This is the reason why I hunted down a copy of The Dying Earth and read it. Subterranean Press told me it was publishing a huge anthology of short stories by authors I love, all as a tribute to this Jack Vance guy, who is apparently a Big Deal. See my review of The Dying Earth for thoughts about Vance and my reaction to his series.

As far as anthologies go, this one is awesome. There are no two ways about it: fans of The Dying Earth will love most, maybe not all, of these stories; neophytes like myself will still find something to enjoy. Every author brings his or her interesting perspective to the table. That's what make this book work, especially for a reader like me, who isn't too enthusiastic about the original Vance tales. As Dan Simmons notes in the afterword to his fun novella, The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz, they aren't imitating Vance so much as paying homage to him. That makes the anthology work well.

Here are some highlights.

The first story, by Robert Silverberg, is "The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale." It's a good way to start off the collection, for it isn't a travelling tale and has few characters. But it gets you into the mood of the Dying Earth, that sense of inevitability that seems to plague every action.

I liked "Grolion of Almery," by Matthew Hughes, even more. Grolion is an anti-hero who cares mostly for himself, an archetype we will see pop up frequently throughout this anthology. Hughes, and Terry Dowling in the next story, "The Copsy Door," have a good handle on the whimsical side of Vance's magic. Anything, and I mean anything, can happen with magic. And it's bizarre. I love the setup for "The Copsy Door," probably because I have a thing for stories where the conflict is an unfair competition.

"Abrizonde," by Walter Jon Williams, is a hilarious story about a magician named Vespanius who gets trapped between two opposing armies as they lay siege to a fort that protects the pass between their towns. Watching as Vespanius engaged in a game of wits with the other sides' faceless wizards was a lot of fun.

There are a few more in between that fans of the Dying Earth might like more than I did, but my next favourite was "The Last Golden Thread." Lith's original story in The Dying Earth was great, both for the way Vance set up the fall of the protagonist and for Lith's tragic circumstances as well. This was a great way to revisit that legend with a fresh take. All of the characters in Phyllis Eisenstein's stories were neat, particularly the mentoring mage who indulges Bosk's obsession with Lith.

One of the true stars of this book is "The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or The Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee," by Tad Williams. As with "Grolion," the eponymous character isn't a nice guy, and he deserves some comeuppance, which Williams delivers exactly as promised by the title: laughably and tragically (or vice versa, if you prefer). The book is worth reading for this story alone. The same is true of Simmons' novella, which I've already mentioned. I don't love everything Simmons writes, but this story is good.

The last three stories display the roughly chronological order of this anthology, and we creep up to the very end of the Dying Earth. "A Night at the Tarn House," George R.R. Martin's contribution, was quite clever. I have to admit that Neil Gaiman's closing "An Invocation of Incuriosity" disappointed me. I know that end-of-the-world stories are hard to write, but ever since Good Omens, I seem to have associated Gaiman with such fare. This story didn't really fit with the rest of the Dying Earth motif, nor was it really very interesting.

The few disappointments aside, I really liked this anthology. It took me longer to read than I had hoped but shorter than it might have—usually I don't read such collections all at once but instead intersperse the stories among other novels. How you choose to read Songs of the Dying Earth is, of course, up to you. If you are a Vance fan though, go and get it today.

My dad gave me this book Christmas 2009, and I prior to reading it last week, I had not experienced Calvin and Hobbes. Well, that isn't completely true. I had read one or two strips, I suppose. Seen other people reading it. But I hadn't experienced it. I had not sat down with a thick, luscious book full of Calvin and Hobbes strips, full of wonderful, pinpoint and intelligent humour.

When I did finally sit down, I fell in love. So to all my friends out there: how dare you not kidnap me and force-feed me Calvin and Hobbes? For shame!

I fell in love with the way Bill Watterson portrays the truth and beauty of the universe through the cheeky eyes of a young boy. Children, lacking the filters that most adults come to acquire, often say the darnednest things, and Calvin says a lot that falls into that category. Calvin refuses to eat something on his plate, observing wryly that "you know you won't like it when they won't tell you what it is." Calvin, ever street-smart, sneaks out of bed late at night, then phones his house from a pay phone (remember those?) to say, "Hello, Dad! It is now three in the morning. Do you know where I am?" Precocious, clever, and self-aware, Calvin embodies that spark, dare I say that joie de vivre, that we all seek to retain from childhood.

I speak with the perspective of a 21-year-old who never wanted to grow up, but in spite of my best efforts, managed to do it anyway. Maturity sneaked up on me, stalked me, and played a game of cat-and-mouse through my adolescent years. Eventually, fortunately or unfortunately, it won. Which is not to say that I have entirely abandoned my childhood glee, my sense of wonder—I do, after all, read science fiction; in November I got involved in an awesome snowball fight with my coworkers. And I know now what I did not know as a child: it is tough to keep your child-like enthusiasm when the world expects you, requires you to be an adult.

So I think a child, an adolescent, or an older adult are all going to get something different from Calvin and Hobbes than I will. We all might find the strips funny, but our core enjoyment is going to come from an identification that is different for each of us. Calvin and Hobbes has a broad appeal, but it is not the same appeal to everyone. For me, it is a nostalgic retrospective on the days I have left behind. Not that I was ever a trouble-maker like Calvin, oh no. I did not launch wagons into lakes or trees. I was not a terror of babysitters, and as far as I know, I never flooded the bathroom while struggling against a shark in the bathtub. Nevertheless, there is something universal to the childhood experience about Calvin's exuberance. And now here I am, in my third decade, trying to reconnect with that aspect of my life.

The brilliance of these comic strips go deeper than just nostalgia. There is something profound about Calvin and Hobbes. At the same time that these two are cooking up a scheme straight out of—well, the comic books—and we are laughing right along with them, suddenly Hobbes will spring a Big Question on us:

Calvin: do you believe in Fate?
Hobbes: You mean, that our lives are predestined?
Calvin: Yeah ... that the things we do are inevitable.
Hobbes: What a scary thought.

Hobbes says this last part as the wagon they are in goes careening off a dock into a lake, possibly as part of a crazy Calvin venture to jump across the lake in their wagon.

There is just such a broad range of humour and tone to these strips. Watterson takes us from the fantastical Spaceman Spiff sketches to the hilarious and intelligent insults Calvin hurls at his crush, Susie: "I hope you suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm, you freak!" (Which, if an adult uttered this, would be horrible; and in the real world, let's face it, a child might get soap mouthwash. But for me reading Calvin, it's just adorable.) And from these strips, Watterson takes us even further, to ponder those Big Questions of the universe—fun, yes, and funny, but those strips tend to end with a question mark hovering above them.

