 |
|
Originally published: 2019 Acquired: December 2022 Read: April 2023 |
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
I read this middle-grade novel told in free verse about a teenage girl fleeing Syria to Cincinnati as part of a project to read books set in my hometown.
Captain Salt in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
 |
| Originally published: 1936 Acquired: June 2022 Read aloud: June–July 2023 |
Though I know I read most or even all of the Thompson books as a kid, I typically have remembered nothing of them before rereading them to my son. But I did remember just one thing from this one: Ozamaland. I didn't remember anything about it, but I recognized that place name, and that as a kid it had tantalized me. What was this place that seemingly shared a name with Oz yet was so far from it?
Like the last few books by her, this has the feeling that Thompson is pushing out of the confines of the Oz structure and just doing what interests her. Specifically, this is a sequel to her own Pirates in Oz, following up on the adventures of Captain Samuel Salt of the Crescent Moon (formerly a pirate, now the Royal Explorer of Oz), ship's cook Ato (also part-time King of Octagon Isle), and Roger (Ato's Royal Read Bird). Together, the three (the Crescent Moon has been automated by the Red Jinn of Ev, so Salt need not rely on her unreliable former crew) set off to explore the unknown reaches of the Nonestic Ocean... and colonize it for Oz!?
Like a lot of Thompson's books, the politics are both pretty conservative and seemingly at odds with other Oz books. The book claims that Oz is getting too crowded—too many communities dotting the map, and too many princes who need places to rule—and thus the Crescent Moon is to bring new lands into Oz, putting them under the rule of Ozma. Whether these new lands want to be ruled appears to be somewhat besides the point, and the book reproduces a number of Orientalist tropes, portraying these lands as "new" and "undiscovered" even then they have their own inhabitants! But those people are, of course, just "natives."
There's not really another Oz book like it, though: none of the characters are from Oz, none step foot in the four countries of Oz during the novel's events, and no characters created by L. Frank Baum appear (which is I believe a first in the Oz books). The looser, aimless exploratory journey structure reminds me a bit of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), which was always my favorite of the Narnia books, and I found a lot to like here too. Thompson takes the Crescent Moon to a variety of new and interesting places: Lavaland Island with its volcanic inhabitants, Peakenspire Island made up entirely mountains and inhabited by yodelers, a giant sea forest, and so on. But like in Pirates, the novel benefits from the fact that being set on a ship means it can't have the frenetic pace of a lot of Thompson's Oz novels, with there actually being time to pause and reflect between each escapade. There's a lot of emphasis of the fauna that Samuel Salt collects, with lots of neat animals described and captured. Like in my favorite Oz novels, there are weird problems the characters must reason their way out of using their varied skills.
On one of their early trips, the Crescent Moon discovers in captivity on Patrippany Island, King Tazander Tazah of Ozamaland, who is being cared for by a friendly speaking hippopotamus named Nikobo. They liberate "Tandy" and bring him aboard, heading for Ozamaland, which Salt has heard of but no one has ever actually visited before. Tandy refers to himself as a "king and the son of a king's son" and is too proud to do any work aboard ship. But with some coaxing from Roger, he soon comes to enjoy sea life and learns to have fun. It's a fairly quick evolution, but it's also the only such evolution I can think of for an Oz protagonist, who usually end their novels much as they began. Tandy learns to be a better person, and when he returns to Ozamaland he is able to stand up for himself in a way he never did before—and unusually for a Thompson ruler, he just gets back on the Crescent Moon once the novel is over.
There's a very perceptive take on this novel I enjoyed from J. L. Bell hosted on Pumperdink; as he points out, it's basically Thompson's version of a Rudyard Kipling novel like Captains Courageous. But "[b]oth THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS are about learning the rules of a society--of the jungle or a ship. In contrast, Roger's approach to educating Tandy is to FREE him from the rules he's been following all his life." Tandy learns to be helpful on the ship, especially thanks to his artistic ability, where he quickly sketches nature scenes for Captain Salt's log. But also the ending is different too:
Can Tandy keep from growing up further? I think the young heroes of both THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS suffer through the death of one of their mentors, a major step toward maturity. Tandy doesn't have to do that. Though he lost his parents in infancy, he still has Nikobo, Salt, Ato, and Roger, and they seem to expect to live for hundreds more years. Thompson's version of Kipling's tales can thus have a uniquely Ozzy ending--a coming-of-age story in which no one actually has to come of age.
I think Bell encapsulates well why the arc of Tandy was one of my favorite parts of the book.
