review – Page 11 – Triple Take

The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

The Plot
Thursday Next lives in a world where time travel is possible, cloning is something everyone can do, and where the general population is as passionate about the arts as they are about religion in ours. As a result, literary forgeries, copyright infringements and book piracy are high profile crimes, and Next is a LiteraTec, a detective whose main focus is on dealing with all crimes involving literature. But even she is surprised when crimes against literature turns into crimes against literary characters: after her uncle Mycroft invents a machine that allows people to literally enter a book, it turns out that said machine can also be used to remove characters from the book into the real world. Now the master criminal Acheron Hades is threatening to destroy several of England’s most beloved classics, and Thursday Next has to stop him.

My Thoughts
I had heard good things about this series before we chose to read it, but I didn’t know (and had chosen not to find out) any details, because I wanted to go in without having been spoiled. Having had few expectations, then, it would be a bit silly to say it wasn’t as anticipated — except it wasn’t, a bit.

The world of Thursday Next is an alternate Earth of some kind. Much is similar to our own world, but much more is different. Now, in my past experience with series of books set in an alternate history of Earth, the differences tend to hinge on identifiable differences between that world and ours which have then rippled forward and caused historical divergence. For example, in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books, the big difference is the existence of dragons and their kin, and this has affected world history in ways which are still being explored. In Jo Walton’s Small Change books, the UK agreed to terms with Nazi Germany and withdrew from WWII before it really got underway, leaving many of the upper classes still able to indulge their fascist sympathies. The setting in Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy may be rather too changed to really be called an alternate history, but Strange Horizons has an incredibly in depth analysis of it available for the interested.

So what am I getting at here? Well, in all of the three examples above, the author has thought carefully about the changes they were making and how the ramifications altered the world. While reading, the worlds make internal sense. This was not the case for the setting presented in The Eyre Affair. There are plenty of changes in this alternate Earth, but they don’t seem to hang together well at all. This is a world where time travel is possible and incredibly advanced bioengineering is embarked upon by amateurs at home — and yet their computers still operate with valves and tubes? I’m sorry, what? The technology is out of whack.

There are also lots of clever asides and nudges at history embedded in the text, a number of which I’m sure I didn’t pick up on, being American and well versed in U.S. history rather than British or European. Some were important: the Charge of the Light Brigade has been shifted up a hundred years or so (the war in the Crimea is still going on as the book opens), for instance, and is an important touchstone for the heroine, Thursday Next, as she is a survivor. Others seemed, perhaps, to be setting up for future plot in the ongoing series, but this was less clear.

Part of the problem is that Fforde seems to have fallen victim to the impulse to say too much about the world, far before it was necessary. There’s a reason authors reveal things slowly and only when they need to: first, excess information can bog down the narrative and confuse the reader; second, once you’ve said something, it’s out there and you’re stuck with it — even if you have a better idea of how to handle it in a later book, when you’re actually going to focus in on it. Sure, you can retcon, but that just makes the fans angry.

A secondary result of the information packing (beyond the added confusion and internal contradictions) was that the actual real plot of the book — the danger posed to literature and to the world by Mycroft Next’s Prose Portal — felt like it didn’t ramp up until well past the midpoint of the novel. Once it did get properly underway, the narrative tightened up almost immediately and became far more readable and coherent. Enjoyable, in fact: it was a good idea and an interesting one, and I think it should have been given more pages than it was allotted. The title of the book, after all, is The Eyre Affair, not How Thursday Next Came to Be in Swindon That One Time.

In Short
This book was hampered by the fact that it wanted to be more clever than it actually was. Fforde didn’t seem to decide until halfway through if he was writing a punny Xanth romp or a novel with a plot that was going somewhere; once he settled on the latter, it got better and wrapped up not unsatisfyingly. For anyone who enjoys trying to pick out every sly reference and allusion in a work, this book would be a gold mine. For those who aren’t as enamored of such things, it’s not bad, if you can wade through the confusion of the first half (which is considerable.) Will I seek out the rest of the series? I can’t say I’m chomping at the bit, but I won’t rule it out.