Reading Calvin and Hobbes also affirms my opinion that comics are a sublime form of literature, and those snobs who look down their noses at this form as somehow "childish" or "immature" are poopyheads. Maybe you don't like Calvin and Hobbes—or perhaps, like me, you've merely never experienced it. Still, Calvin and Hobbes demonstrates the power of the comic form, that essential marriage of witty wordplay with evocative pictures, to convey both humourous and serious subjects. This is a medium that can tell amazing stories, stories both vast and magnificent in scope yet intimate and human in significance. From superheroes to supervillains to ordinary, everday kids, comic strips are awesome. They connect us to our imagination in a way few literary forms can manage. Don't get me wrong; I love novels with a white-hot passion. But there is something just so basic—and I think it is this primal element that snobs confuse with immaturity—to the comic form that makes it so versatile and powerful.

Reading a book by Umberto Eco has become a yearly tradition since I joined Goodreads, and for 2010 I just managed to squeeze The Island of the Day Before under the wire. For the past two years, each Eco book has also made its respective year's list of the best ten books I read that year. If The Island does not join them in this honour, it is only because I have been lucky enough to read so many other great books in 2010. However, this is not a retrospective on my reading over the entire year; this is a book review.

The reason I read one and only one Umberto Eco book is that Eco, more than any other author I have ever encountered, makes me think. His books are not transparent and not easy to read, but they are so good. The Name of the Rose was a fascinating medieval mystery that fanned the flames of my interest in medieval rhetoric. And do not get me started about Foucault's Pendulum, which remains one of my favourite books. Eco is erudite and eloquent in his style. He shows off his knowledge of history, but it's not done solely to impress the reader or display how much more he knows of the seventeenth century. Instead, Eco invites us to share in that knowledge through this narrative. In so doing, not only do we learn about this period, but we get exposed to Baroque ways of thinking and reasoning through the use of metaphor, allegory, and syllogism.

At first, The Island of the Day Before seemed like it would employ the same meta-fictional ambiguity present in Foucault's Pendulum. When Roberto, himself the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Amaryllis arrives on the anchored yet abandoned Daphne, he soon discovers he is not alone. Someone else is stealing eggs from the hens, rummaging through the letters he writes to his lost, unrequited love: in short, there is an Intruder aboard. Roberto spends several chapters exploring the Daphne and trying to discover the nature of this Intruder. Who could it be? Another survivor from the Amaryllis? More likely, someone left aboard from the Daphne. Except the way that the narrator presents Roberto's search for this Intruder, interspersed with more flashbacks to his life growing up in La Griva, his coming-of-age at Casale, and his itinerant adventures in France, I started wondering if the Intruder was even real. It seemed more likely that the Intruder was like Ferrante, Roberto's imagined older brother banished for crimes unknown.

One person cautioned me not to see too many similarities between these two books. He is right: for one thing, the Intruder turned out to be real. That disappointed me at first, but I quickly adapted. After all, Eco's style is just so enchanting that it is impossible to stay mad at him for long, even when his narratives do not take the turns you want or expect. Plus, the metamorphosis of the Intruder into Father Caspar gives Roberto a welcome companion on the Daphne and provides us with numerous interesting conversations and debates. Eco gives us a crash course in Baroque methods of argument and reasoning as Caspar and Roberto debate heliocentrism and physics. I love the way Eco captures the modes of thinking of the time. We and the narrator both know about John Harrison and that Galileo and Copernicus were indeed correct. But Eco is so good at portraying an authentic seventeenth-century mindset.

I loved the flashbacks too. Eco reminds me why I tend to prefer British historical fiction: continental European history is so damn convoluted! You have all these little city-states, republics, kingdoms related through marriage and blood and empires that may or may not have control over their protectorates. It is not at all unified, often confusing, and very chaotic. But I loved reading about Roberto's involvement at Casale, his suspicions that Ferrante was the traitor, and his subsequent troubles in Paris. Roberto is an interesting character: not all that smart, but very educated and, above all, imaginative. This last quality proves essential for helping him survive, although it is also rather dangerous.

Imagination is the quintessential ingredient to The Island of the Day Before. It allows Roberto to conjure up his brother, Ferrante, and later create an entire Romance in which he is the hero, Ferrante the villain, and Lilia the love interest. Also, imagination allows the narrator to construct this story we're reading from the extant papers written by Roberto. It is important to remember that the story does not come directly from Roberto. Roberto begins by writing several letters to Lilia, whom our narrator first calls "the Lady." Later, after the Intruder has been introduced as Father Caspar, those letters stop, but Roberto continues to record his observations and his actions. Yet he did not record everything, and not everything he recorded survived and made its way to our narrator's hands intact. And how do we know our narrator does not have some sort of bias or agenda? So there is a necessary amount of interpolation and extrapolation happening here, resulting from not one but two unreliable narrators.

This hearkens back to Foucault's Pendulum. More than anything, I think Eco loves to experiment with the substance of stories as vehicles of thought. He isn't experimenting with story structure in the sense of how one tells a story but in the sense of how the story conveys his impressions of the Baroque period. The result are arguments and conversations between Roberto and people like Cardinal Mazarin or Father Caspar about longitude and the heliocentric theory. And then there is Padre Emanuele's Aristotelian Telescope, a machine made to construct metaphors!

The most obvious way to experiment with this particular story lies in its resolution. The Island of the Day Before is, at its core, a castaway story. Indeed, I was wary when I began reading, because with castaway stories, you basically have two options: either the castaway gets rescued, or he dies. So I was interested to see which route Eco would take with Roberto's shipwreck aboard the Daphne. At some point, I reasoned, Roberto would have to visit the island. But Eco dangled this goal in front of me like a carrot, drawing out Roberto's eventual departure across the hundred-eightieth meridian and into the "day before" for the length of the entire book.

And it was worth the wait. The Island of the Day Before did not impress me quite as much as the two other books I have read. I lay the blame for this squarely at Roberto's feet, because as a protagonist he is quite different from Adso and Casaubon, who were both learned and literary fellows. Roberto, while educated and literate, is nobility. Despite his presence at Casale, he knows little of real war and has spent a good amount of his time carousing through the less reputable streets of Paris. He is endearing more for his helplessness and his predicament than out of any true empathy he inspires; I want him to succeed and survive more because no one deserves to be shipwrecked on a ship.

But if I were shipwrecked on a ship, I hope it's because I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. I hope I would get to stare longingly at an island trapped one day in my past and construct a romance of my own devising for my lost love, who has been seduced by my evil yet fictitious older brother. I hope I would get to converse with a rather odd Jesuit who probably meets an untimely end trying to reach the island. Although, truth be told, I would much rather be the narrator, who seems the best off of any Eco's characters.