So if you can put the politics aside (and I can't blame you if you can't, because the story wouldn't exist without them), it's an enjoyable book. It seems to me with a little bit more self-awareness this could have all worked. Have Salt come to learn that though these places were all unknown to him, they weren't to their inhabitants, and have him realize that the Oz colonization plan was doomed. The set-up is right there, too, with the chapter about how Samuel Salt ends up a specimen in an underwater zoo, but it goes nowhere.
Like a lot of Thompson's work, it has the faint feel of being made up as she went along. Specifically, we are given a lot of details about Ozamaland early on that aren't really relevant to anything. It's on a continent called Tarara, sharing it with another country called Amaland; the people of Ozamaland wear white and are divided between the nobles who live in the White City and the "natives" who live in the jungles and deserts, while the people of Amaland wear gray. None of this matters in the end. One wonders if Thompson was setting up stuff she could use at the novel's end if the Crescent Moon made it to Ozamaland with fifty pages left to fill up, but then the Crescent Moon made it there with only twenty pages to fill up. I'd like to read a sequel that delved into all this a bit more—and why, as has tantalized me ever since I was a child, the name of the country has "Oz" in it. It seems to me there are some stories there. (There is a four-book fan series called The Royal Explorers of Oz that follows up on elements of this book, but I don't know if it explores what I am interested. Alas, at over $40 it's a bit of a plunge to take on the work of unknown-to-me authors.)
My son and I didn't move as quickly through this as our last couple, but he did seem pretty into it, especially the descriptions of many of the strange and unusual animals they encountered. When I asked him if he liked it, he said he liked all of the parts. (Unlike some other Oz books, there's not really any extended sequence of "bad things" happening to our protagonists, which is always what he complains about.) It was a good one to read aloud, though the early sections gave my throat quite a workout having to do a pirate voice, a pompous monarch voice, and a bird voice! I was very grateful when Tandy showed up.
(Many pedants like to point out that this book, despite the title, has no scenes set in Oz... but that's not true, because every island that the Crescent Moon visits is absorbed into Oz. Captain Salt is in Oz all the time!)
This book marks two years of reading Oz aloud to my son, who was not quite three when we started and is now not quite five. (I am writing this ten days before its posting date, which is a day before his birthday.) In the first year, we read an astounding twenty-three Oz books; this year we read sixteen more, which is not quite as fast but still pretty respectable. This covered books five through sixteen of Ruth Plumly Thompson's nineteen-book run, plus a four of Baum's "borderlands" books. All the Thompsons have essentially been new to me, so unlike the first year of this project, which was largely nostalgic, this has been one of discovery. I don't always like her choices, but almost all of them have been worth reading. The few borderlands books we did have been fun to revisit through a child's eyes; I have more appreciation of, say, Dot and Tot of Merryland and Queen Zixi of Ix now (though less for The Master Key and The Enchanted Island of Yew).
Though his interest ebbs and flows in its precise intensity, he seems as in to them as ever, and we have maintained a fairly consistent pace of late. The other day, he spent a morning drawing me a bunch of strange creatures that he said were from Oz, and indeed, they seemed pretty Ozzy.
It's funny; at this point his reading of the early books was so long ago he scarcely remembers them. Around the time we read Kabumpo in Oz, he told me that Dorothy, Ozma, Trot, and Betsy were his favorite characters; a month ago he did not remember who Trot and Betsy were! Once we get to the end we can go back to the beginning and it will all be new to him. I am looking forward to getting out of the Thompsons soon and discovering other flavors of post-Baum Oz, but I also know a lot of those books are more interested in the specific details of Baum which my son has totally forgotten!
Next up in sequence: Handy Mandy in Oz
Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
Nerilka's Story: A Pern Adventure
by Anne McCaffrey
With these two books, I jump back to the Sixth Pass, a set of events occasionally alluded to in the Ninth Pass books through the epic song "Moreta's Ride"; these were McCaffrey's first attempts at telling stories outside of the framework of the original Ninth Pass. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern tells the story of a plague that swept across Pern and the desperate attempts to stop it, particularly by the Weyrwoman Mortea, her lover Alessan, and the Masterhealer Capian. Nerilka's Story is a very lean novel (possibly a novella by actual word count?) that retells the story of Moreta from the perspective of a minor side character in Moreta.
 |
|
Published: 1983 Acquired: March 2008 Read: May 2023 |
Moreta is an unintentionally familiar read in the COVID era, a story about a respiratory disease that can kill you, quarantines, defiant leaders, and vaccine distribution. It's fairly effective, mostly because of its main protagonist, the eponymous Moreta. She is an older woman, one who has had children and as Weyrwoman, has had a lover, but has clearly never known love. The scenes between Moreta and Alessan are the emotional core of the book and its most effective. Moreta is a Weyrwoman: she must manage her weyr and assist her Weyrleader. Alessan is a Lord Holder; recently widowed, he needs to remarry to ensure the continuation of his bloodline. The two fall in love over runnerbeast (i.e., horse) racing and dance together, but then duty pulls them as the epidemic worsens across Pern. Yet, they manage to snatch moments together. There's an effective feeling of doom layered across the whole thing, and some decent uses of the time travel abilities dragons were revealed to have in the original trilogy. I like that McCaffrey was trying something a little bit different here, and I overall found it an enjoyable, occasionally moving, read.
