thebookishowl.com

After more than 20 years, the Wheel of Time is drawing to a close. The Last Battle looms on the horizon, but as of the last page of 2009′s The Gathering Storm, there was still much to do. As impressed as I was with The Gathering Storm, I admit I closed the book and wondered how in the Light the late Robert Jordan’s successor, Brandon Sanderson, could suitably conclude all the dangling storylines in only two more books. Fortunately, Towers of Midnight, the penultimate book in the series, is further evidence that Robert Jordan’s opus was left in capable hands.

The Gathering Storm was occasionally riddled with exposition, a means of reminding readers where characters stood in their respective adventures since the release of the previous Wheel of Time book, Knife of Dreams, in 2005. Such reminders were necessary, seeing as four years separated Knife of Dreams and The Gathering Storm. Towers of Midnight, released only 13 months after The Gathering Storm, has no such recaps to wade through. Consequently, the pace Sanderson sets in Towers of Midnight is, by and large, appropriately quick and infused with adrenaline.

Aside from some slight slowdown approximately three-quarters through, there is always something happening. Battles are fought, relationships–romantic and otherwise–are explored, and perhaps most importantly, plot threads that began way back in the first four books come to a close, and beautifully. Towers of Midnight very much has a “full circle” kind of feel. As characters move toward resolving their personal plights, dozens of allusions to The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising are made, not only reminding readers of the origins of threads in Robert Jordan’s Pattern, but why the characters featured in Towers of Midnight have become so beloved by readers over the last two decades. As character thought back on events, I recalled those circumstances right along with them, which served up a warm dose of nostalgia that instilled the desire to reread the series yet again.

What characters am I referring to? The vast majority. Rand, Mat, Perrin, Thom, Egwene, Nynaeve, Lan, Gawyn, Galad, Faile, Birgitte, Min, Aviendha, Tuon, Cadsuane, Morgase, a few Forsaken, various Aes Sedai and Asha’man… Burn me, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a Wheel of Time book with a more generous spread of characters–and that list only includes characters whose points-of-view are directly explored. Each character receives as much attention as is needed to move things forward, so don’t worry that the large volume of plots weaved throughout Towers of Midnight results in any one story or character getting shafted.

The advancements each character makes in Towers of Midnight is by far the most exciting element of the story. Rand, having conquered the darkness inside him, makes moves to right the many wrongs born of his self-imposed emotional numbness. Egwene may be the Amyrlin Seat, but the White Tower is still suffering a schism due to her predecessor’s mad machinations that pitted Ajah against Ajah, as well as fear over the encroaching Seanchan. Mat and Perrin, only occasionally mentioned in The Gathering Storm in order to move them into position like stones on a stones board, are given much larger roles in Towers of Midnight. Perrin makes strides to come to grips with leadership and his inner wolf, while Mat, who many fans felt was not quite himself in Brandon Sanderson’s hands, steals the show at several intervals with his trademark blend of wit, action, and the Dark One’s own bloody luck.

Although I enjoyed spending time with all of my favorite characters, there were two segments of Towers of Midnight that especially stood out. The first is an emotional reunion between two characters that has been a long time coming. The second comes when one character finally voices a question I’ve asked myself countless times since reading the first book: do Aes Sedai really serve the world, or do they only purport to serve others while serving themselves? As much as I like many Aes Sedai characters in the series, they have all too often come across as bullies, using magic to bend others to their will in order to see their own schemes bear fruit, the rest of the world be damned. The fact that these questions are (finally) voiced, and voiced by a significant character, will hopefully bring about a change in the way the women of the White Tower view themselves and others. Such a change likely won’t be seen by readers, given that only one book remains in the series. But I would be satisfied with Aes Sedai (especially their Amyrlin) resolving to analyze and adjust their attitudes as the characters continue to exist in their world long after readers have read the final page of the final book.

If Towers of Midnight has any failing, it is that some storylines are wrapped up quick as a blink, which may leave some readers with whiplash. This very problem also occurred infrequently in The Gathering Storm, such as when the wife of one character murdered one of the series’ main antagonists–one who had risen to power over the course of approximately nine books, only to die in little more than three pages. However, the sheer magnitude of plot that had to be resolved over the final three books in the series dictated that some stories would simply have to end more abruptly than others. In this writer’s opinion, Sanderson was prudent in determining which loose ends to tie up posthaste, and which to draw out to appropriate and satisfying lengths.