The Island of the Day Before is delectable. It is not my favourite book by Umberto Eco, but it has all the hallmarks that make him one of my favourite authors—and in fact, I think I would recommend this book to people who are interested in Eco but not sure if they could make it through The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum. This is the same, yet different. Even though it is not quite as impressive, it is no less wonderful.

I bought this book as a Christmas gift for someone, attracted to it by its recent accolade of competing on Canada Reads. I have never before read anything by Carol Shields, and when I buy books that I haven't read before with the intention of giving them to other people, I tend to read them myself first. So I embarked upon Unless not knowing all that much about it, knowing only that it had won a poll entitling it to a spot in a national debate, only that it was some sort of book about a mother in a city near Toronto with a daughter who lives on a street corner in pursuit of "goodness." And I ended up falling in love with Carol Shields' writing, with the way she describes people and feelings and what matters to us, but I didn't fall in love with Unless.

I seem to be in the habit of reading meta-fictional fiction lately. Books about writers, books about writers writing. Writing about writing. Reta Winters is a moderately successful writer and translator, content in how she has managed to fuse domestic life with her own goals, except, of course, for what has happened with her nineteen-year-old daughter, Norah. As Unless unspools, Reta reflects on her writing, on how it has shaped her, on how writing shapes others, and especially on the role of women in writing. Later chapters begin with an unsent letter Reta has composed to an author or editor, in which she questions why a book or magazine article cited so many influential male authors and no female authors. Meanwhile, Reta alternates between discussing her life, including the slow, simmering story of how and why Norah came to live on a street corner, and discussing with us her plans for a sequel to her novel, a sequel in which she realizes the emancipation of her female narrator.

Rather than confront the whys and wherefores of Norah's societal estrangement directly, Shields has Reta approach the issue sideways. It is as if Reta herself cannot bear to interfere directly; heeding the advice of many, she waits and sees how long Norah can continue this self-imposed homelessness. Instead, she explores what she slowly comes to believe is the reason Norah has chosen to search for goodness on the street corner. She confronts the gender divide in our society, and most notably in how it affects her as a mother and a writer.

Reta, and through her, Shields, are right about this, of course. This week I have been following the #MooreandMe trend on Twitter, started by a feminist blogger outraged by insensitive comments made by Michael Moore regarding the allegations against Julian Assange that he raped two women. Moore and Keith Olbermann's initial reactions to this protest movement, not to mention all the trolls on Twitter, made a point abundantly clear, if you weren't already aware of it: this is still a grossly unequal world. Despite our nominally-democratic, Charter-enshrined (in Canada) society, gender is still a minefield and a battleground.

Shields takes an interesting way of reminding us of this fact, a way that is simultaneously seductively unique yet frustratingly heavy-handed. I like Reta, both as a person and as a narrator. I like all of the Winters: Tom, Norah, Natalie, Christine, Lois. I even like the overbearing, interrupting Arthur Springer—he does mean well, even if he is an example of a man who has been educated by society with certain notions of power, gender, and what readers want. I like them, because Shields makes these characters people. They have flaws, but they try hard. There are no moustache-twirling villains here, nor are there golden messiahs. At the same time, Shields avoids making any of her main characters a subject of spectacle. I think there is a tendency to hype literary fiction that focuses on the spectacular character, the crack addict or the prostitute, the child soldier or the homeless mother. Unless, among all its other charms, brings us ordinary people who, for the most part, do not have any serious problems with their lives. And it makes me care about them, invest three hundred pages in them. That's pretty cool.

Yet I cannot ignore that heavy-handed approach Shields takes to these issues of gender inequity. Maybe it's because I am a man, but there is something alienating it, a fatalistic tone to Reta's melancholic proclamations:

Because Tom is a man, because I love him dearly, I haven't told him what I believe: that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lies has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang. That's the problem.

"Because Tom is a man…," because he is outside, he is Other, he can never really comprehend. And I say this not to invoke the rather dim lament of "Oh noes, not feminism! What about the poor mens?!" I just have a difficult time accepting or even considering the idea that there are certain mentalities, certain perspectives, forever inaccessible to me by dint of, as Reta puts it, a seemingly random chromosome determinate. I don't know if that is the case. As a writer I certainly hope not; as a reader I strive my best to access that inaccessible perspective through the voices of narrators like Reta Winters.

Of course, if you have read the book, you might recall the paragraph that immediately follows the one I quoted above. You might, thus, be preparing to call me out, for I have done the questionable thing of taking a passage out of context. I really do like the passage above, as a piece of writing, even if I find the sentiment rather extreme. So, to correct my temporary omission, I will mention that Shields acknowledges her hyperbole:

This cry is overstated; I'm an editor, after all, and recognize purple ink when I see it. The sentiment is excessive, blowsy, loose, womanish. But I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I'm just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always.

Additionally, it is clear that Shields' intention is never to alienate nor even to preach. Danielle Westerman is a foil to Reta, a woman whose bitter old age has metamorphosed her feminism into a general kind of misanthropy. It's her class-conscious, power-conflict sentiments that Reta is echoing, and that is only one view of many that surfaces in Unless.

For despite having a single first-person narrator, Unless carries within it a symphony of multiple voices. Shields manages to convey, through Reta, the opinions and ideas of the other characters, assembling a multi-dimensional view of the story as it centres around Norah.

I am, like with much of this book, ambivalent about Norah and her role. I like that Shields does not pursue the reasons behind Norah's choices directly, because that would have made for a very different type of book, something that would almost be a mystery. Yet I feel a little cheated by the resolution. I feel like the way Shields explains the mystery is careless, because we hear it second-hand through Reta, and Norah remains, as she does for the rest of the book, little more than a name with a sign that says "Goodness" attached to it. That being said, I understand why Shields does it this way, revealing that it is not a careless decision at all. For this is Reta's story, not Norah's, and hence it is important to hear how Reta interprets Norah's actions and Norah's reasons, more important than it is to hear Norah herself discuss them. Thus my ambivalence. I want more than Unless can give, more than it should give. I'm just a greedy reader!

The back cover of my edition has two blurbs, one from The Ottawa Citizen and one from The New York Times Book Review, both so glowing and gushing that I'm a little embarrassed, on the book's behalf, by them. These blurbs are falling over themselves to convey to me, with adjectives and adverbs and exclamation points, how much they love Unless. I won't do that. I try, for one thing, to limit the number and type of adverbs and adjectives I expend on any one book. And I fast approach my quota. Moreover, I obviously do not share these blurbs' sentiments when it comes to this book. I liked Unless, and as my unabated intention to give it as a Christmas present attests, this is a book worth reading. Is it a book Canada should read? Not having read any of its contenders, I will withhold my judgement of that.

