Reading this book was a mistake.

You almost certainly misunderstood that last statement.

I like Stephen King. He’s a darn good story teller, and he’s
darn good at evoking just the response he wants (which, it seems to me,
isn’t quite the same thing). I use to buy all of his books as they came
out, until I got to Insomnia, which was frankly a waste of
time. He told the story well, but the story itself was too silly for
words. After that I more or less stopped buying him, and even got rid of
all but my favorite books by him.

I kept all of his short story collections. He’s a darn good story
teller. So when I saw Everything’s Eventual at the bookstore
and realized it was a new collection, I almost bought it. Almost, but
not quite. I wasn’t in a buying mood, and I wasn’t in a
Stephen King mood.

Well, then came the day when I was to leave for Australia. I didn’t much
want to go, so I was in a foul mood. And then I came across this book
again, at the airport, and thought it would distract me a bit, and so I
bought it and started reading it in lieu of the book I’d brought for the
trip.

That was the mistake.

See, when you write a horror novel you can make it as scary and awful as
you like, and still provide a bit of a happy ending after all of that
catharsis. When you write a short story in the same genre, you mostly
can’t–there’s not time or space. Reading a short horror story is
something like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, because it
feels so good when you stop. The horrible thing happened to someone
else, someone you don’t know, someone who isn’t even real.

If you read a horror anthology straight through in one sitting, it
doesn’t stop. You just keep getting hit with that hammer through story
after story. It’s enough to make a guy feel really lousy, and indeed
that’s usually the effect a Stephen King collection has on me
if I’m stupid enough (after all this time) to read it that way.

I started reading Everything’s Eventually in the terminal. I
continued reading it on the plane. And when I finished a story, I was
still on the plane, with many hours to go (it was a
fourteen-and-a-half-hour flight) before I got to Australia, feeling
cramped, confined, and really out-of-sorts about leaving my family.

I guess you could say that the book fit my mood…but on the whole I’d
have been better off with something cheerful. At the very least, I didn’t
do the stories justice, reading them that way.

Which is a pity, because it’s really a rather good book, if you like that
sort of thing.

At the same time I started my
Ngaio
Marsh re-reading plan,
I thought I’d do the same with Josephine Tey, another author
whose work I’ve not re-read since I first discovered it. And again, it
seemed worthwhile to read her books in order of publication, just to see
how her writing develops.

I had a similar experience as I had with Marsh–part way through this
book, I was asking myself just what it had been that pleased me so much
about Tey’s writing. And then, suddenly, Inspector Grant follows his
quarry to Scotland and the book takes wing and turns out to be much more
enjoyable than I’d feared.

This book also has a bearing on my post about imagination: Grant is known
for his intuitive “flair”, which his boss (the intelligent but methodical
Superintendant Barker) recognizes but mistrusts. And sure enough, toward
the end of the book when Grant is agonizing because he’s might have
arrested an innocent man, he tells himself that Barker has no more
imagination than a paving stone.

I go to 19th century literature when I want to escape. I have been
spending far too much time lately thinking intensely about education, the
act of reading, what makes good writing and whether the role of public
education is to fulfill the expectations of the parents or to fulfill
some larger social purpose such as creating a literate public. And what
is a “literate public” anyway? Or, and even scarier, do kids go to
school to be socialized and exactly what does that mean? From what I can
tell, manners are not part of the equation. Wearing the correct clothes
and using the approved language is. Heavy stuff after a long day at work
analyzing data about child care and what the projected state level budget
cuts will do to the availability of quality care for parents. Not to
mention my job, which may disappear pretty soon.

Anyway, I picked up The Woman in White. I’ve never read any of Wilkie
Collins’ work though I have read about it in the context of Dickens and
the publishing world of Victorian London. Somehow I got the impression he
wrote lurid, sensational novels that were hugely popular but of inferior
quality. But this book, unlike most of what was published then, has been
continuously in print since it was first published in 1860. Something has
to be going on here.

What I found were amazingly well drawn characters.