Zita the Spacegirl (Ben Hatke)

The Plot
Zita and her friend Joseph are on their way home from school when a meteor crashes nearby. Upon finding a mysterious red button concealed within the meteorite, Zita naturally wants to press it — and press it she does. After this results in Joseph being kidnapped by aliens, Zita finds her courage and goes after him, knowing that she may be his only chance of getting home again.

My Thoughts
First impressions are key, they say, and this graphic novel makes a marvelous first impression. The book is in full, vibrant color and composed of sturdy, thick paper pages which not only don’t bleed through, but which look and feel like they’ll stand up very well to small hands and repeated readings.

Zita manages to live up to the great first impression. The artwork, a pleasing mixture of cute and weird, manages somehow to present a detailed and exciting setting while still remaining simple enough that the panels never feel cluttered and the characters overpowered by the backgrounds. As the story got underway, part of me couldn’t help trying to picture how the graphic novel would translate to a movie — and if said movie should be animated by Studio Ghibli or done in live action by the Jim Henson Company. (Sorry, Disney-Pixar, I don’t think you could handle it.)

The story itself is straightforward: girl in a strange land collects a group of rag-tag misfits and heads off to ~~find the wizard~~ ~~summon one of the four gods~~ rescue her friend, but it’s very well-done and effectively told through the artwork and dialogue. I was hooked from the beginning, when Zita and her friend Joseph encounter the meteorite (called a meteoroid in the text, which I’m pretty sure is only what they’re called when they’re still in space) and the mysterious red button. Joseph’s abrupt abduction leads to easily the most realistic reaction I’ve seen in a long time: Zita panics and runs away. But she masters her fears and comes back again, making her effort to rescue him clearly much more considered (and brave!) than a story in which she impulsively and recklessly leapt through the portal right away.

I really had only one major problem with this work. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of it, but it’s not a minor concern, either. It is this: after I finished the book, I sat back with a feeling of vague confusion. I could not remember a single identifiably female character other than Zita — not just among the named characters, but even as scenery in the background*. Then I wondered why I remembered all of the other named characters as male. Some of them were robots, and surely they weren’t assigned a gender? So I went back through the book again, and as it turns out, my impression was unfortunately correct. Not only is Zita the only identifiably female character in the book, every other named character (with the exception of Strong-strong) is referred to with a male pronoun.

I was shocked by this. Was this an oversight on the author’s part, or a conscious decision? Either way, it doesn’t look good. The default gender in the universe should not be ‘male’. Unfortunately, this is pretty common in properties which are aimed toward a cross-gender or male market — but that doesn’t make it okay, less offensive, or less obvious to girls that they’re being dissed. (I was one of those girls, and marketing people can say all they like about girls being willing to watch/read/enjoy things with boy characters — it may be true but we NOTICE.)

The book is good, and I’d like to see more. I can’t give author Ben Hatke a ‘bye’ for this, but I can hope he will strive to provide a more gender diverse cast in any future Zita installments.

*Toward the end, there appears to be an extremely random cameo by Marzipan, but I don’t know if I want to count that.

In Short
Zita the Spacegirl is fantastic. As a character, Zita is believable, interesting and charismatic. The artwork supports the story perfectly, and makes it feel like a movie even while remaining still on the page. I’ll certainly be purchasing a copy of my own, and I’ll probably be recommending that the library purchase it as well. The one major flaw in this work is an egregious gender imbalance, with Zita being the only female character I was able to identify in the entire book — I’m hopeful this is something the author will correct in future installments.

A review copy of Zita the Spacegirl was provided by the publisher.

J’s Take on The Eyre Affair

I’m not quite sure I knew what I was getting into when we decided to read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I’m not quite sure I knew what I was getting into when I started to read it. Or when I was in the middle of reading it. Or now that I’ve finished.