So I'm not going to tell you that this is "a signal novel, profound and resonant." Let me be clear in the way only stumbling, awkward prose can be: Unless more than doesn't suck, and it is in fact quite good. It has a simplicity that truly makes it a serious, thoughtful work of art. And it deserves accolades and attention. At the risk of sounding trite, I will conclude with a quotation: "Goodness, not greatness," as Reta echoes Danielle Westerman, is what Unless and Carol Shields achieve.

Disclaimer: I won this in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. Loves me the free books.

In her biography, Tracey Alley confesses her love of Dungeons & Dragons—and it shows. From beginning to end, Erich's Plea reads like a D&D adventure. And that's not a good thing.

I'm going to start by nitpicking the editing here. This book could have benefited from an editor (or if it had one, a better editor), both a copy-editor and a story editor. I am sure there is an adequate story somewhere inside this book, but it is buried beneath awkward, ungrammatical constructions and exposition-heavy dialogue.

Alley has trouble with both commas and semi-colons: not enough of the former, and oddly enough, she seems to use the latter correctly sometimes and randomly at other times. There are plenty of comma splices; then suddenly I will rejoice to see a semi-colon correctly joining together two independent clauses. It's like the clouds have parted and a beam of light is shining down from the heavens! Nevertheless, it's that first issue, the dearth of commas, that really hurts Erich's Plea. In fact, as someone who has historically tended to go the other way and overuse our tiny curly friends, reading this book has reminded me of their importance in joining phrases and subordinate clauses.

I don't talk about it very much in reviews, because it kind of goes without saying: punctuations is serious business. If I have to translate a book from English to English in order to read it, that will definitely detract from my enjoyment, even if the story beyond that grammatical obstacle is brilliant. Unfortunately, this is where Erich's Plea needs that second type of editor. As much as it needs a good line-by-line dissection by a trained wielder of the red pen, this book also needs a serious big-picture editor who knows how to tweak for success.

For example, at one point the main characters are trapped in a series of tunnels, and one of them unleashes a fireball that causes everything to catch on fire. Including several of his party trapped at ground zero. After they have been pulled from the flames, the narrator describes the situation thusly: "Despite the fact that the flames had lasted merely minutes Wulfstan, Trunk and Nikolai had all been severely burned." There's some questionable physics going on here. I myself have never been set on fire, but I have a feeling that if I were on fire for "merely minutes," there would be no "despite" about it.

And I don't want to be pedantic about this. It is obvious what Alley meant with that passage, but it just takes some editing to realize that the line should be changed to make more sense. These things tend to get away from a writer during the actual writing, and even during subsequent drafts. That is understandable, and that's what editors are for.

I get the feeling that Alley has the general narrative worked out, but she gets lost in conveying the mechanics and details of that narrative (don't we all?). This results in some sloppy and otherwise unappealing habits. Earlier in the book, as the characters are skulking around a level of the terrify Zeaburg Prison, they encounter some orcs. Alley feels the need to describe, in detail, the glacial thought processes of these thick prison guards, and throughout the battle, remind us that the orcs are slow-witted indeed. The icing on this cake of repetition occurs when the annoying halfing Lara decides to take on the guards single-handedly:

Thinking far more quickly than the slow-witted orc guards, Lara knew that the doorway would admit only one of them at a time. Orcs were not known for their slender physiques, that fact and the corridor itself presented her with plenty of opportunities to take out the guards.

I will acknowledge the welcome and proper use of a comma to offset that initial subordinate clause. This does not happen often enough. Note, however, the unfortunate comma splice in the second sentence. So on net balance, grammar points here are zero. But I digress. What I want to point out is the way in which this passage is written from Lara's perspective. Lara is "thinking," Lara "knows" that orcs are slow-witted. This is a classic case of telling when one should be showing—wait, on the next page, Alley does:

Two guards reached the doorway at the same time, their broad shoulders connecting as they each tried to get through the door first. The two orcs pushed and shoved at each other trying to get through the door, while grunting at each other in their native tongue.

So that first passage is completely unnecessary, because Alley conveys the same thing half a page later. And because here she is showing us, not telling us, what is happening, it makes for much better reading.

Incidentally, most of this book is centred around the escape from Zeaburg Prison. Apparently the governor of the prison had set up the escape so these prisoners could be assassinated; their deaths would just look like they had been killed trying to escape. That is actually rather clever. Unfortunately, this literal dungeon part of the Dungeons & Dragons motif is a drag. The characters spend the entire book escaping from the prison, travelling through an escape tunnel, and then they end up in the middle of the city controlled by the Big Bad (more on him in a moment). None of this is very interesting. Beyond the initial escape and that confrontation with the slow-witted orcs, these characters get into very little danger. There are some icky spiders, some ill-advised fire magic, and the problem of what to wear to the dark festival, of course. But these problems are smoke and mirrors that distract from a critical flaw, which is that this main plotline has no real plot.

Most of what happens in Erich's Plea is exposition. There are essentially three plots happening here: Slade et al escaping from Zeaburg, Michael's visits with Lord Nexus and Ulrich, and Ursula's escape from Ulrich's clutches. In the first part, as I mentioned, there are no real conflicts relevant to the overarching story and villain. It's all just prison escape and bickering between characters with stock attributes and relationships. Michael's story can be divided into two sets of dialogue: his conversation with Lord Nexus, which is just a history of Kaynos and some explanation of Alley's magical systems; and his confrontation with Ulrich and subsequent exile. Again, not much going on that really changes the status quo. Finally, we briefly meet Ursula. And again, her sole purpose is to tell us how Ulrich came to power and became such a naughty king. From golden ages to war and witchcraft, most of Erich's Plea is backstory.

Backstory is all well and good, and it is nice to see that Alley has put considerable thought into her fictional universe. The only missing component is that crucial binding element: the story to which the backstory is backstory. How can I tell? It is very simple: none of the antagonists actually do anything in this story. We hear about them. We hear what terrible things they have done and what terrible things they intend to do. Not so much on the doing.

The Big Bad of Erich's Plea, by the way, is called the Dark One.

No, I am not making that up. Yes, "the Dark One." At first I thought this was merely laughable. Seriously, what self-respecting storyteller names his or her villain "the Dark One"?

Turns out [a:Robert Jordan|6252|Robert Jordan|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175475715p2/6252.jpg] does. Not being a Wheel of Time reader, this escaped my notice at first (thank you, TVTropes). Smugly, of course, this discovery is a good demonstration of why I eschew Wheel of Time, but that is neither here nor there. My point is that calling one's villain "the Dark One" does no one favours.

