Oh yeah -- dragons again

I've already gushed several times about my fondness for Naomi Novik's Temeraire series -- it's the Napoleonic Wars ... with dragons! Which sounds a bit silly but as someone who's not a frequent reader of fantasy, I found the series enthralling. I was tipped to it, by the way, from an unlikely source -- the romance site Smart Bitches Trashy Books, where I was scanning through their highly graded reviews (of which there are not that many -- unlike most romance sites, these women are tough graders). I came across the review for His Majesty's Dragon, the first book in the series, and was intrigued, even though I don't think I'd read anything with dragons since an Anne McCaffrey book or two when I was a kid and they didn't really stick. Harry Potter doesn't count. Anyway I rushed through the first five ... and then had to stop and wait for Novik to publish her next one. Which finally happened this month, and I wanted it so badly that I downloaded it onto my Kindle and read it.

(Small diversion here: I find I don't read all that much on the Kindle, since I have such preposterous access to books on the job, but I think it is extremely useful for two things: 1) Classics, which you'd like to read someday but aren't necessarily sitting on your public library shelf. They are way out of copyright and thus cheap as hell on the Kindle -- I have loaded mine up with pretty much all of Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell and dammit someday I really am going to read them and 2) when a new hardcover comes out that you must have THIS VERY INSTANT and you're not willing to sit around and wait for the library copy to show up -- in that case, the Kindle is cheaper than buying the physical version and has the added attraction of being instant. That was the case, for me, with Tongues of Serpents.)

OK back to the book.

It's been long enough that I actually wish I had gone back and re-read the previous books in the series -- I knew the general outlines of why the characters were where they were (Australia, or as it was called at the time New South Wales) but some of the minor characters escaped me. It would be cool if series novels had little reviews like "previously on" segments of TV shows on DVD. Then again, I could easily have just looked up the earlier books myself on Amazon or LibraryThing or Novik's own website, I suppose.

There wasn't a whole lot of action in this one, in which the dragon Temeraire and his human "handler," more like partner, Laurence are sent across Australia looking first for a potential traveling route and later for a stolen dragon egg. What makes this series so great, though, and this book worth the while if you're already into the series, is the characterization and specifically the relationships between dragons and people. The dragons are intelligent, highly so -- there are ways Temeraire outstrips Laurence, such as mathematics and languages. But the dragons have far less sense of duty to King and country and overwhelming loyalty to one person -- his or her handler -- so persuading the dragon to do what you want can be an interesting negotiation. This is especially true for Temeraire, who was Chinese-bred and has seen China, where dragons are treated far better than in Europe. In the middle of that, the people have to navigate their own worlds where military and diplomatic protocol matter ... but so do morals and ethics. So Laurence, for example, has to deal with the attempts by William Bligh (of Bounty fame) who has been overthrown as the colony's governor and wants Temeraire to help re-install him -- even though it's clear that pretty much everyone on the continent hates his guts and he's a terrible administrator.

But it's not all complicated emotion -- it's all done with a nice light touch and a lot of it is quite funny, especially with the firebreathing dragon Izkierka, whose handler is Laurence's (and Temeraire's) former first lieutenant and who gets some interesting ideas of her own.

Does this all sound crazy? Maybe it is -- but it makes for an interesting setup and all kinds permutations that you could never have in straight-up historical novels of, say, Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwell. I'm giving this one 3.5 stars just because I have high standards for Novik but I still recommend reading it -- though not if it's your first one. This is a series you want to read in order, from the beginning. We have the first four in the series in the collection of the Monroe County Library.

The Lennox ladies

I can't remember where I heard about Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard -- I surf so many blogs and other sites with suggested reading titles -- but chances are good it was on a talk forum on LibraryThing, still the best bibliosocial networking site out there in my opinion. The book is a social history of upper class Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century -- and a bit of the nineteenth -- as viewed through the lives of four sisters. Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox were the great-granddaughters of King Charles II, via one of his mistresses. Their grandfather, product of that union, was made the Duke of Richmond so their family was part of the aristocracy.

It's a great read; it could easily have been ponderous with all the personal and social detail to be filled in but it's not. Tillyard does a fantastic job in making people who have been dead for centuries understandable and in providing context for their times. The reality of their lives as women -- even privileged, wealthy women whose lives were far easier than 99 percent of people at that time -- is an interesting and useful corrective to the romantic aura surrounding that era, thanks to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and a million imitators. I'm not dissing Austen et. al -- I'm a huge fan -- but somehow I feel a little more honest having a better idea of how life was really lived.