With its emphasis on character development, exciting pace, and large cast of characters, Towers of Midnight is the Wheel of Time book fans have been waiting for since The Shadow Rising. The amount of ground covered in a single novel is staggering, and if Towers of Midnight is any indication as to what awaits us in the forthcoming A Memory of Light, the end, while bittersweet, is sure to be incredible.

Fantasy Book Critic

R.E.M.’s Mike Mills talks to Rolling Stone about the band’s new album, Collapse Into Now.

---

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal review the new book, Saul Bellow: Letters.

---

The Guardian explores the history of legendary Chess Records.

---

Library of the Early Mind is a documentary that examines the impact and art of children’s literature.

---

Flavorwire lists 12 great musical performances from the children’s television show Yo Gabba Gabba.

---

The Guardian lists 10 of the best zoos in literature.

---

Dean Wareham talks to the San Francisco Chronicle about performing Galaxie 500 songs on is current tour.

---

The Chicago Tribune profiles playwright, author, and actor Sam Shepard.

---

musicOMH interviews singer-songwriter David Sylvian.

---

The New York Daily News interviews Matt Johnson of Matt & Kim about the band’s new album, Sidewalks.

---

Author Sara Gruen lists her favorite books at The Week.

---

At Spin, author Neil Gaiman profiles Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls.

---

Dennis Lehane talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new novel, Moonlight Mile.

---

On sale at Amazon MP3 for .99: Band of Horses’ 10-track Everything All the Time album.

---

Books Worth Reading shares a dystopian reading list.

---

As I Turn the Pages interviews Laura Grodstein about her novel, A Friend of the Family.

---

Follow me on Twitter and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

---

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Online “Best Books of 2010″ lists

Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s comics & graphic novel releases)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

http://www.thewritingtutor.biz/suggested_reading/index.php

A starting point has been established! The link above is the beginning. I am still open to suggestions though. This is fantastic! Geez, that fine at the public library is such a pain in the ass. I realize my irresponsibility is ultimately to blame but that doesn’t make it any less inconvenient. I would love to stroll right in there and grab up about five books. Wouldn’t it be great if they just waived the fine? I don’t have 40 extra dollars sitting around. Especially during this time of year. The holiday season is upon us and my husband just had a birthday. My daughter is turning 2 on the 29th, and my son will be celebrating his fourth birthday on November 30th. I’ll have to cross my fingers and hope to find the first several books at a VERY cheap price online. If anyone actually reads this and knows where to find some books, INEXPENSIVE books, PLEASE let me know! Well, it’s dinner time then bath time for the kiddos then I will initiate my online hunt for GREAT literature!

The Search to Conquer Classic Literature

via Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of  The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the NYPL:

The New York Public Library is delighted to announce the availability of up to ten fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing research in the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division; Manuscripts and Archives Division; Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs; or Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.  Fellowships will range from ,500 to ,000.

Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply.

Applications must demonstrate how The New York Public Library’s collections are essential to the research proposed, and successful applicants are expected to contribute a report on their findings, suitable for posting to the Library’s website, at the conclusion of their research.

Applicants who are neither United States citizens nor entitled to work in the U.S. will be responsible for arranging their own visas. Fellowships will be handled as reimbursements when this is required due to the awardee’s visa status.

Applications must be received by April 1, 2010, and should include:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Outline of proposed research and indication of Library holdings to be used
(not more than 1,000 words)
Outline budget for travel and per diem expenses
Proposed dates to be spent in residence
One letter of recommendation

Application materials, including letters of recommendation, may be submitted by e-mail in PDF format (the preferred submission method) to jbaumann [at] nypl.org.

Awards will be announced April 30.

The official site (with all the above info and more) is here:

http://www.nypl.org/short-term-research-fellowships

Also, look here for more info on the Pforzheimer.

Romantic Circles Blog

Sarah and I have a blog post up at Austenprose today as part of their Heyer month. We’ve focussed on Heyer’s heroes:

Heyer’s novels, and her heroes, have been so influential in shaping the modern romance genre that the heroes created by modern romance authors either fit or struggle against the molds that Heyer perfected. So the supercilious man-about-town (Worth from Regency Buck), the wild child (Vidal from Devil’s Cub), the villainous hero (Avon from These Old Shades) may all seem like immutable romance archetypes today, but they are that way because Heyer established types that appealed to the romance-reading audience to such an extent that they have been copied and revised and expanded upon in Regency and historical romances for almost a century.