 |
|
Published: 1986 Acquired: April 2023 Read: May 2023 |
Spoilers for Moreta: at the end, following the death of Moreta, Alessan marries minor character Nerilka "Rill." Nerilka's Story retells the plague from her perspective. It follows some Pern tropes that will be familiar to anyone who's read Dragonsong and Masterharper: Nerilka's family is mean to her even though she's gifted, Nerilka strikes out on her own, everyone realizes how awesome Nerilka is, the end. It's 182 pages long, but there are pictures and generous typography; I blew through it in one day. Though I was generally entertained, I feel like the central question I had—how did Alessan come around to Nerilka so quickly—was largely unaddressed, going by very fast at the end.
I think the publishers knew this wasn't up to much; the dust jacket insists this is a gift to Pern fans (a gift you had to buy yourself in hardcover?) and the pictures—which are not very good—and the maps and other appendices seem like padding.
This is the fifth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:
Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson
For the past couple years, I've based my AWR 101 class here at the University of Tampa around the "theme" of science fiction. That is to say, we practice our skills of analysis on some common science fiction text, and I also provide them with some "lens" essays about science fiction, before then opening it up so that they can select their own science fiction texts. But each semester, I adjust what texts I use in combination with what. I particularly struggled to pick good focal texts for my lens unit; I really wanted something that embodies China Miéville's idea of sf-as-metaphor-and-literal and also complicated Isaac Asimov's categories of science fiction, but over the years I tried various combinations of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," and Sarah Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)," but for first-year non-majors they were too long or too confusing or too both. (One that did work reliably well was Fonda Lee's "I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married.")
 |
|
Originally published: 2017 Acquired: September 2022 Reread: October 2022 |
It was a hit. Not in the sense that a parade of students came up to me and told me that they loved it (though a few of them seemed to like it, at least), but in that it did exactly what it needed to. I had many students pair it with Miéville and discuss its metaphorical depiction of things like class issues and social media influencers and healthcare. These are a bit obvious, to be honest, but the kind of obvious that works well for a college freshman. If you want to be able to say, "A key tool of analysis is pairing two texts together, and using one as a lens," obvious connections are often what you need.
But it made some unexpected good connections with my other lenses too. When I was teaching Asimov's introductions to Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, it was a good example of his Stage Three-C story, the "if this goes on—" anti-utopia. Last semester I switched to a different Asimov essay, "Social Science Fiction," but it worked well with that too, being a good example of how Asimov argues social sf depicts futures to show the way things should or should not be. Some particularly strong papers argued it wasn't really like Asimov's definition of "social science fiction" but rather his definition of "social fiction" because it wasn't really interested in the future at all, just holding up a mirror to the present. Another student argued that the novel seems like it ought to be an example of Asimov's adventure science fiction, but it's actually social science fiction, which I thought was an insightful point.
It also paired well with the On the Media podcast; in some obvious ways (the podcast discusses how sf isn't really about the future, just commentary about the present) but also in ways where students surprised me. The podcast talks about how it's easy for sf to give us nothing but despair, but at its best, it gives us hope too, and that turned out to be a nice lens for discussing the end of the novel, which (I think) struggles to find grounds for hope in the face of despair at a social catastrophe. The novel spends its whole time demonstrating a widespread social problem, but then I think it wants you to be happy when the protagonist's immediate issues are resolved... even though the social inequalities that caused them remain in place. I think the best lens texts resolve something confusing or difficult about a text but also open up new possibilities, and I find the ending of Landscape particularly frustrating, and I got some good papers looking at that.
In the fall, I think I'll be switching "themes" again, so this will be my last time teaching Landscape with Invisible Hand for the foreseeable, but I think it allowed me to perfect my science fiction theme in its last year.
We've been going to library about once a week this summer, constantly returning and checking out new books. On our very first trip of the summer, my wife suggested we could see what Pokémon books the library had—Son One has become obsessed with the show and game.
Taking them home revealed that Sun & Moon was volume 12 in a twelve-volume series, so maybe not a good one to start with. Sword & Shield is the most recent manga series, of which there are six volumes so far—and it takes place in the Galar region, the setting of Pokémon Journeys, the most recent tv show which he's been watching on Netflix. I also realized that the manga has been running continuously since 1997, and that our library system had many of them. So I suggested we could work our way through Sword & Shield, and then circle back to the beginning, and Son One agreed.