What the heck is this thing?!

Our library has labelled it Mystery. Which most likely means Fforde is typically a mystery writer. Because I can’t say there’s much of a mystery involved in this book, though there is a crime. I guess. Yet I can’t call it an alternate history either. Or science fiction. I would call it fantasy if I had to, but a fantasy reader would typically be disappointed by it. Then again, I can only assume a mystery reader would be completely confused!!

Then again again, I was completely confused!!

Just when you think you’ve got the world and the story figured out, it’d take a 90 or 180 degree turn. And not necessarily in a horizontal direction either. And to label it bizarre might make you think it was bizarre in a cool and interesting fashion. It’s not.

It’s just not.

So the premise? Okay, it’s 1985 for starters. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem for me, but it was just one more thing I had to keep reminding myself of. And it’s the UK. Erm, I think. Well, I guess not, really, since Wales is its own country. But, anyway, something resembling the UK. And it’s an alternate history, in that people are really obsessed with literature. By which is meant classic British literature for the most part, I think. Shakespeare is really big. And there are a couple of really cool points around this part of the premise. Shakespeare animatronic coin-op machines. The original manuscript of Jane Eyre being on display and a page turned every couple of days, so regulars can read it… verrry slowly. I liked that idea. It may even be true. And then there was a Rocky Horror Picture Show version of.. was it Richard III? Very big on audience participation.

Frankenfurter — The real author of Shakespeare's plays...

Shakespeare — ... is, of course, Tim Curry!

The main character is a SpecOps operative, LiteraTec, basically a book cop. And since the Dickens Chuzzlewit manuscript is stolen, well, it’s what she does, right? Or something.

So then to add to this premise, there’s a ChronoCorps, which does time travelly-fixy-uppy stuff. The main character’s Dad is one of those guys. And she ends up dabbling in it herself, of course. He tends to retroactively fit things into the time stream. So that bananas were genetically created and then planted back in the past. And things like that.

Do I need to even mention the blimps and the dodos? Probably not. Steampunk and alternative history readers won’t be at all phased by those. And, really, minor point. And nothing to do with anything.

11 days of The Doctor: Day 9 — Great Source of Potassium

Okay, so have you got your mind wrapped around all that yet? Because there’s also vampires and werewolves for no good reason.

And the bad guy is like immortal or a wizard or something I don’t even.

AND THEN! The main char’s uncle is a crackpot mad scientist, but the lovable sort, you know, and he invents something to let you go into books and change the story. And if you change the story on the original manuscript OHNOES!

If this all sounds awesome to you, more power to you, go ahead and read it. If you’re just confused, then, believe me, reading it won’t make you less confused.

Aside from all of that, the story was not, I believe, very well-written. I was halfway through the book and I felt like we were still at the setting-up-the-story phase. Sometimes there’s be odd bits of text that.. well, I thought the main char was also narrating part of it, but how could she know what was going on? She sort of guessed things she wasn’t there for. And then when it came to the big climax, I was confused. Granted my mind was also wandering because I was bored.

And then I can also quibble that in one chapter there were two misuses of the word ‘onto’. And then later on there was the reverse problem with ‘near by’.

As for the characters themselves, I felt the main character was pretty detached from her emotions. Colleagues are killed and she doesn’t seem to really feel anything. She has conversations with a man she claims to love, but they’re all very analytical conversations. She’s even pretty detached and third person narraty when she’s giving a report to her superiors about something that went down. I mean, narraty in a pseudo-literary sort of way, not a detailed-police-report kind of way.

For the whole Jane Eyre thing, I have not read Jane Eyre. Yet when they discuss the ending of it and Eyre running off to India, I did kind of guess that was a false ending. This was pretty much confirmed for me by the way that the characters in the book (Jane Eyre) are forced to do and say things that you really don’t think they would have given the narrative of this book. Kind of like reading a parallel novel where, now that we know a lot more about the secondary character of the first book who is now the main character of the second book, you can’t quite believe that character would do and say the things s/he did, but the author’s kind of stuck with the scene the way it was written the first time.