If you’d like to read a bit more about Heyer’s novels, Sherwood Smith has written a long and interesting post which compares their depiction of upper-class Regency life to both the fictional worlds of the earlier “Silver Fork” novels and the contemporary social sphere of some of Heyer’s contemporaries (she was born in 1902), which some of them depicted in their own novels:

I was struck by a resemblance between Mitford’s work and Heyer’s, specifically the cadences of language, and the outlook: Mitford wrote about Bright Young Things with the charm one remembers of one’s youth. Heyer wrote about them with the charm of one who admired that life, only she sets them in Regency garb, and gives them Regency era slang instead of the distinctive twenties “too-too sick-making” idiom. But, like twenties Bright Young Women, Heyer’s heroines show a tendency to use male slang, specifically that from Pierce Egan’s popular works, which you don’t actually find much of in Austen or her contemporaries. They also show the twenties freedom from constraint, though they are still ladies of birth and breeding.

Finally, better late than never, here’s a link to something Eric wrote in May about Julia Quinn’s Ten Things I Love About You. His focus is on the hero as a writer of romantic fiction, and he begins by mentioning that he’s

read a lot of novels where the heroine is a novelist, often as a way to let the author explore the history or the aesthetics of romance fiction. Quinn does that through Sebastian, but also something new, by having her novelist character be the hero, not the heroine. Sebastian begins writing because he is suffering from the effects of war, he’s unable to sleep and writing helps—specifically, writing about women. He’s a male character working through trauma by putting himself in a woman’s point of view.

You can read all three posts in full if you click on the links to Austenprose, the Book View Cafe Blog and the Avon blog.

The photo of the cover of Regency Buck came from Georgette-Heyer.com. My thanks to jay Dixon for sending me the link to the post by Sherwood Smith.

Teach Me Tonight

Rare issue of the long-running Horror magazine – WEIRD TALES from DNA Publications from Winter 1990/1991. This one is a JONATHAN CARROLL special and features 4 stories by him and an interview with him. Also features a long interview with DEAN KOONTZ and stories by WILLIAM F. NOLAN (“Gobble, Gobble”), IAN WATSON, NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN, STORM CONSTANTINE and others. Poetry by RUTH BERMAN and others. Reviews of books by DAVID J. SCHOW, ALAN RODGERS and others. SIGNED by WILLIAM F. NOLAN on the title page of his story. Very good copy with some light surface wear to covers and light creases/curling to a couple corners. Shipping is for first class or for priority airmail in the US, for first class or for priority in Canada and for first class or for priority airmail overseas. Shipping can be combined on multiple auctions won from me. Powered by eBay Turbo Lister The free listing tool. List your items fast and easy and manage your active items.

doublefeaturesciencefiction.com

New @ TNC:

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal envisions a world still blighted by the presence of Saddam Hussein:

Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi’s thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West’s efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?

There are two possible scenarios to weigh and I can’t tell which is worse.

The first is that Saddam would have redoubled his efforts to reconstitute his own nuclear program either by cutting a deal with North Korea or A.Q. Khan (which all evidence shows he was trying to do anyway) but with new assistance. Arab regimes now quietly entreating the United States and Israel to take care of the mullahs’s atomic ambitions for them would likely hedge their bets by helping out the one Sunni brethren who stood the best chance of becoming a "deterrent." For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the unpredictable adventurist of yesterday would suddenly appear a reliable countermeasure against Shiite predominance tomorrow.

The second grim outcome to contemplate is that Saddam might have once again become a military ally of the United States, providing us with intelligence on Tehran in exchange for a loosening of sanctions or some other material douceur to keep his dictatorship afloat. If you think such an arrangement impossible after the first Gulf War, the Anfal campaign and the No-Fly zones, you’d do well to remember the arguments that were in fact trotted out against removing Saddam from power in 2002. Mainstream war opponents took for granted that he was indeed seeking the bomb and yet they believed he was containable. Well, it’s fairly easy to see the progression of this logic in light of a mounting Iranian threat: "realists" of both a right and left coloring would now make the case that only by soliciting the Baathist’s aid on this key national security challenge could we truly be able to cool his lust for a nuke of his own.

Snarksmith: new york. gossip. art. politics. pop culture. literature. etc.

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

Official N.K. Jemisin Website
Order “The Broken Kingdoms” HERE
Read FBC Review of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Read FBC Interview with N.K. Jemisin
Read Guest Author Kelly Link Interview with N.K. Jemisin on FBC

INTRODUCTION: At the end of February 2010, N.K. Jemisin’s debut The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms made a well deserved splash and we got lucky to have its sequel in the same year with the third installment promised for 2011. A highly expected novel we all could preview in the extras of the earlier book, “The Broken Kingdoms” delivered with brio and with quite a few surprises.