The next night I sat down with the library catalog to make a list of all the volumes of the manga in order... not counting the two Sword & Shields we already had, it came out to ninety-four!
Like I said, it's been running since 1997. And in all that time, it's had one writer, Hidenori Kusaka! And only two artists, Mato and Satoshi Yamamoto.
The rounds are compiled into larger books called "volumes"; there's about nine rounds in a volume on average. In Japan, these volumes are continuously numbered from 1 to 64; in English, they ran from 1 to 29 before they began resetting the volume numbering with each new series. My understanding is that the volume publications will see things tweaked and expanded, sometimes adding whole new rounds to the story.
These volumes lag behind the original magazine publications by quite a bit, though. Volume 64 was the most recently released in Japan, and it goes up through round 616. So to compensate, beginning with round 549 (the beginning of the X•Y series), Viz began releasing what are called "mini-volumes" or "special editions," which collect just three or four rounds apiece, straight from the original magazine editions.
Our library system has basically everything: almost all the regular volumes in hard copy (and what ones aren't in hard copy, they have electronically) and every mini-volume in hard copy. So the list I made runs through what is currently available in volume form, and then when the volumes run out, switches to mini-volumes to bring it up to the present.
This is how my list currently goes:
Pokémon Adventures is not the only Pokémon manga, either; there's some that adapt the tv show and movies of course, and our library also has two others: Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! (which confusingly is nothing to do with Pokémon Adventures: Diamond and Pearl/Platinum) and Pokémon Horizon: Sun & Moon (which confusingly is nothing to do with the new tv show Pokémon Horizons). I put these on our list, too. Alas, our library does not have Magical Pokémon Journey, the shōjō romance manga set in the Pokémon world.
So for now I seem to be committed to reading these to Son One, though hopefully not forever. By the time we get back up to where we started, surely he will be able to read them himself!
That said, though, Sword & Shield is pretty cute. I like the two protagonists, Henry Sword and Casey Shield; it's interesting to have people in the Pokémon world who have purposes different from Ash's; Henry wants to be an expert on Pokémon "gear," the equipment some Pokémon carry around with them. Casey is a hacker, creating computer simulations of Pokémon battles to aid research, and carrying out a search for her vanished Pokémon. The stuff I have read about the earlier volumes sounds intriguing, too.
Though I am sure some stuff has escaped me, I am fairly certain I have cleaned up 90% of Pokémon Adventures–related material on LibraryThing. One thing I won't be doing, though... logging the books myself, either on LT or on my reading list. I dunno, though I count reading Oz with Son One, this feels different. But perhaps I'll periodically write up my thoughts on them here.
The Masterharper of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
My memory of the original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy was that Robinton, the Masterharper of Pern, was my favorite character, carrying me through parts of the book I found less interesting. So it seemed logical to me that I would follow up the Harper Hall trilogy with this prequel about the life of the Masterharper.
 |
|
Published: 1998 Acquired and read: April 2023 |
Well, whatever made Robinton my favorite character in the original books, there's absolutely no trace of it here. Like Menolly and Piemur, Robinton is an obnoxious prodigy, able to compose amazing music from a young age, and basically better at everything than everybody else. And that's it, that's the book! He never seems to struggle, he just is the best at everything he does. I think McCaffrey doesn't really understand excellence; she seems to think it some kind of effortless superiority. Some of the most excellent people you know work the hardest and struggle the most, but you wouldn't know it from reading a McCaffrey novel. And why does Robinton have to be the best composer, the best singer, the best player? Surely the skills required to be Masterharper are not these technical ones, but the skills of leading men and having wisdom? These are skills Robinton never demonstrates in this book. Why is he picked as Masterharper? It's not clear, he just is. How does he adjust to this new role? As boringly effortlessly as he does everything else.
On top of all that, Robinton can hear all dragons talk, which totally contradicts the depiction of Robinton in the original trilogy. Wow, he's just so so special. Actually, a lot of stuff doesn't line up; Menolly's boyfriend Sebell is aged up by a whole generation here, and Robinton's mother was a harper when the Harper Hall trilogy made clear there were no women harpers prior to Menolly. Why write a prequel if you can't make it join up right?
This book was a tedious, awful slog that made me hate a character who had been one of my favorites. I've seen it said that as the Pern series went on, McCaffrey lost sight of what made it work in the original books. For the readers, Pern was an awesome place you'd want to live, but that hadn't been true for the characters. But as it went on, that became true for the characters too. The Pern of the 1990s has had all its rough edges rounded off, and that loses what made Pern work to begin with back in the 1960s.