This family also happens to be a particularly good one for examining the time. Caroline Lennox, the eldest, married the politician Henry Fox and one of her sons was the even more prominent politican Charles James Fox. Emily Lennox married an Irish nobleman, later named a Duke, and with him had 19 children -- then produced another three with her second husband, who was definitely not nobility but was her children's tutor. Louisa Lennox was the most conventional; she also married an Irish nobleman and appeared to be happy in her marriage though they had no children. Sarah, the youngest sister in the book's focus, had the most dramatic life. The future George III fell in love with her but she wound up marrying another man -- very unhappily. She had affairs, which was not terribly unusual, but actually left her husband and wound up divorced, which was. Eventually she married a military officer and was the poorest of the sisters but happy with her lot. It was an interesting time for lots of reasons -- the king went mad, the French revolted, Napoleon was running amok and the industrial revolution was right on the horizon -- and the sisters were in the middle of a transition where love and fidelity within marriage were assuming greater importance -- heading for the Victorian era and all its conventions.

Now that I've read the book I'm eager to see the miniseries produced by the BBC in 1999 -- especially since Louisa is played by Anne-Marie Duff, better known to devotees of Shameless as our Fiona (she's married to James McEvoy, by the way). Anyway it's on the Netflix list. Once the Tour's over I may even get to it ...

Beastly tales

I just reviewed another work of nonfiction for my alma mater, The Miami Herald -- the book is Zoo Story by Thomas French and the review ran yesterday. I liked the book a lot -- it was obviously based on years of reporting, which is the sort of thing that the St. Petersburg Times has been able and willing to do -- and which may be pretty darn scarce on the ground in the future, even at papers owned by nonprofit foundations. The story follows the expansion and consequences of that expansion at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, where the CEO pushed for an ambitious new Safari Africa exhibit featuring elephants imported from a game preserve in Swaziland. French makes characters out of some of the zoo's animals, which is dangerous -- my only problem with Mike Capuzzo's otherwise excellent Close to Shore was when he claimed to be inside the shark's head -- but French navigates the perilous territory very well, describing more of what happens to the animals than pretending to know what they're thinking.

The same book is reviewed today by Salon's Laura Miller, one of the best book reviewers in the business. Not that I'm intimidated or anything.

A report from Library Land

I recently attended the American Library Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. -- the mother of all library conferences. According to an ALA news release, there were 19,513 attendees -- and I believe it. The gathering was so huge that I knew my college housemate was there -- and never saw her once in three days (she is a university library dean and operates on a whole different level of librarianship). What did I learn? For one thing, from the moment I stepped into the Convention Center to pick up my registration packet, I realized this was my tribe. Everyone looked a little familiar, even though I didn't know any of them. This conference was one of the first times I've felt real regret for not going into this field earlier in my career -- even though I value everything I learned from journalism and other jobs.

It was an exceptionally well-organized conference, which I suppose comes from having these down after all these years. Everything was in the room specified, at the time specified. Events started on time and did not run over their allotted time. A lot of conferences could take a few lessons. For me, it was a nice mix of literary celebrity and practical info. My only complaint is that not much seemed geared toward little libraries like ours -- and I know there are a lot of us out there. No doubt that's because little library staffers don't have time to attend ALA conference organizing sessions, or make their name in the field as speakers. But it's worth keeping in mind because I bet a big part of ALA's constituency actually comes from little shops.

There were some big name writers there -- Toni Morrison as the keynote speaker at the opening general session, John Grisham, Junot Diaz, Dennis Lehane. It was interesting to see the difference between librarians as an audience from a purely literary gathering like the Key West Literary Seminar or the Miami Book Fair. Librarians seemed purely appreciative, not needy in the way that literary eventgoers can sometimes be, and I liked that. Naturally all the writers made sure to give props to libraries and librarians.

Some other mostly random observations and quotes:

What is it with the librarians and Second Life? I just don't get it -- and I don't want to and I won't. Maybe it's because I associate it with a particularly unappealing former work colleague but it just strikes me as creepy. Isn't Regular Life enough, or more than enough to keep up with? I suppose this is just how others feel about Facebook but that's cool. No one's forcing you to do any of those things. It just seems like I never hear any references to Second Life ... except from strangely enthusiastic librarians.

"You don't walk into Nordstrom's and say, 'please show me your inventory management system.'" Stephen Abram of Gale, talking about the way we present our online public access catalogs to patrons.