“In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind. Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a strange homeless man on an impulse. This act of kindness engulfs Oree in a nightmarish conspiracy. Someone, somehow, is murdering godlings, leaving their desecrated bodies all over the city. And Oree’s guest is at the heart of it. . . “

FORMAT/CLASSIFICATION: ‘The Broken Kingdoms” stands at about 400 pages divided into 21 named chapters, a prologue, a glossary and a “historical record”, as well as an extract from the third series book “The Kingdom of Gods” which is narrated by Sieh – the well known child-god of the first two novels.

‘The Broken Kingdoms” is narrated by the blind Maroneh artist Oree who has a touch of magic and came to the city of Shadow beneath the World Tree some 10 years ago just after the events recollected in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms had taken place. In a nice touch that adds depth to the novel, each chapter has a sub-heading describing it as what kind of painting its content would inspire Oree to create.

Connecting to the first novel but with a completely different focus and many new characters, ‘The Broken Kingdoms” – secondary world fantasy with magic and gods – can be read on its own and it has a definite ending; having first read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms adds to the enjoyment, while I am quite eager for “The Kingdom of Gods” to see where the tale of the wonderful series created the author goes next.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: “The Broken Kingdoms” is an excellent sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms because it expands the universe of the series geographically, historically, magically and in the range of characters, while keeping the same superb prose and gripping narrative that made the first one such a memorable debut.

The author makes an interesting narrative choice when she has us – the readers of the first volume at least – know more than Oree for a good part of the novel and we watch Oree’s groping towards the true nature of her “guest”. In return we know considerably less about the nature of the world – gods and godlings and their interactions with humans as well as magic and its workings – and the novel slowly reveals quite a lot, including some twists that explain more about what has happened in the first volume too. It actually pays off rereading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms after reading its sequel to see both the little touches that we missed and how skilfully the author managed to weave a great story but reveal far less than the “full picture”.

From the beginning we understand that Oree has an added dimension since while blind in normal conditions, she can see magic, emanating both from gods or humans. Her back story that interweaves the main narrative adds more depth and complements well the forward going action. The secondary characters are also very well drawn, from her godling lover Madding, to “Shiny”, her unwitting lodger and later companion, not to speak of the main villains who are quite chilling as you will discover.

While the blurb quoted above summarizes well the main thrust of the book, “The Broken Kingdoms” has much more, including some great action scenes, delicious irony in the motivation of the villains versus their unwitting results and quite a few musings on the nature of godhood, power and magic.

The major niggle I had with the novel was the same I had with the first volume, namely the limiting nature of the “laws of the universe” of the series, where gods – and godlings – push humans around and ultimately decide their fate. That is something I tend to rebel against by instinct and while I recognize that the characters have no choice but to live in such a universe – the ultimate authoritarian dictatorship backed by infinite power however disguised or occasionally well intentioned – I still do not like it that much and the last part of “The Broken Kingdoms” illustrate my point clearly.

“The Broken Kingdoms” (A+) is an excellent fantasy with great narrative and emotional power that only its stifling universe – for humans at least, since after all it is the gods and godlings playground – slightly takes away from my appreciation.

Fantasy Book Critic

At the recent IASPR conference, Pam Rosenthal gave a paper on “The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre.” She’s now put up a summary of the paper at the History Hoydens’ blog. Here are a couple of quotes from it:

Brussels sounded like a great opportunity to think hard about something I’ve been wanting to understand better for a while now: the hot new trend of male/male or male/male/female romance — written by women for women. [...] I took on this project because I wanted to understand more specifically how this new development of male/male love works in individual texts, and most particularly in Ann Herendeen’s recent tour de force, Pride/Prejudice.

and

In the centuries since Austen, the romance novel (and sometimes the literary novel as well) hinged upon a simple, but incendiary, paradox: that a man occupies a primacy of position in the public world, but the power of the female subjectivity cannot be denied.

Until the 20th century, perhaps — when in romance this changed again. when male power began to be understood as a fraught and painful thing — with, I think, the tortured heroes of the 70s to the 90s. My own untested theory is that this occurred in a parallel development to Second Wave Feminism. We started seeing tortured lonely hero subjectivities in deep third person (Dr. Sarah Frantz of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance has often written and spoken on this, and I was delighted that she and I were on the same panel in Belgium).

To read more and/or join in the discussion, please head over to the History Hoydens’ blog.

Teach Me Tonight