This is the fourth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Moreta and Nerilka's Story. Previous installments are listed below:
Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes by Travis Baldree
An orc decides to give up adventuring and open up a coffee shop. Apparently this is the standard bearer for "cozy fantasy." If this is the epitome of cozy fantasy, then apparently cozy fantasy is an utterly boring genre where nothing happens. I've read some discussion of the book, and often people stereotype its detractors as needing big battles and epic adventures... but unlike many readers of fantasy, I read outside of the genre as well and know how much a good writer can do with seemingly little. One of my favorite books is Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which is about a guy who realizes he's getting old, that's it. The problem isn't that this is a novel of "low stakes," it's that it's a novel of no stakes.
 |
|
Originally published: 2022 Acquired and read: July 2023 |
Viv opens her coffee shop... and basically encounters no problems that aren't resolved within about ten pages. There is almost no interpersonal conflict—everyone she meets is instantly helpful all the time—and very little internal conflict as well—having decided to do this thing, she does it. I couldn't help but keep thinking what Terry Pratchett would do with an orc running a coffee shop. It would be hilarious, of course (whereas I remember laughing about once here), but more importantly, there would be some kind of conflict from what the protagonist was expected to be (a violent orc) and what the protagonist wanted to be (a coffee shop owner), both internally and externally. There's none of that here, the rich potential of this idea goes completely unmined. You never have a sense that Viv could fail, even though most new restaurants in our world close within a year because they can't turn a profit. This is still true even when her shop burns down! It comes across as a minor, temporary setback.
There's just no depth of character here. I hate for a review to be "how I would have written it," but if I'd written it, the orc would have had to struggle to put away her old mindset, struggle to make connections, even struggle to do basic customer service. Because, who wants to read 250 pages of someone easily doing everything they want to do? (Apparently lots of people.) I love stories where groups of disparate people overcome their differences to accomplish something... but these people don't overcome anything, much less their differences!
There is a sort of subplot about a local crimeboss trying to extort protection money from the coffee shop, but it ends nonsensically. After refusing to pay and refusing to fight, Viv just begins... buying her off with free baked goods? How is that any different from paying, morally speaking? Then the brutal crimelord is just another pal.
Often I can read a book and not like it and see what other people appreciate in it anyway... in this case, I can only wrap my head around it be assuming the people who made this book into a sensation have absolutely no discernment. I get wanting something "cozy"... but I also feel like coziness is pointless in fiction if it doesn't come after some kind of struggle. I had a friend in college would used to complain there weren't more "slice of life" stories. When quizzed, it turned out she meant a story where a woman met a man and lived happily ever after with no issues coming up. I thought it was pretty self-evident why stories like that didn't exist, but maybe I should send her a copy of Legends & Lattes.
Well, I guess the floor for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel has been set. Shouldn't be too hard for it to be surpassed.
The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem by Rudolph Fisher
This is a 1930s murder mystery set in Harlem, the first murder mystery written by a black author with an all-black cast: black victim, black suspects, black detectives, including a black police detective and a black physician. It's been republished a few times since, most recently as part of the Library of Congress's "Crimes Classics" series, with an introduction and footnotes by Leslie S. Klinger.
 |
|
Originally published: 1932 Acquired: September 2022 Read: May 2023 |
It's pretty good, if not great. The basic premise is that a "conjure-man" has apparently been killed, and there are all too many suspects; a police detective and a doctor end up working together to solve the crime. The opening half is the best part, with the detective methodically interviewing and verifying the different suspects and accumulating all the clues, aided by the insight of the doctor. We get a lot of different segments of 1930s Harlem life; my favorite was Bubber Brown, who used to be a street sweeper but decided to launch a new career as a private detective investigating infidelity, reasoning anybody can follow someone. He's a funny character, and the source of the book's best jokes. (When Detective Dart points out he can't put "Inc." on his business card if he's not actually incorporated, Bubber claims it says "ink" because he's black.)
As the mystery unspooled, I found it got a bit overcomplicated and technical, and the ending felt very abrupt. I mean, I know you don't want a mystery to be very guessable, but I wasn't convinced this one was guessable at all, based on the clues provided. Enjoyable, and I'd recommend it, but unlikely to be anyone's favorite. I am curious to track down the previous appearance of Bubber and his friend Jinx Jenkins in Fisher's first novel, The Walls of Jericho. (Speaking of which, though overall Klinger's apparatus is pretty good, with lots of useful clarifications, but not condescending overexplanations, I had to infer these characters were reused from an earlier book by a passing reference in a footnote; weirdly, it's never explicitly stated.)
