The January Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line–a day late, but, given that it’s free, less than a dollar short.

This is a singular book for Brust, not just in the context of his “Vlad Taltos”
series, but with respect to all his work to date.

One of the fascinating things about Brust’s work is that he always uses
an unreliable narrator. Even when you think the narrator is giving you
the story straight, you can’t be sure–and you certainly can’t assume
that the narrator is always 100% correct.

In this book, which follows immediately after Teckla and
Phoenix, Brust dispenses with a narrator altogether, and
consequently gives us the only unbiased external view of Vlad Taltos we
are likely to get.

Toward the end of Phoenix, Vlad took some actions that
seriously angered his superiors in the Jhereg. He’s now persona non
grata and will be rendered persona non viva (if that’s the
right expression) as soon as the Jhereg’s best assassins can catch up
with him. So he’s wandering about the countryside trying to keep his
head down–and attached.

As this book begins, he’s just come to a rural area; the local lord turns
out to be an Athyra wizard Vlad had a difference of opinion with in
Taltos. The wizard kills someone who helped Vlad at that time,
and then tries to kill Vlad; Vlad obviously needs to do something about
it.

The neat thing is, not only is Vlad not narrating, Vlad’s not even the
viewpoint character. Instead, the camera follows a young Teckla boy
who’s being trained to be the village healer, and who (being curious)
befriends Vlad when our hero first shows up. It’s simply fascinating how
different Vlad looks from the outside as opposed to the inside.

Every January 1st we get up and watch the Rose Parade on TV (except for the rare occasions when we get up much earlier and watch it in person). And this year we watched as a B2 stealth bomber, accompanied by a couple of other jets, did a flyover of the parade route.

And then, about ten minutes later, we watched as the B2 and its companions did another flyover in the other direction.

And then, having a shrewd knowledge of local geography, we went out to our driveway hoping to catch sight of them.

We heard them before we saw them–and then watched in awe as they flew, low and slow, right over our house.

…we might see more of this kind of thing.

Here’s yet another outstanding review of The Return of the King. It’s really amazing, when you add it all up, how many really, truly, stupid things Jackson managed to cram in there, and it’s even more amazing how much of the original magic still comes through in spite. (Via Captain Yips.)

On another note–did Legolas’ dance with the oliphant remind anyone else of Luke Skywalker and the Imperial Walker in The Empire Strikes Back?

This, the fifth book in Brust’s “Vlad Taltos” series, picks up
immediately after Teckla. The initial plot concerns an
extremely odd bit of “work” that Vlad does for a most unusual
client–Verra, the Demon-Goddess. And as such, it takes us to some
interesting places we’ve not seen before.

But mostly, this is the book in which the tensions, the doubts, and the
self-examination begun in Teckla begin to ripen. This is the
book where Vlad decides what’s really important to him, and just how far
he’s willing to go in pursuit of it. It’s not an entirely satisfying
book–Vlad and Cawti remain estranged–but it’s got some pretty nifty
moments.

Byzantium’s Shores has a wonderful post on The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s version of it. Without ranting, or dwelling on specific departures from Tolkien’s vision, Jaquandor pinpoints a number of ways in which Jackson has…–what’s the opposite of “deepened”? “shallowed”?–produced a creation less deep than Tolkien’s.

Jane and I went to see Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King this afternoon and evening. Having seen the first two episodes of the trilogy, I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic; I figured that the good bits would be interspersed with mountains of nonsense, and in the event I was not disappointed.

I won’t do a detailed post mortem; either you’ve seen the movie, in which case it’s unnecessary, or you’ve not, in which case I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll confine myself to making two comments.

First, the one bit that Jackson absolutely, positively had to get right he got right. He overdid it a bit, but in general he got it right.

Second, Denethor was robbed, and if I were Faramir I’d sue Jackson for defamation of character.

’nuff said.

This is the fourth of Brust’s tales of Vlad Taltos, and it’s probably my
favorite of the nine he’s written to date.

Having pulled us through the wringer in Teckla, Brust now
steps back and gives us a tale of Vlad’s earliest days. The main plot
concerns Vlad’s first meetings with Morrolan e’Drien, Sethra Lavode, and
(eventually) Aliera e’Kieron, as well as such divinities as Verra, the
Demon-Goddess. As such, it’s as close to a straightforward heroic
fantasy as we’ve yet seen in this series. But in addition to the main
plot, we’re also given a series of vignettes about Vlad’s childhood and
young adulthood. We hear how he regularly got beaten up by groups of
punks from the House of the Orca until he got strong enough and quick
enough to start picking them off one by one. We hear about how he joined
the business side of House Jhereg, and how he became an assassin.

Truly, when we first meet Vlad he isn’t a nice guy. In this book we
learn how he got to be what he is when we first meet him–and we also see
the seeds of the person he can become when (not if) he eventually
overcomes them.

Man, I hate this book.

It’s not that it’s badly written. It isn’t. If it were badly written, I
wouldn’t hate it so much.

This is the third volume in Brust’s “Vlad Taltos” series. We saw
something of Vlad’s “normal” life in the first volume,
Jhereg, and something of how he got there in the second
volume, Yendi. As the book begins, Vlad is one happy camper.
He’s got a good job, he’s reasonably affluent, he’s got the respect of
his peers, he has some powerful friends outside of the Jhereg, and above
all he’s got a beloved wife.

Until she married Vlad, Cawti was a freelance assassin for the
Jhereg, working as one half of a team. Her partner retired due to the
events in the previous book, and though Cawti has “worked” occasionally
since then she’s mostly had a lot of time on her hands. Consequently,
she’s been spending a fair amount of time in South Adrilankha, where
(unlike she and Vlad) most “Easterners” in the city live in squalor and
poverty. She’s made some new friends there–friends who are convinced it
is time for the Easterners and the Teckla (the Dragaeran peasantry) to
band together, rise up, and take over the Empire. More over, she’s come
to agree with them, body and soul.

When Vlad discovers what she’s been up to, he is not best pleased. Nor
is he pleased when she begins to question his livelihood, both as a
Jhereg boss and as an assassin. What follows is a detailed portrait of a
loving marriage going straight to hell.

I hate that a whole lot.

It’s especially painful because even as I identify with Vlad, I
have to admit that on most counts Cawti is right. Assassination really
isn’t a good way to make a living. Easterners and Teckla really are
fairly well down-trodden.

At the same time, Vlad knows that any such attempt at revolt is doomed.
In the Dragaeran Empire, the ruling house
can only be succeeded by the house that follows it in the Cycle.
Empress Zerika is of the House of the Phoenix; it’s well known that her
successor will be of the House of the Dragon. The House of the Teckla is
halfway around the Cycle, and so Cawti’s rebel friends have about as much chance
at succeeding as your average Christmas fruitcake does of getting eaten.
I might add that this isn’t simply political theory; in Dragaera, the
Cycle has pretty much the same force as physical law, and Vlad, for
reasons we do not discover until the next book, has a better reason to
know this than even most Dragaerans do.

So Vlad’s in a real bind. Knowing what he does, he can’t bring himself
to buy into Cawti’s new political views. On the one hand, he wants to save his
marriage; on the other, he wants to prevent Cawti from getting herself
killed. It’s not at all clear that he can do both. Meanwhile,
revolution is bad for business; his Jhereg superiors aren’t happy with
Cawti’s activities.

Teckla is an ugly, unhappy, unpleasant book, and unfortunately
it’s also the hinge upon which the rest of the series turns.

Bottom-line: if you read Jhereg and Yendi, and you
like them, read this one and get it out of the way. Then you can go on
to Taltos, which is a lot more fun.