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May. 23rd, 2008 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe last two books I read were both full of CRACKTASTIC AWESOMENESS, albeit in very different ways.
The first, Joan Aiken's A Cluster of Separate Sparks, is a Gothic thriller of the insane and self-mocking variety, as a heroine with a Tragic Past bumbles her way into a Mysterious Greek Mansion/School/Ex-Templar Monastery full of kitchen oubliettes, giant retractable organs, killer bees, and enormous pottery ovens (all of which will of course come into murderous play sooner or later), all the while asking herself, throughout these tribulations, 'what would Esther from Bleak House do?' I have to say that this last is one of my favorite things about the novel, although I was also very fond of the Tremendously Polite and Helpful Terrorists, the Muddle Principle, and the throwaway reference to a drug that could turn an entire country into schizophrenics. It is the sort of book in which, when the heroine finds herself in yet another series of mysterious tunnels, she thinks to herself, "Am I going to find the Chief of Police knocked unconscious down here again, that seems a bit much!" As you might guess, I enjoyed it tremendously.
At the same time, I was reading E. Nesbit's The Magic City on Project Gutenberg, which was actually a Nesbit book I had never read before. Philip is the cranky boy hero whose beloved older sister, who has been his mother figure throughout his life, is finally getting married to a widower with a daughter. Philip promptly decides to despise both widower and daughter - a resolve that holds until he and the girl, Lucy, find themselves in a magic city that he built with blocks and books and other knickknacks, and, in making his escape, he accidentally leaves her behind. Then of course he has to go back and rescue her, and meanwhile perform the seven tasks that will prove he's the fabled Deliverer of the city instead of the Destroyer (they're the only roles open, you see, as the inhabitants of the city explain to him.) Lucy isn't passive either, though; she solves about half the tasks for him (including one about slaying some lions in the desert, which caused me tremendous cognitive dissonance) and is constantly characterized as bold, heroic and clever. Like all Nesbit books, fabulously insane situations pop up on every other page; I am particularly fond of the Jolly Child Islanders who import bored M.A.s from Oxford to do all their construction projects. I also really want someone to write a paper about the character of the Destroyer, also known as the Pretenderette to the Deliverership, who is characterized by her red hair and goes off into a long rant at the end about class issues, but I will try not to go off on that right now.
Basically, both of these books are the kind of reads where you turn a page and suddenly find yourself giggling at an incredibly insane event or coolly bizarre turn of phrase; I did not so much read them for deep analysis, but they were ridiculously fun.
The first, Joan Aiken's A Cluster of Separate Sparks, is a Gothic thriller of the insane and self-mocking variety, as a heroine with a Tragic Past bumbles her way into a Mysterious Greek Mansion/School/Ex-Templar Monastery full of kitchen oubliettes, giant retractable organs, killer bees, and enormous pottery ovens (all of which will of course come into murderous play sooner or later), all the while asking herself, throughout these tribulations, 'what would Esther from Bleak House do?' I have to say that this last is one of my favorite things about the novel, although I was also very fond of the Tremendously Polite and Helpful Terrorists, the Muddle Principle, and the throwaway reference to a drug that could turn an entire country into schizophrenics. It is the sort of book in which, when the heroine finds herself in yet another series of mysterious tunnels, she thinks to herself, "Am I going to find the Chief of Police knocked unconscious down here again, that seems a bit much!" As you might guess, I enjoyed it tremendously.
At the same time, I was reading E. Nesbit's The Magic City on Project Gutenberg, which was actually a Nesbit book I had never read before. Philip is the cranky boy hero whose beloved older sister, who has been his mother figure throughout his life, is finally getting married to a widower with a daughter. Philip promptly decides to despise both widower and daughter - a resolve that holds until he and the girl, Lucy, find themselves in a magic city that he built with blocks and books and other knickknacks, and, in making his escape, he accidentally leaves her behind. Then of course he has to go back and rescue her, and meanwhile perform the seven tasks that will prove he's the fabled Deliverer of the city instead of the Destroyer (they're the only roles open, you see, as the inhabitants of the city explain to him.) Lucy isn't passive either, though; she solves about half the tasks for him (including one about slaying some lions in the desert, which caused me tremendous cognitive dissonance) and is constantly characterized as bold, heroic and clever. Like all Nesbit books, fabulously insane situations pop up on every other page; I am particularly fond of the Jolly Child Islanders who import bored M.A.s from Oxford to do all their construction projects. I also really want someone to write a paper about the character of the Destroyer, also known as the Pretenderette to the Deliverership, who is characterized by her red hair and goes off into a long rant at the end about class issues, but I will try not to go off on that right now.
Basically, both of these books are the kind of reads where you turn a page and suddenly find yourself giggling at an incredibly insane event or coolly bizarre turn of phrase; I did not so much read them for deep analysis, but they were ridiculously fun.
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Date: 2008-05-24 04:27 am (UTC)I really want to read more of them, because with the Derkholm books and Cherstomanci, they're becoming my favorite Diana Wynne Jones' books.
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Date: 2008-05-24 04:34 am (UTC)