A Review: Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth – J.R.R. Tolkien

4.5 / 5 Stars
Oh, if only The Silmarillion was this good! Well, let me clarify. The “best” of what Tolkien left unpublished upon his death was cobbled together into the book known as The Silmarillion. That would be the stories about the making, marring and bending of the world and the epic of the elves’ war against the first dark lord. Unfinished Tales contains the second tier of that unpublished oeuvre. This book is full of the unknown adventures of the also-rans, alternate versions of cannon events and author Tolkien’s after-the-fact musings about how exactly his story world was put together. It’s all good stuff, but with the exception of the first piece (a detailed account of Tuor’s journey to Gondolin), it’s not great stuff. That being said, what makes it a better book for me is that editor Tolkien as left well enough alone. Admitting from the title page on that everything is “unfinished” frees him to keep his editorial presence to a minimum and present each piece essentially as he found it in his father’s papers. There is no need to jury-rig it all into a “readable” whole; it’s just a collection of unfinished tales. I appreciate that raw, clipped and cut-short feeling. It fits perfectly with the “this is a collection of documents I found” writing style that author Tolkien used in his published works. You can leave The Silmarillion for later. When you finish The Lord of the Rings and wonder, “What’s next?,” this book is the answer.

A Review: Eyes of the Calculor - Sean McMullen

4 / 5 Stars

A pleasant coda to the trilogy. This is in some ways the most successful book of the series. The scene switches back to Australica but picks up chronologically right where The Miocene Arrow left off. The novel is smaller in terms of the main events. There are no wars and there is only a drop of the humanity-is-doomed feeling. This smaller stage allows McMullen to focus on what is probably his best exploration of characters yet. A densely tangled web of new characters and new machinations is the focus but there are a few significant appearances by people you’ll remember from the pervious books (and one very surprising re-appearance). The story of the intertwined lives of Martyne, Velesti and Samondel is the most realistic yet of McMullen’s efforts. It is a very satisfying story of people interacting. There are a few points where I question his use of characters form the previous volume. McMullen is a literary nihilist. That is to say nothing from the previous novels is sacred. He throws previous characterizations of central characters out the window. Whether this is simply for the sake of convenience or is an effort to present the same people from another point of view is unclear. Mostly those few characters that receive this kind treatment read as different characters with the same names. I can accept all these changes though, because the progress of the central story is so well crafted. If you loved the heroes of Mounthaven more than cake, you might want to leave it at a duology, but if you are ready for more Libris and more Avids this book is pretty much a must. You can read set of very thorough reviews of the Greatwinter Trilogy (with a slightly different opinion) here.

A Review: The Great American Pin-Up - Charles G Martignette & Louis K Meisel

4 / 5 Stars
What can be bad about 902 pin-ups? This is a huge collection of pin ups from the 1890s all the way through to the 1970s. Most of them are from the pin-up golden age of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. This is primarily an art book by the well-know Taschen. The colour reproductions are very high quality. Many of the images get a full page. Four images per page is another common layout, but all kinds of lay outs are used to really squeeze the images in. Much less satisfying is the text. After a fine introductory essay on the history of the pin-up (sharing its title with the book) the quality of the writing fades. The other initial essays are forgettable. The great bulk of the book is divided up by artist with each getting a brief biography. Other than the basic information on birth dates and schools attended these biographies all fade together into glowing praise of each man’s (or woman’s) brushwork, colour and luminosity. I’m not sure what I expected out of a book about pin-ups, but except for a few gems of information I was underwhelmed. Avoid it if you are looking for “scholarly” stuff about the place of the pin-up in the American psyche or the history of sex appeal in advertizing. Get it if you like to look at pin-ups.

A Review: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes – Robert Louis Stevenson

3 / 5 Stars

A quaint but somewhat flat travel log. A famous author takes a few weeks and hikes across the southern French mountains. He relates what he ate, whom he met, the scenes he saw, the things he felt. I’m sure it sounded different when it was first published over 100 years ago, but today it all reads as rather pedestrian. And I’m not just saying that because Stevenson walked. It’s a loose narrative with no clear flow and hardly any striking passages. That’s probably how it really was to walk across the mountains of southern France, so it’s accurate at least. Of a bit more value are the bits of history that are woven into the account. He discusses the “Napoleon of Wolves” and the Camisard revolt. If you are a big-big fan of Stevenson’s globe-trotting or of Victorian travel logs then it’s worth a look, otherwise just go watch the 2001 film Le Pacte des loups.

A Review: China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party – Michael Schoenhals, ed.

4 / 5 Stars

A remarkably clear window into another time and place. This is a collection of primary sources related to the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Many of the documents are from the government. Many others are from the people themselves. There are selections from both the students (Red Guards) who carried out so much of the ground work of the Revolution and from their targets (party persons in power who are taking the Capitalist road). Particularly powerful are Document 20, the transcript of the “struggle” against Wang Guangmei, and Document 64, a brief anonymous autobiography. Since it’s all primary sources there is very little in the way of commentary. That’s just fine since the documents speak well enough for themselves. They are well-arranged and the translations are very readable. The whole progress of the Cultural Revolution unfolds quite clearly. It was not a dinner party, it was an act of violence. Just as Mao proclaimed.

A Review: The Miocene Arrow – Sean McMullen

5 / 5 Stars

A superior follow-up. Book two of the Greatwinter Trilogy is a lot better than the first. This is not a novel built from two novellas as the first book was. This is a long novel from the get-go. That solves the consistency problem of the first. It also allows everything to be bigger. Bigger conflicts, better technology, more factions, more characters. That is not to say things are top-heavy. McMullen has done his work at every level to support the bigger story. Happily, there is a more even distribution of female and male characters and their interactions throughout are far more realistic (read: the thick sexuality of the first book is a bit thinner this time). McMullen does all of this without loosing any of the elements that made the previous volume so good. His world-crafting remains impeccable and his characters move in that world as if they have grown up there. He maintains a complex interplay between politics and relationships. He also continues to explore the limits of technology (if there are limits). I think by every literary measure, this is a better book. And the plot? Here McMullen gives us a look at North America in the 40th Century and lays out yet another complex dueling culture. This time duels are fought in fabric and wood airplanes called gunwings. Such duels decide matters of honor and the outcome of wars between the Airlords. Or they should. Avids from Australica are about to teach the Americans about total war.

A “Full Day’s” Work

I have been writing some on Jaws of Empire in the last few days. Today I did 1500+ words. I was trying to think of as a NaNoWriMo day. When you are just starting out on a story you can make up essentially whatever you want and just make a note to explain it later. Once you have several chapters down and the characters are starting to interact with the story elements you’ve left hanging you can’t get away with that anymore.

That’s the point I am getting to in this story. I think I need to take some time to work out the political structure of each Empire – at least a sketch of them. I also need a chronology. What day is this all happening? Does Jundah have enough time to get from where he was in the last chapter to be in on this meeting I am writing? I can just decide, “yes, yes he does,” but that will effect the timing of other events I have planned! Ga!

On the other hand I am rather happy with the slow reveal of the mystery and the scene I wrote today has a lot of different characters bringing different points of view to piece things together. I like it as of right now.