The plot itself is fairly straightforward. Walter Hartwright, a young
drawing teacher, has been offered the financially lucrative opportunity
to go to the house of a Mr. Fairlie to teach his young wards drawing.
Late at night, on the way back from a farewell visit to his mother’s
house just outside London, he encounters a ghostly woman dressed
completely in white asking his aid in getting to London. She is
mysterious, nervous and attractive. After walking with her the rest of
the way and finding her a cab, he overhears the conversation of men
looking for her. She has escaped from an insane asylum. And, later, after
arriving at the house he is to teach in, his new student is the spitting
image of her. That is just the opening. The story is told by various
narrators telling their version of events from Walter’s meeting with the
mysterious woman to the marriage of Laura Fairlie and the final escape
made from it and the revelation of Sir Percival Glyde’s “Secret”.
There are some melodramatic moments though by current standards they
wouldn’t frighten a five year old. And the sexual innuendos are so tame
by comparison I had to consciously think back to the times the book was
written in to appreciate them.

But the characters are wonderful. Count Fosco is so hypnotically evil he
sends shivers up your spine. And the interesting part is that his
nastiness is so under the surface, so seemingly congenial that you just
want to believe he’s a good guy. Yet something about him is off. The
other bad guy, Sir Percival Glyde is the foil that sets him off. He’s
manipulative and cunning but can’t keep the ruse up in the face of
frustration. His true self shows through and you hate him. But he gets it
good in the end.

The good characters are just as much fun. Walter Hartwright’s initial
description of Marian Halcombe, the principal female narrator, is
perfect. He lovingly describes her goddess-like figure from bottom to
gloriously described bust and hair only to come to her face, which is,
deep intake of breath here, UGLY. Ugly beyond belief. Gargoyle ugly.
Butt ugly. She has hair on her upper lip. Fortunately for Marian, she
has a fine mind and a perfect temperament. Laura Fairlie doesn’t quite
fair so well. She is perfect in a more conventional sense–frail, blonde
and unassumingly compliant. I just wanted to take her by her lovely locks
and shake her up a little. But had she had more backbone, the plot of the
book would have been disrupted.

There are also several humorous grace notes. Mrs. Vesey, the companion of
Laura and Marian, is a woman who sits. That’s her role and she fulfills it
splendidly. And the Italian friend of Walter, Pesca, chitters away in
broken English in a perfect rendition of a Victorian writer’s attempt at
displaying a foreigner.

It’s a good book. Read it slowly and enjoy.

As I noted a couple of days ago, I’m starting to re-read all of
Ngaio Marsh’s work in order of publication. And I was
shocked, once I cracked this one open and remembered which one it was, to
find out that it was only her second published work. It’s far and away
better than A Many Lay Dead.

Gone is the country house, gone is the absurd Russian Secret Society;
instead, this is the first of a number of her books that take place at
the Unicorn Theater in London. Nigel Bathgate’s sweetheart being
unavailable, he asks his new friend Inspector Alleyn to join him at the
theater. The play is a tale of crime and betrayal, and ends with a
shooting, only on this occasion the shooting is real–and it was the
victim himself who was responsible for loading the gun with dummy
bullets. Suicide? Or was he pushed?

Some books just become dated; others age gracefully into period pieces,
and this is definitely one of the latter.

…especially coming after the Science
Fiction Book Club’s fifty most significant science fiction and fantasy
books of the last fifty years. I received e-mail from Borders Books
saying that they now had a web page listing
essential science fiction and
fantasy books–and here’s their complete list:

• Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
• Dune, by Frank Herbert
• The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan
• The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Leguin
• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

Now, I can’t deny the quality of most of these. I think
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series has degenerated into
pointlessness, and I have doubts about
Terry Goodkind, as no one has ever recommended his stuff (her
stuff?) to me. But why only nine? And why these nine in particular?
Why The Hobbit, rather than The Lord of the Rings?

And therein lies the answer–every one of the books listed above, except
for poor, lonely Fahrenheit 451, is the first in a series.