The Wishing Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
 |
| Originally published: 1935 Acquired: September 2022 Read aloud: June 2023 |
When writing up Speedy in Oz, I noted how Thompson's books often have analogues in Baum's, but Wishing Horse is different—it has no analogue in Baum's work as far as I can think of, and indeed, it seems to me that it must have been fairly unusual as a fantasy for the 1930s in general. Skamperoo, the king of Skampavia, a small poor country across the Deadly Desert from Oz, comes into the possession of magic wishing emeralds, and uses them to wish himself an amazing horse (the charger Chalk) and then to make himself emperor of Oz. But he's crafty (or rather, his advisors are), so he also wishes all the existing rulers and magic users of Oz disposed of, and he wishes that no one ever remember them. So Ozma, Glinda, the Tin Woodman, the kings and queens of the Munchkin and Gillikin countries, the Wizard of Oz, and even the visiting Red Jinn of Ev, are all gone in an instant, and no one remembers them—except Dorothy. You see, just before the spell takes effect, the beard of the Soldier with the Green Whiskers turns red, and Dorothy uses a wishing pill she happens to have in her pocket to make a wish that no matter what happens, she will be able to save Ozma and Oz. In classic Ruth Plumly Thompson fashion, this isn't really explained, but it seems to be that the Soldier's beard is somehow reacting with the magic of the wishing pills. (It's suggested that the beard is reacting to red magic, but we eventually learn that the wishing emeralds were formed with green magic, so who knows.)
What you get, though, is one of those classic sf&f stories where the universe is wrong, but only one person remembers: I think this is a combination of what TV Tropes would call "Backstory Invader" and "Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory." Dorothy realizes that Ozma and a lot of other people are missing... but no one other than her remembers them, not even the Scarecrow! My son did not like this, though he was also a bit confused—it's definitely a more complicated kind of magic spell than we usually see in Oz stories. The only person she can convince is Pigasus, the flying pig introduced in Pirates in Oz. Whoever sits on Pigasus's back speaks in verse, and this mental connection means that Pigasus can read Dorothy's mind and know that she is telling the truth. So Dorothy and Pigasus take off by themselves on a desperate mission to find some kind of assistance in restoring the proper history of Oz.
(It did sort of bug me that Dorothy doesn't even try to bring Toto with her; you think if anyone would believe Dorothy that Oz history had been changed even without evidence, it would be Toto.)
I don't think it has an analogue in another Oz book, but you can tell that Thompson probably reread both Wonderful Wizard and Road to Oz before writing it. The latter because Wishing Horse opens with basically the same kind of gigantic party and parade that closes Road. While I found it a bit annoying in Road, it's a clever way to open Wishing Horse. We see so many characters from previous books: along with the ones I already mentioned, we see High Boy, Notta Bit More, the Hungry Tiger, Sir Hokus, Prince Tatters, Kabumpo and the Royal Family of Pumperdink, Ojo and Unc Nunkie, King Ato and Roger, Tik-Tok, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, Snif the Iffin, and many more. Because we see so much of how things are supposed to be, it's jarring when suddenly things are different. Thompson can be clever when she wants.
You can tell Thompson reread Wonderful Wizard because Wishing Horse is the first Oz book since the first to remember that the Good Witch of the North kissed Dorothy on her first trip to Oz in order to protect her. Exactly how this protection worked was a bit vague, and it never came up again; you might have assumed that it faded when Dorothy returned to Kansas at the end of the first book, given it never did anything for her again. But here it protects her from Gloma, the Black Witch of the East (who ought to be the Black Witch of the West, because Thompson always swaps the locations of the Munchkin and Winkie countries). Maybe the protection afforded by the Good Witch of the North only works against other witches? I don't think Dorothy was ever threatened by a witch specifically in all the intervening books. The whole encounter with Gloma and her people in the Black Forest was interesting; it's one of those rare threats that Thompson takes slowly and carefully, and I appreciated that. Like many Thompson communities, the denizens of the Black Forest transform their visitors to be like them, but they're not just a group of maniacs to be run away from, but rather potential friends to be won over in classic Dorothy fashion.
Anyway, on finding no one in Oz can help them, Dorothy and Pigasus travel to the Nome Kingdom, because King Kaliko has an army and politically owes his position of power to Oz intervention. Thompson always does well by Kaliko (and I always like reading his dialogue in a very obsequious voice), tricky but also careful not to overtly cross someone from Oz. Kaliko says he'll loan her an army... but only if she can come up with another army; Kaliko's wizard (the Nomes had a wizard in Tik-Tok, so clearly Thompson reread that too) also tells her that Ozma and all the other disappeared people are asleep submerged in Lightning Lake on Thunder Mountain, so Dorothy and Pigasus set off once again.
