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.

Farthing by Jo Walton: B-

From the back cover:
Jo Walton crosses genres without missing a beat with this stunningly powerful alternative history set in 1949, eight years after Britain agreed to peace with Nazi Germany, leaving Hitler in control of the European continent. A typical gathering at the country estate of Farthing of the power elite who brokered the […]

From the back cover:
Jo Walton crosses genres without missing a beat with this stunningly powerful alternative history set in 1949, eight years after Britain agreed to peace with Nazi Germany, leaving Hitler in control of the European continent. A typical gathering at the country estate of Farthing of the power elite who brokered the deal is thrown into turmoil when the main negotiator, Sir James Thirkie, is murdered, with a yellow star pinned to his chest with a dagger.

The author deftly alternates perspective between Lucy Kahn, the host’s daughter, who has disgraced herself in her family’s eyes by marrying a Jew, and Scotland Yard Inspector Peter Carmichael, who quickly suspects that the killer was not a Bolshevik terrorist. But while the whodunit plot is compelling, it’s the convincing portrait of a country’s incremental slide into fascism that makes this novel a standout.

Review:
I’m a fan of England, mysteries, and gay-themed literature, so I expected that Farthing would be my cup of tea. As it turns out, I was quite disappointed. Though the majority of my complaint can be summed up as, “It was just kind of weirdly put together,” there are some specific areas that bothered me enough to merit their own place on a spiffy numbered list.

1. Punctuation.
I’m starting with the most minor quibble, though it did truly bug me. A couple of times there were lists of buildings or people that were improperly punctuated. Here is an example:

There was a church, larger than most, a pub, the Eversley Arms, a row of cottages, and a high wall containing a pair of wrought-iron gates…

The way that’s written, the pub and the Eversley Arms appear to be two different things. There should be a semicolon after “most” and another after “Arms.” Because of this, a later list of attendees at the gathering had me confused as to whether Lucy’s dad and the Earl of Hampshire were the same person.

2. Woefully undeveloped gay characters.
There are, if I counted correctly, eight nominally gay or bisexual characters in this book, nine if you count Lucy’s deceased brother. For some, that’s practically all that’s known about them. Frankly, it started to get ridiculous. I’m beyond cool with having gay characters, but just having a cardboard cut-out standing there with a nametag reading “Gay” on his chest does not really count.

3. A pretty boring mystery.
The investigation into this mystery was kind of meh, with Inspector Carmichael and his sergeant doing a lot of theorizing in advance of the facts. It also seemed to hinge on locating one particular girl from a photograph who, when found, blurted out the culprit pretty anticlimactically. Granted, it was obvious by that point, anyway. The impact of the increasingly fascist government upon the investigation was kind of interesting, as Carmichael had to keep in mind that whomever he arrested would be hanged (and so he had better be absolutely certain before arresting them), but also frustrating, since the innocent Jewish fellow everyone kept insisting was guilty (even when presented with evidence to the contrary) was one of the few likable characters in the book.

When I try to recall something I particularly liked, I come up empty. The conclusion was decent enough, I suppose, though the final chapter from Lucy’s point of view ended rather ominously. I will probably finish up the rest of the trilogy, because I am a completist and because I hope it gives more closure on the Lucy front. I think the other books might feature different characters, though, so I shan’t hold my breath. Neither shall I expect to enjoy them any more than I did Farthing.

J’s Take on Sixpence House by Paul Collins

I can’t remember how Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books caught my attention, but it’s clear why it did. It’s a book about a little town full of used/antiquarian bookstores. And that town is in Wales! It’s Hay-on-Wye, and I’m afraid now any trip to the UK is not only not going to […]

I can’t remember how Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books caught my attention, but it’s clear why it did. It’s a book about a little town full of used/antiquarian bookstores. And that town is in Wales! It’s Hay-on-Wye, and I’m afraid now any trip to the UK is not only not going to be complete without a trip to the Platform 9 3/4’s sign and an even geekier trip to Cardiff, but now I need to at least spend an hour or two in Hay-on-Wye.