"We are living in a golden age of comics and book design." Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," "Her Fearful Symmetry" and the upcoming graphic novel "The Night Bookmobile."

Dennis Lehane said the first nine screenplay adaptations of his novel "Shutter Island" tried to change the story to have a happy ending -- and they all sucked.

The panel called "Isn't It Romantic?" -- which featured six very nice and funny writers of romance novels -- was held in a room that was way too small for the crowd, in stark contrast to other sessions that had much bigger rooms and were half full or less. I think that speaks to the dissing of genre in general and romance in particular (I didn't check out the couple of scifi sessions I saw on the agenda so I don't know if those had similar room assignment/crowd issues). Too bad -- because we know they're popular with readers and obviously with a good section of librarians, too. Speaking of stereotyping, I think I was at the exact median of age, body size and apparel choices in that room -- making me feel both at home and strange, like when I see Swedes whom I've never met and am not related to, but who sort of feel familiar.

And this isn't ALA or library-related at all but if you go to Washington and have limited museum viewing time, I cannot recommend enough visiting the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. They share the old U.S. Patent Office building and they are both fantastic museums that are also a reasonable size to take in. The Portrait Gallery side, in particular, offers a nice precis of American history at the same time as seeing some cool paintings. And I got to see a genuine painting of Elizabeth I there! (Yes, she's not American but she played a role in early English settlements.) The real thing! The guy who painted that was looking at her! That gets my Tudor geek on, big time.

Of course, if you're interested at all in libraries you will probably visit the Library of Congress -- I'm embarrassed to say this was my first visit there but it was so worth it. What a gorgeous building, and monument, to the mission of libraries and their centrality to our country. And it's a working library, too. The tour was great, with all the cool architectural and artistic details explained and they had a great exhibit called Exploring the Early Americas. Highlighted in this exhibit is a map from the early 1500s by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, for which the Library recently paid $10 million. Why, you might wonder, would our national library pay $10 million for some German map? It turns out this was the map in which Waldseemüller named that big continent to the west after one of the early explorers: Amerigo Vespucci. OK. Now I get it.

Don't worry I'm not writing about ebooks

I'm sick to death of reading about ebooks and digital publishing because it all seems to come from the poles -- either we're looking at the Glorious Future or the Terrible End of literature. Plus there's so much being written and published, both online and in print, by self-obsessed media types, that you couldn't possibly follow it all. Plus as a wise person once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. So why kill myself trying to figure it out when really smart people who are paid to do so obviously can't? I chose this image because I recently completed two online book club reads -- in both cases, ahead of the official schedule. The first was Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the inaugural One Book One Twitter. The second was Justin Cronin's Passage for the inaugural Salon Book Club.

I liked both books a lot -- each gets four stars -- but in terms of communal reading experience I have to give the edge to Salon -- even though they're only midway through and even though I have spent a lot less time with the online component than I did with the Twitter side and I don't plan to contribute to the Salon discussion, as I did to the Twitter talk. It might be because I'm more comfortable with someone in charge -- and I fully understand that the brilliance of Twitter is that no one is in charge -- but if I have a chance of sitting in on a book discussion guided by the brilliant Laura Miller, I'm taking it. The Twitter conversation was necessarily stutterstep and repetitive and without nuance. Salon's is far more limited in terms of the number of people taking part -- but the contributions seem more thoughtful and considered. In other words, more like reading a book.

This is not an anti-Twitter jeremiad. I was mildly Twitterphobic and am now glad to have gotten over that. It's fun to use it as a kind of personalized wire service; I follow mostly book-related feeds but also a few news feeds and a couple celebrity feeds (Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, OK?). I also follow a couple cycling feeds (Lance Armstrong and Johann Bruyneel).

As for the books -- American Gods was good but I really need to re-read it because limiting myself to the 1B1T reading schedule was just too frustrating and too scattered. There's a lot going on in that  novel, with a lot of characters and side stories thrown in, and too much time between reading sessions meant I forgot too much. The Passage is one of this summer's hot books -- it's, inevitably, about vampires but this ain't no Twilight/True Blood dreamy vampire. These are bad vampires, initially created by a government experiment run amok and they manage, in short order, to destroy America as we know it. It's been compared quite a bit to The Stand by Stephen King, which I haven't read. I don't even read in that genre. But I found it an engrossing, well written tale that credibly created a world and included characters whose fates mattered to me. Isn't that what a good summer book is supposed to do?