, social and political problems of adults. He is uninterested in them and focuses instead on the children, desiring to fill their lives — which, unlike his own childhood, must be lived out in harsh reality — with happiness and fun.

Once Claus starts interacting with the outside world, Baum begins to focus on his slow transformation into Santa and the creation of the traditions surrounding him. It is, of course, impossible to read this story, and any other story in which adults take a pointed interest in children and their doings, without wrestling with twenty-first century cynicism and sex offender panic. These feelings, forced upon us not just by the sex offenders themselves, but also by a fear mongering, sensationalistic government and media, make it difficult to evaluate the story within the context of its era and its original intent. There isn’t much here that could be misinterpreted, but I don’t doubt that it would be possible to do so.

There are only a small handful of children who receive enough individual attention to get names of their own. For the most part, the human populace is dealt with as a generic whole, with persons and places more or less interchangeable. I think this is a good choice, since it avoids the sense that judgements are being made upon cultures and ways of life. There’s just one real scene where the representation of a family is questionable, but even that brief bit is very vague and open to many interpretations.

This book, similar to a number of other Baum books, does not have a central villain or obstacle that Santa must overcome (other than his own mortality); the obstacles he does face are mostly isolated and do not return once conquered. The chapters, though arranged chronologically, are not always direct continuations of what came immediately prior. They’re more like a collection of anecdotes about Santa over the course of his first sixty or so years.

My favorites of the anecdotes center on Santa’s nighttime visits to houses, after he’s expanded his operations enough to begin requiring reindeer assistance. During his initial efforts, he is chagrined to discover that all the house doors are locked and everyone is asleep, making it impossible for him to get inside and deliver his toys. He finally lights upon the chimneys as a convenient alternative means of entrance, and uses that successfully for quite some time. Until! The relentless advance of technology eventually renders the chimney flues too skinny for him to use. He nearly gets stuck several times before one of his fairy helpers mentions in passing that they can walk through walls. You can practically hear Santa think, “And WHY am I still stuffing myself through chimneys?!”

In Short
Overall, this is a really cute Santa Claus origin story, suitable for any age. The Oz books were and are popular for a reason, and Baum’s imagination is in good form here as well. The story only suffers a little from Baum’s tendency to make up a multitude of fanciful places and names, and for the most part, these are not superfluous to the plot. With the accompanying special to recommend it, I’m surprised this book isn’t more popular.

Sixpence House (Paul Collins)

The Plot
This is a memoir, and more a string of events than a story with a plot. However, the basic premise is that the author, his wife and their toddler decide to give up life in San Francisco in favor of moving to a village in Wales. Here, the lovely country air and the […]

The Plot
This is a memoir, and more a string of events than a story with a plot. However, the basic premise is that the author, his wife and their toddler decide to give up life in San Francisco in favor of moving to a village in Wales. Here, the lovely country air and the peaceful British countryside will provide their child with the perfect setting for growing up.

My Thoughts
The author, Paul, and his wife, Jennifer, are finding life in the big city of San Francisco to be less than ideal for raising a child. So they dispose of their place in California and head to the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, where they have vacationed several times in the past. Note that Paul is the American born child of British citizens and as such is considered a British national by that country, so just up and moving there is not as complex as it might be. The action in this book also takes place pre-9/11 (specifically during the year 2000) so all craziness introduced by that incident is not yet in place.

Both Paul and Jennifer appear to be writers, and not employed in such a way that they’re tied to a geographic location. This and Paul’s citizenship status remove the biggest obstacles to indulging in their whim, and so they proceed to Wales. When they arrive, they establish themselves at a B&B and begin looking for a more permanent residence. It does not take them too long to locate an apartment which they can take for a longer period of time and they move in above one of the forty bookshops in the town.

The remainder of the book details their efforts and failure to locate a suitable house to purchase, and their eventual decision to give up and return to the United States.

It’s hard to discuss the book itself without making judgements upon the actions taken by the author and his family, so I’m going to get that out of the way first. I think their plan was poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. Though they had visited the town several times previously, they did not appear to have any real idea about the real estate market in the area and they had only the vaguest of notions about the neighborhood aside from the fact that there were bookstores around. Their search for a house was lackluster at best, as they apparently looked at only three or four houses during their entire effort. And then, when they decided that Hay-on-Wye was not the town for them, instead of looking nearby for a more suitable location, they packed it in and returned to the United States. It was all very odd.

Now, how much of the oddness stems from the way the tale was told, I cannot say. It is entirely possible that there were lengthy conversations and much house hunting which took place off camera and was neither alluded to nor described in any way. In fact, I know there must have been at least a few discussions which were not related to the reader, as we are informed of the family’s imminent return to the U.S. as a sort of aside, in the author’s thoughts as he converses with a resident of the town.

As one might guess from this, the narrative itself is very episodic, jumping from one event to the next and glossing over details which, while not necessary, would give more insight into the people in the book. At many points I felt like the author started a thread and then dropped it without resolution. For instance, at the beginning of the book we find ourselves in London, where Paul has agreed to do a freelance article about how some old conduits are being used now for fibre optic cables. This all ties in somehow with green construction, and he goes around London looking for examples of this. He doesn’t find any right away, and we never hear what happened with this article, the proceeds from which were supposed to cover part of the costs of moving to Wales from California. Did he ever write it? Did he make stuff up? What happened? The reader is left hanging.

This sort of thing happens over and over again throughout the book. Paul is hired to organize a section at one of the bookshops in town, owned by the man who made the town into the used bookshop haven it is today. He works on it diligently for a good fraction of the book, and then suddenly he mentions that he is done working there, with no real explanation as to why. Was he finished? Did he quit? What happened? The family looks at several houses, and clearly they do not end up buying any of them, but the interactions with the current owners trail off without any satisfying conclusions.

In the midst of these unfinished anecdotes that make up the bulk of the story are little bits of information and quotations which the author has pulled from old books, obscure and not so obscure. For many of these inserts he provides a proper citation, with the book of origin’s title, author and date of publication. And for others he provides no citation at all, throwing them out as random bits of trivia. Random bits of hard to check trivia. I know this isn’t a scholarly work, but if you’re going to say things that sound too odd to be true, then surely you’re well aware of how they sound and of the potential need to back these assertions up with proof. Some sources might have been nice.

The writing itself flowed well and struck just about the right note of humor. I kept wanting to compare him to John Hodgman; he certainly isn’t in the same class as Hodgman or even Dave Barry at his best, but the prose was very readable, and the selections from older books were varied and interesting. I would like to compare him to Bill Bryson or Peter Mayle but, alas, I have not yet gotten around to reading either of them, so I can’t.

In Short
The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the author acknowledges midway through the book, when Sixpence House finally appears for the first time. It seems, at times, that the author could not decide if this was a straight up memoir or a collection of anecdotes tied together by various bits of obscure quotation from out of print books. It was interesting to read, though I wish he could have made up his mind as to which direction he was going to go. The book would have been better for being more focused, with more attention being paid to either tightening up the stories or packing in info from even more random books. These issues are probably as much a result of poor editing as they are the author’s scattered attention. But while it was not the best book ever, it did provide a fascinating little glimpse of Hay on Wye, and I do now intend to attend the Hay Festival at some point.