Apparently there are more books about this main character, whose name is Thursday Next, which totally reminds me..

The names in here are stupid! And none more stupid than Jack Schitt.

So there are more books in this series, but I can only imagine what they’re about. Will Next be going into another book? Who knows? Will she be messing with the past? Travelling to the future? Fighting more vampires? Eating brains because she’s been turned into a zombie? Going to Mars on a recumbent bicycle? There is just no telling. None at all.

Before I close, I probably shouldn’t neglect the Crimean War. Which is still going on. But I know nothing about the real Crimean War. Except there was one. So. Yea.

In summation, not the worst thing I’ve ever read, but possibly the most uneven hodgepodge thing I’ve ever read. And I will not be reading another thing about Thursday Next. And probably not another Jasper Fforde either.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett: B

From the back cover:
Unrepentant book thief John Charles Gilkey has stolen a fortune in rare books from around the country. Yet unlike most thieves, who steal for profit, Gilkey steals for loveâ€”the love of books. Perhaps equally obsessive, though, is Ken Sanders, the self-appointed “bibliodick” driven to catch him. Sanders, a lifelong rare book collector and dealer turned amateur detective, will stop at nothing to catch the thief plaguing his trade.

In following both of these eccentric characters, journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett plunged deep into a world of fanatical book lust and ultimately found herself caught between the many people interested in finding Gilkey’s stolen treasure and the man who wanted to keep it hidden: the thief himself.

With a mixture of suspense, insight, and humor, Bartlett has woven this cat-and-mouse chase into a narrative that not only reveals exactly how Gilkey pulled off his crimes and how Sanders eventually caught him, but also explores the romance of books, the lure to collect them, and the temptation to steal them.

Review:
When a man depicted in a nonfiction narrative is described on the back cover as someone â€œwho will stop at nothing to catch the thiefâ€ who has been victimizing members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, a reader might be forgiven for expecting some sort of chase. The clever thief. The details of his crimes. The dogged pursuer. The final, satisfying capture. The end.

But that’s not what one gets with The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. I don’t fault author Bartlett for thisâ€”she probably had little to do with the way the book was marketedâ€”but it’s rather disappointing all the same. Instead, the book is more a profile of John Gilkey, a mild-mannered guy who used a combination of identity theft and manipulative politeness to steal vast quantities of rare and valuable books. It’s not as if his methods are ingenious, it’s just that he found one that worked and employed it over and over again until enough booksellers finally pooled their information and got him caught. Until he made bail. Then stole again. And was incarcerated again. Then stole again.

The details of some of his crimes are provided, and the scenes of police investigations and sting operations are genuinely fascinating. I liked, too, that Bartlett began to wonder what her responsibilities were regarding some of the information Gilkey had divulged to her, and how much she herself had become a part of the story. Even the fact that Bartlett is more interested in why Gilkey steals than what or how is fine, but after being told for the fourth time that Gilkey steals because he wants a collection others will envy and feels entitled to have it, regardless of whether he can afford itâ€”and how, but for â€œhis crimes and his narcissistic justification of them,â€ he’s not that different from law-abiding collectorsâ€”I began to grow weary.

I admit to some peevishness over the title, as well. Gilkey is not a man who loves books, but a man who loves the status owning an impressive array of recognizable titles will bestow. Granted, that’s a little long for a book title, but as someone who genuinely loves booksâ€”for their content!â€”I am annoyed that someone who merely desires their sheer presence on a shelf gets to make the same claim.

Ultimately, those looking for a detective-style story with a definitive ending will be disappointed. Gilkey is brought to justice for only a fraction of his crimes and shows no intention of stopping any time soon. As the portrait of an obsessed thief with a grudge against those who would keep him from what he believes he deserves, the book is more successful, though somewhat repetitive.

