My Writing.

Picture a great turtle moving through space. Balanced on the backs of the four elephants riding its shell is a pancake-flat planet. This is the Discworld, and its inhabitants have no doubt that it's flat. The concerns of the Disc's citizens aren't all that different from those of our world. They're just trying to get along as well as they can.

In Moving Pictures, the tenth Discworld novel, a wild idea leaks through a time-space hole into the Discworld, bringing with it dreams of a place called Holy Wood. At the same time, the alchemists of the city of Ankh-Morpork discover the secret of making "octo-cellulose," a substance that, while highly volatile, can have pictures painted on it (by tiny demons in a box). Light can be shown through the resulting film and by moving the pictures very quickly, educational and historical stories can be shown.

Until, that is, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, purveyor of extremely suspect sausages, comes to Holy Wood. CMOT can sell anything, and what he wants to sell right now is moving pictures (or "clicks," as they're called from the noise the handles of the moving picture boxes make). Thrilles! Chilles! 1,000 Elephants! Suddenly, "educational and historical" goes out the window in favor of such wonders as Valley of Blud (the inhabitants of the Disc aren't much for standardized spelling) and the epic story of love set against the civil war of Ankh-Morpork, Blown Away.

In the middle of all this are Victor, a student wizard who has managed to spend his entire career intentionally just failing his final exams, Ginger, a milkmaid turned actress, and scruffy Gaspode the [talking] Wonder Dog, who principally wonders why the stupid but gorgeous Laddie should have a better shot at Holy Wood stardom than he. And it is the three of them who discover that Holy Wood's dreams are masking the attentions of some fairly nasty creatures from outside the Disc, who want desperately to be inside. Now it's up to them to save the Disc from moving picture monsters.

The recently-knighted Terry Pratchett is a master of...well, just about everything, most especially wonderfully witty prose and sharp satire, and in Moving Pictures, he turns his attention to -- obviously -- the motion picture industry. He skewers everyone from movie execs to star-struck audiences; in one scene, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, attending the premiere of Blown Away wonders who the nice young couple (the stars of the click) are seated next to him, and why they're considered to be as important as he is, and why on the Disc people who would never dream of fawning on him are, in fact, fawning on them.

One reviewer, who is frequently quoted on the covers of the Discworld novels, once compared Pratchett's works to Tolkien's, "only with a sharper, more satirical edge." It would be far more accurate to compare his works to Douglas Adams's Hitchchikers trilogy (with the exception of the downright depressing fifth book) or to Monty Python. Where The Lord of the Rings is serious and -- at times -- ponderous, displaying Tolkien's scholarship and weighted with his attempt to build a specifically English mythology, the Discworld is more like our own world, and Pratchett uses it like a fun-house mirror to reflect all our own absurdities.

Oh... and did I mention that it's funny?

Cross-posted to webofbooks.

In a house on Whitward Street lived a family with three daughters. The eldest, Ivy, was the sensible one. Lily, the middle daughter, was far too enamoured of romances, while Rose, the youngest, was a bit...shy. Unfortunately for the Lockwells, Mr. Lockwell had gone quite mad some years before, so Mrs. Lockwell had done her best to raise her daughters mostly alone. While all mothers dream of high marriages for their daughters -- and Mrs. Lockwell was certain Ivy had snared the attention of a certain gentleman -- it was unlikely that the Lockwell daughters would do nearly so well as their mother hoped.

The setting of The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is very similar to early eighteenth-century England, the England we know from Pride and Prejudice, but Altania is not our Earth. This planet is, instead, part of a solar system of twelve planets, one of which has such a long revolutionary period that it has not been seen in the heavens since before recorded history. It is known only as part of myth and fable. But now it returns, bringing magical danger with it.

The book is oddly constructed in three parts. "Oddly," because the first and third part take place in the Altanian city of Invarel (analogous to London) and have multiple third-person viewpoint characters, while the middle part is a first-person narrative by Ivy Lockwell that can be best compared to Jane Eyre, and the tone is somewhat different from the other two sections.

It was Galen Beckett's stated intention to explore what would happen if there were a "fantastical cause underlying the social constraints and limited choices confronting a heroine in a novel by Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë." It is not surprising, then, that The Magicians and Mrs. Quent should read like a novel written by either of those two ladies. Or both, actually, given the differences between the sections.

The book is very entertaining, and the magic, while an integral part of the plot, is more or less downplayed. One point of interest is that days and nights are not of fixed duration as our own are, so a very long "lumenal" might be followed by a much shorter "umbral" or vice versa.

Such a short summary does not nearly do justice to a plot which involves marriage, magic, highwaymen, revolution and agents of the Crown. Fans of Austen or Brontë who are willing to take a chance on a fantasy novel (and I know that many people are -- somewhat short-sightedly -- not) would probably enjoy it.

Cross-posted to webofbooks

Aunt Dimity was dead, to begin with. Yes, the title character of the Aunt Dimity mystery series is a ghost. Well...actually, she's not a ghost, technically, she's a haunted journal. When main character Lori Shepherd speaks to the leatherbound journal, Aunt Dimity replies in a neat copperplate hand.