One often has the feeling that Thompson makes up her books as she goes along; she starts with a general sense of how that will end, but never goes back to the beginning to revise it to line up with the end more. Rarely has that been more clear to me than in Wishing Horse, where Dorothy and Pigasus never ever make it to Thunder Mountain; instead, they bump into a friendly seer, Bitty Bit of Some Summit, and he solves all their problems for them. So what had been a strong, engaging plot for most of its run suddenly fizzles out. Did Thompson not know how to handle Dorothy and Pigasus on Thunder Mountain?
With Bitty Bit, the two travel back to the Emerald City and corner Skamperoo and convince him to give up the emeralds. Again, it seems like things are going to explode at the climax but instead they kind of peter out, because by the time they get there, someone else has stolen the emeralds from Skamperoo! You might think this will complicate things, but in fact, a kitchen boy runs in with them, Pigasus grabs them, and then the kitchen boy runs away, all too easy. The complication is they still need to trust Skamperoo and Chalk to make the right wish to undo everything; in the book as written, it's Bitty Bit who makes this leap of trust, but I changed it to Dorothy as I read it aloud to my four-year-old son, which I think works better for a lot of character reasons. So kind of a disappointing ending to an otherwise strong book.
I will say that Skamperoo himself is one of the fun parts of the book; the narrator calls him a big baby early on, which my son thought was hilarious. He just wants to rule someplace nicer than Skampavia... though Skampavia would be nicer if he was a better ruler! Chalk is one of her typically strong horse characters; moral, but also loyal to his owner, even if his owner wants to do something wrong. I liked that at the end, they both reformed.
On the whole, as we come closer to the end of our run of Thompsons, you can see that she's kind of cutting loose a bit. Neither Speedy nor Wishing Horse are really like her other Oz books or, indeed, any Oz books. We have just six Thompsons to go (only four "canonical" ones), so I look forward to seeing what else she does next. My son reported enjoying this one, and I believe him—though as always he did not like the "bad parts," which in this case were when people didn't remember Ozma, and when Skamperoo was ruling Oz.
Some continuity thoughts: maybe Thompson didn't reread Road because she makes some mistakes about Merryland, Ix, and Noland, the three countries adjoining Skampavia. She says Merryland has a king (but it has a queen), that Zixi of Ix is friendly and pleasant (but she could be quite fierce), and that no one lives in Noland (sort of logical based on the name, but not the case). I edited all this as I read it.
Near the end of the book, we learn that the wishing emeralds were created by the Wizard Wam (an ancient Oz magic worker previously mentioned in Cowardly Lion) for the King of Green Mountain. My son suggested that "Green Mountain" could be an older name for "Big Enough Mountain," the big green mountain in the Quadling Country colonized by settlers from Emerald City in Speedy. Good idea, and I don't think there's anything in either book to contradict it.
Next up in sequence: Captain Salt in Oz
Dragondrums: Volume Three of the Harper Hall Trilogy
by Anne McCaffrey
The Harper Hall books are less a trilogy and more a duology about Menolly and then a single book about Piemur, the young harper who was introduced as a side character in Dragonsinger. Piemur has a beautiful prepubescent voice... and Dragondrums opens with that voice breaking as Piemur goes through puberty, so now he needs to carve out a new space for himself at the Harper Hall.
 |
|
Originally published: 1979 Acquired: July 2010 Read: April 2023 |
This is the third installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers The Masterharper of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:
American Splendor: Our Movie Year
 |
|
Collection published: 2004 Contents originally published: 2000-04 Read: May 2023 |
American Splendor is, of course, the comic book about the life of Harvey Pekar in all its humdrum glory, usually told in the form of short observational stories. Every once in a while, I pick up an American Splendor book I haven't already read; this time around, that brought me to Our Movie Year, which collects a number of stories that depicted what happened in Pekar's life when the 2003 film came out, or were written around that time, or came about as a consequence of the film. As is frustratingly normal for an American Splendor collection, there's no contextual material: when and where did these stories originally appear? you will just have to infer it.
It's a bit of a mixed bag, more than most American Splendor collections. Part of the issue is that much of the material is redundant: I think there are three different accounts of how the movie got made. Each originally appeared in a different venue, I believe, but put them all in the same book and you get the same story three different times. Some other stories re-tell the story of American Splendor itself. Again, useful if Pekar's debuting in some new venue, but longtime readers don't need to be reretetold the story of how he met R. Crumb.
 |
| This panel cracks me up, because it makes Harvey look like he's threatening the guy and making him uncomfortable when he gives him a compliment. original publication unknown* (art by Ed Piskor) |
 |
| Harvey Pekar: able to make much out of little. original publication unknown* (art by Gerry Shamray) |
 |
| Harvey Pekar: can never enjoy a good thing. from Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider (art by Mark Zingarelli) |
 |
| TLDR. from Gambit Weekly (art by Gary Dumm) |
As is often the case by now, his artistic collaborators are well chosen. There's a fun reunion with R. Crumb, and I particularly like Gerry Shamray's work in this one, though we also have a lot of solid contributions from Gary Dumm.