Nor does Alley's portrayal of this Dark One ameliorate his melodramatic title. Instead of remaining an enigma whom the protagonist only confronts during the climax, we meet the Dark One and learn that he is only human. To be fair, we learned quite early that the Dark One is a human, or rumoured to be human. But when we meet him, it seems like he is just human. He's not even that smart; at least, he doesn't notice that his right-hand man has betrayed him. And he has allied himself with a witch who seeks to rival the gods in her powers. I shall take one guess about the fate of that alliance.…

Unfortunately, we only meet the Dark One once, and not for long. So we know almost nothing about him, and after destroying his precious evil mystique and supervillain street cred, Alley frustratingly keeps him an abstraction as a character. So "the Dark One" is the "bad guy" because he hates non-humans. So it goes.

Speaking of abstractions, I couldn't help but notice that some of the characters aren't … always … there. By which I mean, sometimes it seems like Alley has forgotten that certain characters are with Slade's party; they just fade away and then rematerialize when they have a line to contribute. This happens in particular to Darzan and Trunk, who often drop away for tens of pages even when there is some action happening to which both could contribute (why does the halfling have to slay all the orcs?!). Yet another sign here that Erich's Plea needs an editor. In the case of someone like Darzan, it makes me wonder if she is all that necessary to the story; her role is mostly extraneous, so she could probably be cut. Considering Trunk's relation to a reveal at the end of the book, not to mention his role in Slade's vision, his lack of participation is a little more problematic but no less noticeable.

So I conclude by reiterating what is, perhaps, the most serious offense of Erich's Plea, which is its frustrating lack of story. The egregious grammar and poor editing wound me to my core, and they certainly do nothing to predispose me to the book. Nevertheless, they are meta-narrative problems, technical problems, and thus all the more easily corrected. Lacking a story is a huge problem. I know Alley has a story to tell, because her meticulous explanation of the political climate of Kaynos, the way its kingdoms and states and magic are set up, reveals to me the direction she wants to pursue with this series. I just wish she had gone much further along that path than she does, because as far as I am concerned, Erich's Plea is not Book One of the Withcraft Wars; it is Book Zero.

I first approached How I Became a Famous Novelist with some trepidation. Like many other humourous books, this one is very committed to its humour in a very meta-fictional way. Everything from the back cover to the epigraphs is part of the commentary the book and author Steve Hely are making on the state of writing and publishing in contemporary North American society. The book and its main character are extremely self-aware and self-possessed. Books like this tend either to impress me or to get on my nerves. How I Became a Famous Novelist averaged out: the book impressed me, but Pete Tarnslaw got on my nerves.

Hely's style and the meta-fictional nature of the book remind me a lot of [a:Douglas Coupland|1886|Douglas Coupland|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1264509011p2/1886.jpg]. And as a general rule, I consider Coupland a god among men when it comes to witty insights into this postmodern melodrama we call life, so by garnering such a comparison, Hely has both earned implicit praised and set the bar quite high for the rest of the book. Unfortunately, How I Became a Famous Novelist never quite reaches the highs of my favourite Coupland-esque scenes and schemes; for that I blame mostly Pete Tarnslaw, because he got on my nerves.

I love the premise of this book. It's simple, and to some extent it feels true (isn't that ironic?). Pete is a disaffected twenty-something, and when he learns his ex-girlfriend is getting married, he vows to become a famous novelist so he can show her up at her own wedding. Having watched a vapid interview with a bestselling author, Pete decides he has figured out the "rules" to writing a bestseller. And he succeeds, for a little while. Then he gets on my nerves.

Pete is just insufferably whiny and entitled. And I think that is intentional; when we sympathize with Pete, it's not because he's a nice guy, or even because he's an underdog. Rather, the source of our sympathy comes from Pete's chosen target: the publishing industry. Pete sets out to game the system in a very deliberate, cynical way. In so doing, Hely pokes fun at both the industry, the types of writers Pete is emulating, and the types of writers who emulate Pete. Yet I have a very difficult time enjoying Pete's enjoyment of his success. I have an even more difficult time enjoying Pete's discomfort as Hely subverts his con game to foist upon Pete an epiphany about writing and the meaning of literature. As much as I like Pete's snarky comments and the caricature secondary characters floating around each chapter, very little of this book actually sticks.

For regular readers, for book reviewers, and for writers (I am all three), I think this book has a special resonance beyond what the general public may feel. Pete has unkind words for all three categories of individual (more on that later), and of course, all three of these types of people have good reason to be interested in the health and attitude of the publishing industry. How I Became a Famous Novelist really works, especially for this audience, because it is embedded in its time. That is not in and of itself bad—many well-regarded classics benefit from a knowledge of their contemporary period—but it does amplify that transitory quality. Nevertheless, I think this book will remain relevant for a long time, because the Dan Browns and James Pattersons of publishing are not going away any time soon. And wherever you find a thriller writer, you'll find Pete Tarnslaw and Steve Hely, pulling back the curtain.

As a voracious reader, who is also a bit of literary snob, and who has made it his mission to review every book he reads for Goodreads, I loved Pete's invective toward book readers. It really captures how good Hely is at representing the ecosystem around book publishing in a Dilbertine way:

I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers.

Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.

Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.

Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.

But a bad book review is just disgusting.

Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad different books are"? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?

The above picture, unfortunately, is not at all accurate: I hate mayonnaise. Yet we reviewers often require authors to develop thick skins, so isn't turnabout fair play?

Beneath all the jibes and jests, Hely is raising a serious question; this is where the "meta" part of the book comes into play. Firstly, he observes that the way we, collectively, value books is very arbitrary. The books that sell well in their day do not necessarily become literary classics; the converse is also often true. Pete likes to cite Moby-Dick as an example. He also has an interesting conversation later in the book with a professor hired to teach at his old college; the professor is an advocate of judging books based on their "free-market" value, so he only teaches bestsellers of the day.

So that is the paradox that readers, writers, and publishers all face: we can't really know what makes a book "good," nor can we predict how long a book will be revered or scorned by the public before the tide turns. This problem appears any time quality is entirely subjective, whether we are talking about books, music, or art. And the reason why this is a big deal is simple: it scares us.

This paradox runs counter to the entire individualist philosophy that has permeated the twentieth century. It tells us that we have no power in determining our legacy or the legacy of our culture. Furthermore, this is not just a matter of time, but of individual versus society. Although some individual future critics might shape future public opinion, for the most part that opinion will shift collectively. And because our minds don't have the capability to comprehend such numbers, we don't really understand how our individual preferences contribute to that collective change. It is a little boggling, and thus a little scary.