Aunt Dimity: Snowbound is the ninth or tenth book in series -- I can't keep track, anymore, and the titles aren't listed in the book. This deep in the series, a pattern for the stories has become apparent: Lori will go off somewhere without her husband (or if he does go with her, he will spend most of his time offstage), but with Aunt Dimity's journal and her stuffed rabbit Reginald (a gift from Aunt Dimity while she was still alive). She will meet a few new people and run into a mystery. She will be tempted by a handsome man, but will do her best to remember that she is married and has twin sons waiting for her at home. She will manage to humiliate or embarrass herself around the middle of the book because of her suspicions, but it will all turn out right in the end. But just because there's a formula doesn't mean that the book isn't entertaining.

In this entry in the series, Lori, with Aunt Dimity and Reg in her pack, goes for a day hike. However, she manages to miss her trail and get lost. Then an unforecast blizzard sets in, forcing her to take shelter along with two other lost hikers in Ladythorne Abbey. The Abbey is fully furnished, though not inhabited, and her suspicions are immediately roused by the fact that Wendy, one of her fellow hikers, carries a pry bar and lied about trying the abbey's front door. It's a good thing the caretaker's on the grounds and that Jamie, the third hiker, is such a nice, strapping fellow, because it's clear that Wendy is up to no good.

It is an interesting coincidence that three Americans hiking in England all sought shelter in the home of Lucasta DeClerke, though. Especially when Miss DeClerke so violently loathed Americans right up to her death. Or so says the caretaker.

Things are not, of course, what they seem and by the end of the novel, Lori's preconceived notions have been turned upside down, helped along by Mr. Catchpole the caretaker and Aunt Dimity

Conjuror Edward Moon is a handsome, charismatic man, popular in the best circles. But his assistant is by far the more eye-catching of the two. The Somnambulist is freakishly tall, mute, drinks only milk, and can suffer numerous swordthrusts with no apparent damage. The two are good friends, even living together beneath their theatre. And when London's finest occasionally request Moon's assistance with a case, the Somnambulist is right there to back him up.

Moon, like Sherlock Holmes before him, is subject to ennui unless he has a case to engage his wits. Unfortunately, cases have been few and far between of late. But when a wretched actor is thrown from a tower, Moon and the Somnambulist are drawn into a bizarre mystery that will, in the end, threaten London itself.

This novel hooked me right from the first paragraph: Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it. After that, there was no chance that I wouldn't finish it, and as quickly as possible.

The Somnambulist is a marvelous, convoluted tale. Within its labyrinthine twists are a man who lives backward, a totally unreliable narrator who confesses to lying to the reader, secret organizations, bizarre nightmare Tweedle-Dee and -Dum assassins, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Barnes' lyrical writing complements his just-post-Victorian setting and, combined with the inspired madness of the plot, makes this novel very difficult to put down.

Cross-posted to webofbooks

I posted about this book last year, after reading it the first time, but what the heck, here's another: ( Ysabel )

Hôtel Transylvania is the first book in the long-lived Saint-Germain series. Having recently read the nineteenth (set in late-Imperial Rome) and the twentieth (set in early nineteenth-century Europe) novels in the series, I was curious to see how it all began.

The novel is set amid the grandeur of mid-eighteenth-century Paris during the reign of Louis XV, 40 some years before La Revolution. Le Comte Saint-Germain is a mysterious figure in Parisian society: a foreigner -- though no one knows whence he hails -- he is filthy rich, a composer and musician, and dresses always in black and white. He is cultured and popular, especially with the ladies, though his attentions to them are always strictly within the bounds of honor.

This first book of the series takes place approximately three-quarters of a century prior to the latest. Where Hero in Borne in Blood is jealous of Saint-Germain's affection for Madelaine de Montalia, in this book, Madelaine is the heroine. She is a young noblewoman who was promised to a circle of Satanists by her father before her birth. Her father later repents of his actions and involvement with the Circle and flees Paris, but when Madelaine goes to Paris to visit her aunt, the Circle comes to claim her, and her only hope is Le Comte Saint-Germain with whom she has fallen in love.

Saint-Germain, of course, is a vampire, born some four thousand years ago. However, Hôtel Transylvania isn't really a vampire book, in the way that, say, Dracula or some of the current paranormal romances or urban fantasies are. The point is not that Saint-Germain is a vampire; the word is used, in fact, fewer than ten times in the course of the novel. Yes, his vampiric nature comes in handy for rescuing Madelaine, but at its core, this is a love story between Madelaine and Saint-Germain (but not of the squishy romancey variety).

As is fitting for the first novel in a series, Hôtel Transylvania sets the pattern for the rest of the series. The book begins with a letter and each chapter ends with a piece of correspondence, sometimes from characters that appear in no other way (which is, in fact, how Madelaine appears in the aforementioned Borne in Blood).

Because the author is also a historian, eighteenth-century Paris really comes to life. I am looking forward to reading more of this series.

The seventh novel in this little-known series appeared with this past weekend with no fanfare ... what? Oh, sorry, must've been Confunded, there.( No Real Spoilers, But Nevertheless... )