It’s easier to describe this book before you’ve read it. Like, I probably would’ve called it a travelogue, except… for ‘travel’ there’s the assumption that you’re going to a place for a finite amount of time and then going home, or alternatively, traveling on to another place and another in a continental or world tour. But in this book, the author and his wife and small child pack up to sell their home in San Francisco and move to Wales. Without, apparently, a whole lot of research. They supposedly know the UK and Hay-on-Wye in particular, from relatives born there and from past trips, yet they’re surprised that they don’t get a real estate agent because they’re buyers, not sellers? Even I knew the real estate market there was rather goofy. And then they’re also rather surprised when all the cool, old buildings they’re interested in need a lot of upkeep, and they realize they’re not prepared for that. Heckuvan expensive and time-consuming learning experience, if you ask me.

But the book is full of random bits of information, gleaned from old books. Facts, anecdotes, quotes, and just interesting little tidbits. So you really get a sense of this town just from the way he’s written the book. A couple really stood out to me. Right at the start, we learn that the Harry Potter printruns used up most of the publishing industry’s paper for a brief period of time. Logical, amazing, amusing, and something I hadn’t heard before. True? Or just something that should be true?

Because when I finished the book, I wasn’t sure what was true and what wasn’t. Yes, this is a real town, so you might assume names have been changed to protect the innocent, but he doesn’t say this up front. And how do you write about such a small town and mention it by name and still disguise the identities of the people you’re talking about? At the end, he tells us some of the names of people and places are made up. But we don’t know which ones!

There are other parts where I questioned the honesty of what I was being presented. Where there’s a bit of dialogue in which a vital bit of information is shared in an amusing way. Did he really not know that information before that moment? Are the conversations all really that pithy and eccentric? My disbelief has trouble being suspended when I’m supposedly reading a nonfiction book, so my credulity was strained.

Interspersed with talk of the UK, Hay-on-Wye, and books, is mention of his own books. He’s in the middle of the publishing aspects of his first book. We hear about his first reading, sort of. We hear about his proof edits. We also hear about a couple of his novels that weren’t published.

Which leads into a quote I wanted to share.

… that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and “take over a book.” This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by the faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen.

He’s dead wrong here. Not all novels are written this way, and some are more about plot, setting, or theme than they are about three-dimensional characters, but many are. Once you know a character well enough, you know what they’ll say and do, and what they won’t say and won’t do, even if you need them to for the purposes of the plot. This topic is probably an essay in itself, involving references to psychology and neuroscience and our mental constructions of other people. Suffice it to say that I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t grasp this essential truth, and that it didn’t surprise me to learn that his novels had yet to be published.

At the end of the book, I rather wondered what the whole point of it was. It was like a journey without a destination. You may say the whole point is the journey, but there’s still something unsatisfying about not arriving anywhere at the end of it.

It was an amusing, entertaining read, and made me wish I cared more about old books. Unfortunately, the science fiction genre is relatively new as far as old books go, and I prefer modern fantasies to very old ones, so I have trouble coming up with any topic or author I’d be seeking out in old bookstores in Wales. Honestly, I don’t care to own an old copy of a book I already have a new copy of. It’s still the same book. So if I was seeking anything out, it’d be obscure books. How do you find obscure books of quality?

For the readability and entertainment, I’ll give this three stars. For the ending and the author’s low, for lack of a better word, likeability factor, I’m only giving it three stars.

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.

A brief convo about Farthing

K says, “So, my question for you was, do you think it was a cop-out that even though there were a ton of LGB characters in the book, some of whom were main characters, the only sex scene we saw occuring on camera was straight?”

J says “I don’t know about a copout, but it was disappointing.”

J says “I wonder if it gets any better in HaPenny.”

J says “I don’t see any reason at all why we couldn’t have a scene with.. was it Carmichael? And Jack?”

J says “It was frustrating this guy got talked about, and he was fairly important to one of the pov character’s life and we never saw him at all.”

K mms. “Well, that happens in mysteries where the main action takes place away from the character’s home. I don’t know if the next one takes place in London or not, but it wouldn’t make sense for him to have gone off to the country with Jack in tow.”

J says “No, but he went back to London, and I’m pretty sure there was one night there at least where he was home.”

K says, “Yeah, that is true. And we did see Royston’s house kinda.”

J says “Yup. His daughter twice.”

K says, “It does seem a bit odd. Perhaps it does get better in Ha’Penny, though that’s no excuse for not having this be a more fully stand-alone novel than it actually turned out to be.”

J says “Yea.”