So sometimes it is easier to believe in a conspiracy, to believe that writing is a racket and there are easy rules to follow. Or, equivalently, to believe that the general reading public are predictable sheep who will buy the same formulaic drivel over and over. On some days, days when I see pyramids of Dan Brown novels with "#1 bestseller" stickers plastered over their covers, I truly believe that is the case. But that is the cynic in me rearing his head; I do know better. Or at least, I am smarter than Pete, because this his hamartia: he calls the public ignorant to its face, and the public doesn't like that. We see this during the climactic conversation with Preston Brooks, where Brooks harnesses that discontent with the way Pete baldly insults his audience's intelligence. It is OK to believe the collective is stupid; just don't say it aloud. Or don't say it too loudly; the Internets can hear you!

It all works out for Pete in the end, of course, because controversy is great for driving sales. And that's all that Pete wants; he just wants to be a "famous novelist." He has lost his faith in the integrity of literature as anything more than a money-making business. As Preston Brooks put it: "You're always looking for falseness in everything. You're used to falseness. You grew up with that lie machine, the television." While I don't agree with all of Preston's, "Yarr, your generation has never had it so hard; I'm an old man but I believe in writing!" speech that wins over the crowd and hands Pete his ass on a platter, I do like that one line. Just look at the so-called "reality television" on the schedule grid—do you remember the days when TLC was actually "The Learning Channel"? Fundamentally, I don't think the masses have changed all that much through the generations—we are wired, evolutionarily, for spectacle. But television has just made it so easy to deliver spectacle, cheap spectacle, to those masses. And the novel, as a much more ponderous medium, is having a hard time competing.

I don't really think it should compete in that sense, and I could digress into a rant about how we should probably be raising our kids as readers if we want them to read more. Or I could talk about how all good things come to an end, and maybe it's true that the novel, as a literary form, has reached its expiration date. But I think it's time we return to the book.

How I Became a Famous Novelist is rather funny, very clever, and definitely entertaining if you like reading books about people writing books. The main character got on my nerves, and for that reason alone, this book never quite reaches the heights it could have. Still, I have to admit this book was better than I expected it to be, and Hely's criticism of the publishing industry is both humourous and accurate. The finale is touching, if a little trite, and overall this book made me think more about reading, how I read, and how I write reviews. So not too shabby, Hely.



But holy wow, did Pete get on my nerves.

This is the first Bernard Cornwell book I've reviewed on Goodreads, which means it is entirely too long since I have read a Bernard Cornwell book! I'm a casual fan of Cornwell, having read some of his books—I'm particularly fond of his Arthurian trilogy, and I like his Hundred Years' War stuff—and eschewing others—like the Sharpe series, or the Starbuck series, because those two historical periods appeal less to me. That is the most enduring and endearing thing about Cornwell: his remarkable versatility as a writer of historical fiction. Give him a time period, any time period, and a battle, and he will find a character and a story that fits. Azincourt demonstrates this skill perfectly with the character of Nicolas Hook, an archer who finds himself at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

I rather liked Nicolas, and that surprises me, because he seems like a rapscallion and—sometimes—a coward. After all, it takes the voices of saints to urge him on to commit noble deeds! But Nicolas is just so earnest, especially toward the end of the book, that he won me over almost without Cornwell's help. He begins the story as a young, very naive forester who becomes an outlaw and gets exiled to France. By the time we reach the Battle of Agincourt, he is a leader of men, a husband, and a true warrior. And Nicolas recognizes these changes, especially the last one, for he meditates on what it means to be a warrior and why he fights for king and country.

Cornwell captures the spirit of the battle, particularly among the common soldiers present at Agincourt. I think it is easy to project our own contemporary, 20th-century nationalism back onto these soldiers, and that creates a rather inaccurate view of why these men were fighting. Yes, there was plenty of nationalism to go around, because the English hated the French, so if you were an Englishman, you sure didn't mind helping a few Frenchmen die. Sure, Henry V had a claim to the French throne. But it was a dubious claim, and these men-at-arms and archers are not scholars. They don't care about the legitimacy of claims, and they aren't necessarily fighting for Henry because he's an awesome guy or because he's their king. Many of the nobles, and a good deal of the common soldiers, are fighting for gold and glory. And many of them fight because they think God is on their side.

So it all comes down to gold, God, and glory, as my grade 11 history teacher liked to say. The nobility could capture noble prisoners for ransom, and the common folk could always acquire some nice armour, weapons, or trinkets from the corpses. Spoils of war. And if you survive to return to England, you return a war hero. The ladies like that. Despite its place in history as a celebrated victory of underdogs, the Battle of Agincourt was not some great triumph of the good English over the bad French, and it wasn't even a very good idea. It was a stupid move by Henry to march his forces to Calais. But he too was motivated by gold, God, and glory; he had creditors he couldn't disappoint, not to mention nobility who were always eager to see a succession crisis of their own.

Agincourt is not about nobility and political intrigue, however much I like that sort of story. And that's fine. Nicolas instead gives us the commoner's perspective: he's fighting because, as an outlaw, living in England is rather dangerous, and he does need money. Plus, he has a personal connection with this campaign against the French. Since the sacking of Soissons by the French army, and Nicolas' rescue of his eventual wife, Melisande, Nicolas has been hearing the voices of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian. They want him to be their avenging angel for the tragedy at Soissons.

So Nicolas marches off to war, but Cornwell doesn't get around to the Battle of Agincourt until much later in the story. In fact, most of the book isn't about Agincourt at all. And that's fine too. I don't see how Cornwell could have sustained interest for a reasonable length of novel just focusing on Agincourt; although the siege of Harfleur is more drawn-out and perhaps less dramatic, it has its own kind of suspense that makes it no less interesting. In his descriptions of the siege preparations and execution, from Nicolas' role as an archer to the Welsh diggers and the horrible living conditions, Cornwell shows us that he knows his stuff. And thanks to his vivid depictions of the gory carnage of war and the battlefield, Cornwell shows us that he knows how to show that he knows his stuff. Dry exposition Agincourt is not.

There is a lot of frank gore and violence in this book, and I think that's worth noting for people who would be hesitant to read such things. Cornwell does not gloss over the details of battle: he loves the skull-bashing of the pole-axe, the slopping of entrails over one's feet, etc. And I respect this kind of writing, even if it isn't my favourite thing to read, because it goes a long way to depicting the horrors of war. This is not a game, and if you are not a hardened veteran like Nicolas has become, then you are out of luck. Like Nicolas' poor brother, Michael, you may be eaten, chewed up, and spit out if you are too faint of heart. It is a good reminder not to over-romanticize this part of the past: sure, they had cool weapons, but I definitely would not want to live back then.