J’s Take on The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Allison Hoover Bartlett introduces us to a bookseller on the trail of an unusual book thief, and to the book thief himself. Along the way, she and us her readers learn more about the rare book trade. Though I still find the desire to own a bunch of old books incomprehensible on a gut level.

I can understand it from a bookseller’s point of view. Heck, reading this book makes me want to learn more about rare books so I know how to spot them at library booksales! I’ve been watching a lot of Auction Kings, Pawn Stars, and American Pickers, so I can definitely see the thrill of the hunt. Discovering this expensive little gem in the midst of a bunch of worthless dusty books. That’d be cool. And then, of course, attempting to sell it at a profit. Not that many people get rich in the business..

It’s the collector’s and by extension the thief’s point of view that I can’t quite understand. I want books so I can read them. I want old books because they’re out of print and it’s the only way I can read them. I do like owning books that I like, so I know I have them and can reread them when I want. But I don’t need to own every book I’ve read, or even every book I want to read.

I own books that have been signed, but when it comes to standing in line for autographs, I sometimes wonder why I’m doing it. To have a chat with the author, or to support the author, sure. To then have a signed book I’m reluctant to read and unwilling to sell. Well.. what to do with it?

So.. why own a book that’s signed, or was owned by someone famous, or is just old. What’s so special about a first edition compared to a third or fourth? Especially if there’s no change in the text. Why?

The thief in this book wants to own an impressive library. Well, I have visions of having a large library with one of those rolling ladders. But I don’t need to fill it with books to impress people. I don’t need them to be old books, rare books, expensive books. I want it filled with cool books! Awesome books!

Will my view of this change as I get older? As I have more money to spend? As ebooks take over and print books become extinct? I dunno. Maybe, like the author of this book, I should try buying a rare book and seeing how I feel at buying it and owning it.

I dunno.

Speaking of ebooks, I have one quibble with the author. You are not allowed to disparage ebooks when you use the word ‘ebook’ to mean ‘ereader’. I would’ve even accepted ‘device’.

“Andy and his wife had each bought an e-book shortly before moving to Guadalajara. They were glad they had, since it’s nearly impossible to find books in English there, and the mail system is unreliable.”

Well, I hope they’re slow readers, that’s all! One book each to last them their whole time in Guadalajara.

Though she does then go on to say she thinks the physical books we do keep will have more meaning. And reminisces about books from her childhood and her kids’ books and whatnot. And I don’t know that I have a whole lot of books I have an emotional attachment to, as the physical object. So.. I dunno.

Reading the book made it obvious to me that there is more than one type of booklover. In fact, there may be 2 distinct types. (Or perhaps it’s a spectrum.) The ones who like books primarily for their content. And the ones who like books as objects, of which content is only a part.

Not that I don’t think most manga is pretty. Not that I don’t love the look and feel of the Doctor Who and Torchwood books (over and above the lackluster content). But few publishers are making books I love in that sort of way.

One other thing bugged me. Along about 2/3rds of the way in, she starts foreshadowing how she got all caught up in the thief and faced a moral, ethical, legal dilemma as he revealed more and more about this thieving to her. And the foreshadowing lends you to think that she’ll go to jail, or she’ll testify against him, or he’ll commit suicide, or.. something. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that all that foreshadowing didn’t appear to lead up to anything to me! Maybe it was too subtle for me.

It was rather cool though to see how a book we read here on Triple Take had a great influence on the thief. The book is Booked to Die by John Dunning. This book would’ve reminded me of that book even if it hadn’t been mentioned.

This review is much more about me than about the book, but I’m okay with that! As I said, the book was interesting, and if you’re interested in learning more about the rare book trade or the mind of a thief, definitely you should read it. You can skip Booked to Die though. We all agreed it was mediocre at best.