Novelish

Fantasy series in general seem to have a habit of mysteriously expanding, I’ve noticed, and this time it’s Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance trilogy - uh, I mean, cycle. It’s going to be four books now.

I’ve always been extremely critical of Eragon and Eldest, and this latest development makes me even less excited about the future books in the series. In a video on Alagaesia.com, Paolini talks about searching for a good ending place to leave the third book and deciding on the death of a major character. (It wasn’t clear whether this character was destined to die at that point regardless, or if it was only conceived to make a good finale.) But even so, I’m not convinced a story originally planned as one volume could work as well as two.

The third book is scheduled to release on September 23rd, 2008.

Here’s a frame of the video I mentioned (full version available here):

• The first interesting thing about this is, well, it’s where he writes. I can’t help finding a writer’s workspace interesting - even a writer whose books I don’t like.
• The second interesting thing is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Behind his right shoulder. Seeing that increases my respect for him just a little bit. I don’t immediately recognize any of the other spines, but leave a comment if you happen to, ’cause I’d be interested.

This is a bit… odd. I’ve subscribed to Publisher’s Weekly for two years, and although I really enjoy browsing their bestseller lists, articles, and book reviews, I don’t want to spend $240 to renew again - at least not just yet.

They’ve already sent me the standard renewal messages - two or three of them - but today I received a more sternly worded notice by email:

Your subscription to Publishers Weekly ends this month and frankly I am surprised we haven’t heard from you.

We’re not only going to have to stop sending you your copy of Publishers Weekly, but we are now forced to deny access to PublishersWeekly.com. As you know, we’ve given you complete access to PublishersWeekly.com as part of your subscription. But now that relationship is about to end.

Feels rather like I’m being punished for something horrid.

No, really. He was in love with Grindelwald - a revelation that reportedly led to several minutes of cheering from the audience.

More information in the link, but J.K. Rowling finished by saying: “I had to give you something to talk about for the next ten years… just imagine the fan fiction now.”

And, honestly, my first thought was of the childlike excitement this would give the fan fiction community. There’s already a discussion about it on FictionAlley.

I just got back from Ursula K. Le Guin’s reading of Powers at the University Bookstore in Seattle. Exciting, no?

Pictured above: Duane giving the introduction. Duane is the University Bookstore’s fantasy specialist, sort of. I don’t know his official job title. He is very awesome, however.

And here’s Ursula Le Guin; after reading a passage of Powers - as well as a poem that someone in the audience requested - she answered a few questions.

I’ll copy down what I remember of the Q&A below. Disclaimer: I believe I accurately captured the essence of what was said, but I’m writing this several hours later. It’s possible that I may have made a small mistake or two.

• The world of The Western Shore series and Powers isn’t based on any particular country or culture - it’s her world, an invented world. The northern parts of it resembles Scotland in some ways… but she’s only been to Scotland once and doesn’t really knows what it’s like there.
• On differences between writing life in 1955 and 2005: the largest change for her is that, after a few decades, she’s getting paid for her books. (Presumably meaning paid enough to live on.) Writing is not a very romantic pursuit, she explains, in response to an audience member bringing it up. It involves a lot of sitting alone. For the writer that may be enjoyable - they’re lost within in their own worlds, after all - but definitely not biography material.
• Does she have an ending planned out when she begins? Basically, yes. She doesn’t work very well without an idea of where something is going; she needs a “strong conviction” of where it’s headed. But sometimes where it’s headed will change - and a lot of how the characters get to where they’re headed isn’t planned at all beforehand.
• She belongs to a poetry group that will give a monthly assignment, usually involving some specific form (e.g. a sonnet). She finds that having the structure laid out can be a really good thing in helping the words come out. (I believe the word “liberating” was used, even though you might think it’s the opposite.)
• She is a very fast reader. In regards to how she allocates time, reading is something she usually does when she’s tired, since writing can be a lot of work. She often reads in the early afternoon or at night, which would presumably mean she writes in the morning.
• She likes languages a lot, inventing them and so forth. She identifies with Tolkien in this way, as that’s something he did, too.
• She thinks she’s taken the Earthsea books to where she wanted them to be, so it’s unlikely that there will be another.
• She’s also unlikely to return to the space opera genre. Previously, the idea that humans were headed for space seemed possible. She feels this gave some credibility to the genre among readers, and also made it more appealing to her to write. But today, it doesn’t seem so realistic.
• There are only so many paragraphs about traveling you can do before it starts to get boring, so sometimes corners have to be cut; horse-travel is one corner that shouldn’t be cut and often is. All too often, riders will travel at a gallop for an entire day, only to jump off and go about their business as usual at the end of it. The poor horses would be left exhausted, desperately in need of some food and water, and likely unable to keep up a similar pace the next day - but in so much fantasy none of that is ever mentioned.
• Writing about invented worlds gives her the opportunity to be political and talk about current events (Iraq is mentioned) without, well, talking about them. Many people don’t like to be preached to too directly. Many people don’t like hearing about politics in a direct way because they already hear about it all the time from many sources - they want an escape of some sort. History doesn’t offer a very good one, as it constantly reminds you of current events. Fiction, on the other hand, does, even if it’s very political at the core.

More pictures after the break.

[Read more]

This will contain some spoilers.

Everything I said about the characters and writing style - and, yes, being entertained - in my Twilight review is also true of New Moon. I won’t repeat myself.