So Azincourt is more than just a single battle, even if it is not quite an entire war. It is a gradual, wending narrative that intersects with Henry V's campaign against France, told from the point of view of an archer who finds he needs to put to rest the demons of his past: the ghost of Sarah, whom he couldn't save, and the honour of Melisande, whom he did. He takes solace from the fact that saints talk to him, even though it also weirds him out. This was not my favourite part of the book either. We never get an explanation for why Crispin and Crispinian are talking to Nicolas (or if he's just hallucinating). Considering the very pious, credulous nature of the time, I think that is OK—but it still seemed out of place amidst the rest of Cornwell's hyperreal narrative. And juxtaposed with Father Christopher's accurate observations about both sides, English and French, invoking the name of God in their fight against the enemy, the presence of two saints pulling for an English archer is a little weird, and it undermines that otherwise very valid point.

I don't want to say "read this book" with all the certainty of a hearty recommendation, because I know it isn't for everyone. Meticulously researched but very well-written, Azincourt is something you might like if you are into military historical fiction, or even if that time period just fascinates you. As far its place in Cornwell's oeuvre goes, it definitely isn't close to being my favourite, but it is certainly a competently-executed novel that has a flair for dramatic but believable battle sequences. And it helps that it is based on a true underdog story. Archery has always been cool; archery at Agincourt pretty much set the standard against which all other archery coolness is measured.

Damn you, Ursula K. Le Guin, for managing to move me even when I think your book sucks.

Many of the poor reviews on Goodreads here can be summed up like so: "Le Guin is a great writer, but this isn't her best." Both of these statements are true. However, I'm not willing to leave it at that. I refuse to accept that a writer of such skill as Le Guin can have an "off" novel, that she somehow misses her mark here. Other writers might have books like that, but not Le Guin. So while it is true that I think this is far from Le Guin's best work, and it is true that I did not enjoy The Beginning Place as much as I had hoped, considering its author, there is definitely something going on here.

Let's start with the two main characters. We first meet Hugh, self-described as "fat" and otherwise unhappy in his dead-end job as a checker at a supermarket. (I'm not sure if the term has just not aged well in the thirty years since this book was published, but I at first didn't understand what a "checker" was. I thought it meant he was a "price checker," but from Le Guin's descriptions, it sounds more like he was the cashier. And I kept picturing him using terminals or, as a price checker, a little infrared scanning device. Bad, anachronistic reader!) Hugh's secret ambition is to go to night school so he can become a librarian. His obstacle is his unhealthy relationship with his mother, who is too dependent on him and far too controlling of his life. Hugh seems to have no real friends and no other solace—until he finds the Beginning Place, or whatever you want to call it.

Irena is a twenty-something girl with chips on her shoulders, because her stepdad is a lecherous, abusive husband and her mother is too "loyal" to him to get help. She's stuck in a terrible in-between where she wants to help her mom, but she can't bear the thought of going back to stay with them and be subjected to the leers—or worse—of the stepfather. She found the Beginning Place, and the world of Tembreabrezi, before Hugh. But it's Hugh that the inhabitants of this world (village?) want to go fight the monster.

Or something. I was never entirely clear on that part—or, I should say, Le Guin never fully explains the nature of the quest Hugh undertakes. The villagers are deliberately vague about the whole endeavour, although it seems like they don't expect Hugh and Irena to return. I was rather disappointed when the threat turned out to be physical (albeit with a side of psychological terror). I was hoping for a much more intellectual obstacle for Hugh to overcome; after all that dallying in the village, that was a very disappointing climax.

The Beginning Place begins somewhat strangely, in that I was not predisposed to feel much sympathy for Hugh. He seemed like a loser—and not the lovable kind. As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that he is a lovable loser—sort of—just as it becomes obvious that he and Irena are destined to hook up by the end. What remains to be seen, then, are the lessons each of them learn and the resolution Le Guin provides when it comes to their respective family troubles.

It is this part of The Beginning Place that most intrigues me. Le Guin does not spend much time exploring either of the worlds she depicts. This is perhaps a reflection that Hugh and Irena do not fully belong in either world—at least not until the ending. Compared to her other books, however, this makes for a very unusual experience. Even her prose style feels different, much less engaging and detailed than I would expect from her. Yet it is still noticeably Le Guinish. Even at its most descriptive, her prose is not straightforward, not meant to be too literal. As a work of magical realism, The Beginning Place speaks volumes with its juxtaposition of "real life" with the surreal Tembreabrezi.

Both Hugh and Irena need to do some growing up, and that's what the adventure in this story is about. Like a lot of escapist fantasy, Tembreabrezi and the woods that lead to it begin as a place of refuge, a sanctuary from the parts of their lives from which Hugh and Irena want to escape. Then it presents its own challenge, manifesting as a sort of quest that Hugh and Irena must complete to come of age.

And true to form, Le Guin does not deliver the expected epic quest and its equally epic resolution. Instead, Hugh and Irena succeed, but it is success tinged with a sense of regret and confusion. It is more about their journey home, and finding solace in each other rather than in their place or their time. Hugh and Irena finally forge what they have needed all along: a connection with someone else.

It sounds trite, and that may be true. The ending is predictable, but in a reassuring sort of way. From the beginning of The Beginning Place to the end, Le Guin seems to alternate between fulfilling our expectations and defying them. What does not work for me is the drabness of the worlds she describes. Neither our world nor Tembreabrezi ever feels very alive or interesting, and at the beginning Hugh is not a sympathetic character. Though this changes, it develops very slowly, and that makes The Beginning Place unappealing, especially at first.

So yes, this is not Le Guin at her best. She brings all of her skill as a writer and a storyteller, and it shows in the themes and the development of the characters. But the setting isn't quite there, and I couldn't get that off my mind no matter how much I tried. The Beginning Place never really began, for me, and that's why I can't say I liked it all that much.

I was avoiding this book, and then I decided to read it during my busiest weeks of the term, which in retrospect was a mistake, since it took me two weeks to read! In Ben's reading world, that is an eternity.

This book comes to me courtesy of an ARC of the Subterranean Express edition, which I received when they shipped me The God Engines. I was pleasantly surprised, and I shelved this book to read it when I could get to it. Every time I took it off the shelf and glanced at the back cover, however, I ended up giving it a pass.

Last Call is set in Las Vegas and deals with Tarot, Grail symbolism, ritualistic magic, and manipulation of statistics. None of this stuff really interests me. I lack the ability to get excited about the myths and legends that have arisen out of the culture of mid-twentieth-century America. So I started reading this book with the attitude that I didn't want to like it, probably wouldn't like it, but I should get it over with and read it anyway.