Next up in sequence: Best of American Splendor
* Possible this book was their original publication. Who knows?
Usually the summer is when Sarah Juliet, the editor at Studies in the Fantastic, the academic journal on which I am associate editor, and I put together our fall issue. My role is usually to do later passes, after SJ and the writer have worked through things back-and-forth a bit. The writers have responded to peer-review comments and SJ's queries, and then I go through, editing for citations and adherence to MLA style, but also making any other comments I see fit, or sometimes weighing in on anything still uncertain between SJ and the writer.
It's a process I enjoy—enough that I've been wondering if I should pick up freelance copy-editing work or something—but also it is frustrating. Mistakes I hammer into my AWR 201 students are still being committed by people with Ph.D.s in English! Now, if they weren't doing this, I would have little to do, but it has made me wonder if I should be a bit more understanding of my students' mistakes if people with Ph.D.s commit the same ones...?
Nah.
(I do think, though, that if you have a Ph.D., you ought to be able to figure out how to give your Works Cited page a hanging indent in Microsoft Word.)
I often get praised for my master of MLA style, and I don't know if it's the kind of thing one should be praised for, because to me, it just comes naturally. What I mean by this is that I think I've always been pretty good at grasping systems; I blame being the child of two engineers. My siblings are engineers, and while that has no appeal to me, I clearly have some of that mindset myself.
What can be tricky about MLA style is that it can feel like there's fifty different formats with fifty different rules. But that's not really true, and what I liked about the 2016 eighth edition changes to MLA style is that they made the systematization even clearer. In the old days, you might cite a journal article like this:
Mollmann, Steven. "The War of the Worlds in the Boston Post and the Rise of American Imperialism: 'Let Mars Fire.'" English Literature in Transition 53.4 (Aug. 2010): 387-412.
But why a period after the volume number of the journal and a colon after the date? Why does the date go in parentheses? And it's all a bit inscrutable anyway—you can only know those are volume and issue and page numbers if you already know MLA style! MLA8 (which has since been superseded by the mostly identical MLA9) simplifies and systematizes things. This is how you would cite that now:
Mollmann, Steven. "The War of the Worlds in the Boston Post and the Rise of American Imperialism: 'Let Mars Fire.'" English Literature in Transition, vol. 53, no. 4, Aug. 2010, pp. 387-412.
It took me a bit to get used to the changes, but I came to really like them. More information is clearly labelled now: we now at a glance that "53" is a volume number, "4" an issue number, and "387-412" a page range. Even better, punctuation has been systematized. Instead of having to remember that some things are followed by periods and some by commas and come by colons and some go in parentheses, there's a fairly simple system.
All citations break down into five (potential) parts. (I don't describe it here quite like how MLA does in its own materials, but the end result is the same.) These are:
Not all of these apply to every source; the example I've been using above needs only #1-3. The thing to remember is that after each of those parts, you end in a period. If one of those parts needs multiple pieces of information, you connect them with commas. So for a journal article, the publication information consists of the journal title, the volume number, the issue number, the date of publication, and the page range, so that all gets strung together with commas. Easy!
Van Meter, Jen, writer. "Spin Cycle." Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant, no. 1, DC, Jan. 2010.
You just string all the publication information together with commas. (This comic didn't use page numbers.)
So I still do make my students responsible for MLA style, but what I try to emphasize is that it's a system. I don't expect them to memorize individual citation formats, but the skill I think they should be able to develop is to use a resource like a handbook to understand that system and apply it. That's how I teach it—and it also seems to me that that's the thing someone with an English Ph.D. should have learned how to do as well, even if they don't have an engineering brain.
Star Trek: Prometheus: The Root of All Rage
by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
translated by Helga Parmiter
 |
|
Translation published: 2018 Originally published: 2016 Acquired: December 2020 Read: March 2023 |
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every
few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: The Missing by Una McCormack
Pick of the month: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I always feel like it's cheating to pick a "best of" anthology, but I guess there are bad ones, so including the best sf is not necessarily a guarantor of quality. This is a good one indeed, lots of stuff I enjoyed reading.
All books read:
Best month in almost a year!
Currently reading:
Books remaining on "To be read" list: 667 (down 6)
Last month I wrote, "I anticipate an increase next month," but I was wrong! Despite getting a number of books, things went down even more. Six months with no increase!!