For the first half (or two-thirds, or something like that) I was liking New Moon more than Twilight. The atmosphere of mystery/suspense/danger builds up really well. Bear sightings are mentioned near the beginning and get increasingly serious as time goes on; Jacob tells Bella that he’s worried about strangely-acting family, before starting to act a bit odd himself; et cetera.

I also really like the setting of rainy northwest forests - for whatever reason, I can imagine them all splendidly.

But as with the first book in the series, I felt that New Moon’s ending was too disconnected to everything else. This time it’s not vampire baseball but Bella’s decision to go cliff-diving that triggers a chain of events, but it’s still coincidental. Now, I don’t think Edward running off to Italy works very well, period. However, if he has to, it would have made more sense had it been the result of Bella getting in danger with something to do with the werewolves.

New Moon didn’t end soon enough. I think we can safely call the height of the action/conflict the moment when Bella runs to Edward through the Italian squares, church-bells tolling obligingly in the background - the subsequent chat with Italian vampires is more of an aftermath thing. That means there are slightly over 100 pages between the height of the action and the end of the book.

Having 100 pages of “post-action end material” is usually a bad idea - unless you’re Tolkien, of course - but I didn’t even think it was good end material this time. It would be better to have Edward and Bella hook up in Italy, strongly hinting that Bella will become a vampire soon, then pull down the curtains. The rest could’ve fit better in the third book.

Related Novelish entries:

• Twilight
• Eclipse (coming soon)

Having recently finished Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse, it seems like a good time to get around to reviewing the series from the beginning. I’ll start with something positive. It’s one of the more entertaining books I’ve read this year.

Now, the rest:

I’m ashamed that Twilight entertains me, because it’s
such unadulterated literary crap. (The Eragon of the teen romance, if you will. I’m sure that is all the description necessary to send many writers fleeing in horror.)

The book starts with the main character and narrator, Bella Swan, moving to Washington State to live with her father. She soon falls “unconditionally and irrevocably” in love with Edward Cullen.

User “romancenovel” on livejournal puts this well:

[I] found Bella falling in love with Edward to be completely unrealistic. Lust, probably. Some sort of hormonal state that approximates love, perhaps. But Twoo Wuv (TM)? Right away? At seventeen, never having experienced anything before, and with little knowledge of what true love might be? And ready to live with him eternally despite not knowing which side of the bed he prefers to sleep on, or whether or not he leaves his socks strewn around the living room? Come on. Very teenager-ish, very Romeo-and-Juliet, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of her ’smart’, ‘middle-aged’ character.

And Edward Cullen? Not to get caught up on quoting other people or anything, but:

[F]rankly, Edward Cullen is kind of a dick. He’s high-handed and autocratic, he constantly talks down to Bella and wraps himself up in his own immortal angst.

My largest problem with it was the writing style itself. The dialogue tagging’s awful. I flip through the book at random and I find:

• continued
• asked
• called
• murmured
• snickered
• encouraged
• croaked
• ordered

Do I find said? No, I do not. Said - which is all that’s really needed in most situations - is used very sparingly indeed. “Asked” appears far more than “said.” And good luck trying to find even one “said” without an adverb attached, because adverbs are used almost as freely as in the Harry Potter series, both in conjunction with dialogue tags (”He asked ominously,” “I added earnestly” - both real examples) and elsewhere.

Yet Dialogue is only one small piece of what I don’t like. The whole voice of the narrator is just unappealing to me, for any number of reasons that are less easy to pin down. Probably it’s a combination of things: the choice of words, the way sentences are constructed, the paragraphs.

The plot felt wrong. Disconnected. Coincidental. You start to believe it might lead up to an intriguing finale, but the cause of the action at the end doesn’t enter the book in any form, and isn’t so much as hinted at, until chapter seventeen. If an impromptu game of Vampire Baseball in the Rain hadn’t taken place - or if it had been on some other day - or even if Bella hadn’t gone to watch it - the trouble would all have been avoided and there wouldn’t have been much of a story.

In other words, it felt like there were two separate sources for conflict in the novel that don’t overlap very well: relations with Bella’s love interest Edward, and the eviler (less sexy) vampire of Chapter Seventeen.

Differing opinions

Plenty of people do disagree with almost everything I’ve said. The review on Two Motives, which I quoted above, generated some interesting comments:

if you do not like twilght there is something insanly wrong with you or the rest of the world who is head over heals for this book.

[Y]ou may have your view of the novel but not many will agree with maybe you should re-analyze your thought on it.

Alrich you bitch I think your a dick not Edward. Maybe you could have expressed your opions a little nicer but you brought this on yourself you just pissed alot of people off and i have news for I will whoop some ones ass for being a bitch and you really should think about being nicer. [...] So get over yourself and shut that hole in you face you call mouth.

(I’m inclined to think something is wrong with the rest of the world.)

However, more reputable sources also praised Twilight, some of them quite highly. I normally trust Publisher’s Weekly. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. Booklist gave it a starred review, too. So did the School Library Journal.

Related Novelish entries:

• New Moon
• Eclipse (coming soon)

More reviews:

• The Review Revolution (neutral)
• Vulpes Libris (positive)
• Two Motives (negative)
• Books Love Me (positive)
• Beside The Norm (negative)
• LJ user “romancenovel” (negative)
• LJ user “aoibhinn” (negative)