At first, this attitude was mostly vindicated. But then Powers began tossing out little tidbits that piqued my mathematician's curiosity. He presented the poker powers in terms of probability, statistics, and of course, Mandelbrot. That was kind of cool. And for a bit, it was almost enough to make me forget why this book is difficult for me—almost.

But let me say some good things about Last Call now. The dialogue is often good, and many of the characters—random though they seem—are fascinating in their own way. Despite his understandable use of archetypes, Powers never quite succumbs to stock characters and one-dimensional villains. Deep down inside, this is a father-son conflict, and all of the myriad plots and players dance around this central idea.

Most of the characters I liked happen to be on the side of the good guys. I liked Scott, most of the time, and Archie and Ozzie and, of course, Diana, who is kind of badass toward the end there. I didn't like Georges Leon (or Ricky, or whomever you care to call him), nor did Trumbull do much for me. And Al Funo annoyed me in a way that few characters in fewer books have managed to do.

In addition to the characters and the dialogue, I can also praise Powers' writing in general. He knows how to keep the action going, how to advance the story, and how to whet your appetite for more exposition. I can sort of see what other people admire and appreciate about Last Call, even if it does not enchant me in the same way. Owing to my disinterest in the subject matter, reading this book was more of a chore than an enjoyable diversion. I had to tell myself to turn the page, and the story just seemed to keep on going for hundreds of pages more than it needed.

The plot is convoluted and confusing, and I never really get a chance to care about it all that much. This is a story about the fight for survival, but so much of it is spent not knowing what the hell Scott is fighting. I had to force myself to pay attention and try to figure out what was happening; even then, I found myself skimming through some chapters, just sort of hoping it would all work out in the end.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my reading of this book was far less involved than most books I read, to the point where I did consider putting it aside more than once. I didn't, and maybe that was the wrong decision, or the right decision—I don't very much know. But I doubt this review was very helpful to you, as ambivalent and vacillating as it sounds to me. Last Call registers on my radar as static, just random background noise with very little in the way of intelligible signal.

Owing to sudden insanity in my school and work schedule, I finished this book on November 3, but I only had time to finish the review now. As a result, the first three paragraphs of this review were written at the beginning of the month, and the rest is more recent. So I apologize for any discontinuities.

My first real experience in epic fantasy was [a:David Eddings|8732|David Eddings|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1223870462p2/8732.jpg]' Belgariad series, the first three books of which I devoured in grade seven at the insistence of a friend, who thumped the omnibus edition on my desk one day. Although I had read The Lord of the Rings previously, I call this my first real experience with fantasy because it is the book (or books, more properly) that hooked me on this genre. I've since gone on to read bigger and better fantasy books, but you always remember your first.

Among the more memorable aspects of the Belgariad is the way Eddings handles his gods. As soon as I began reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I was reminded of his personification of a pantheon. I thought back to the conflict between Aldur and Torak, the departure of the other gods, and the eventual arrival of Eriond. I find novels that personify the gods very interesting, especially when they allow those gods to die. There is a vast difference between a god who is invincible and one who is vulnerable in some way; despite both beings having virtually limitless power, and perhaps being creators of life or the world as we know it, one is eternal and the other is not. And exploring the vulnerability of a god fascinates me, as someone who grew up in a society dominated by a single all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal deity.

The eponymous Hundred Thousand Kingdoms nominally worship one god too: Bright Itempas. I kept wanting to foist a Yahweh-like mentality on him, if only because of his role as a somewhat oppressive, singular deity, but I'm not sure this is a valid interpretation. Let's move on: there are two more deities in the pantheon, and then their children form a kind of sub-pantheon of demi-gods, if you will (though Jemisin does not use the term herself). The remaining Big Two are Nahadoth, the Night Lord, and Enefa, stylized by the Itempas supporters as "the betrayer" but known to us mostly as the goddess of life and whatnot.

So the epic backstory, if you will, deals with the conflict among these Elder Gods. After the death of Enefa, Nahadoth and all their children were imprisoned in mortal forms and bound to obey the commands of the bloodline that helped defeat them. Of course, as with any semi-omnipotent being on a leash, that sort of power comes with a caveat, and all commands get obeyed literally.

As far as mythology and worldbuilding go, Jemisin has managed something that, while original, still feels very conventional. Nothing in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms quite jumps out at me and screams for my attention. When I glanced at the Library of Congress classification and saw that it was "Gods—Fiction," I correctly guessed the direction the plot would take. Now, my accuracy in such premonitions is surprising, but it's not a dealbreaker. Originality in story is overrated, or at least, it isn't a problem if the rest of the book delivers a satisfactory experience.

I really loved the magical transportation system Jemisin has set up in the palace-citadel of Sky. Instead of elevators, everyone uses teleporters navigated by thought—which requires a certain amount of concentration to get you where you want to go. This might not be entirely original, but it's certainly uncommon enough to be notable. And Jemisin incorporates it smoothly without much fanfare and minimal exposition, creating a sense that this is just normal, and we have to deal with it that way. I love it when authors incorporate magic into the quotidian operations of their alternate world—if magic really is that common, it should be harnessed for normal activities, like getting around.

Similarly, Jemisin takes the "word is magic" approach, where the language of the gods allows its speakers to shape creation. In this way, scriveners who learn that language can create persistent enchantments based on the gods' alphabet. It is a nice twist on rune magic. On the verbal level, this forms an important part of Yeine's journey of self-discovery as she explores the fundamental differences between the mortals and the gods.

Also, Yeine's persistent powerlessness perplexes and irks me. Jemisin establishes her as a capable and competent heroine who is determined to escape the trap into which she has been thrown by her family members. Yet her she spends most of the novel unable to do all that much except wander around Sky contemplating her doomed fate and conversing with various gods and servants. I don't mind it when a novel is mostly meditative, but there is much less political intrigue here than I was expecting—and what little intrigue we get is uninteresting and unengaging. It's not for Yeine's lack of trying, but she doesn't do much until the climax and her literal apotheosis. By that point, however, some people might have stopped reading.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has a lot of interesting elements to its story. Jemisin's take on the incarnation of gods in the mortal world is, if not unique, handled very well. The story begins with an interesting set up, and the resolution is intriguing even if it wasn't what I expected. Unfortunately, it meanders from the former to the latter as if its obligation to maintain my interest is a formality, not a necessity. The book simultaneously promises the epic, political conflict implied by its title and a personal, family conflict. With the emphasis on the latter, the former gets lost in the shuffle. The resulting book is more of a series of conversations between Yeine and other people, with a little suspense thrown in for good measure. It's a good effort, and other people might enjoy it, but for the most part I was underwhelmed.