Book 37: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Last time I read Jane Austen it was the last book she wrote, Persuasion.  This time it's the first she wrote, Northanger Abbey.  I've heard that, like Persuasion, it's not as polished as her "big" novels, but I'm interested to see how it plays out.  It's making me a bit sad that I only have 2 more Austen novels to read.  Maybe I'll try to drag it out a bit.

At 256 pages it's going to by tough to drag it out... that's only 37 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book was a very pleasant surprise for me.  I've read almost all of Jane Austen's novels now and just have left some of her minor works.  They are all supposed to be either early works, like this one, or unfinished works that were posthumously edited together.  Either way, they are shorter, unpolished novels that may not hold up to her master works.

However, Northanger Abbey turned out of be one of my favorites!  This is the first novel that Jane Austen wrote, though not the first published.  As such, it is a little raw in places but it does not suffer for it. What really surprised me, though, is that it was so funny!  The main character in the book, Catherine, is 17 years old and really comes off as young and naive.  She jumps to conclusions constantly, usually way off-base, and gets herself into embarrassing situations because of it.  The narration is also quite witty and addresses the reader directly in many places.  Because of this, the novel has a much more intimate feel to it, as though Austen is telling you the story personally.

As usual, reading Austen is always a pleasure.  She, and therefore her characters, are smart, funny, witty and complex.  I would highly recommend this novel to anyone that has enjoyed her other works, and would even recommend it to others who have not.  I'm going to place it squarely in my top three of her works, right behind Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

9 out of 10.

Book 36: Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn

What's this?  A Star Wars book?  Yes, I felt it was time for a bit of fluff.  I like to read a few of these kinds of books now and then just for fun.  The series (this is the second book) starts about 5 years after The Return of the Jedi and continues the story from there.  Other than the original films, these are the best Star Wars stories I know of.  Instead of the prequel trilogy, Lucas should have filmed these.  I've read this set a long time ago and wanted to re-read them.  Before my little project here started I read the novelization of the prequel movies, the original movies and these seemed like the logical place to go from there.

At 440 pages it's only 63 pages per day.  Shouldn't really be a problem.


REVIEW:

This is the second of the Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars books.  It picks up where the last left off.  Leia and Chewbacca are on a mission to try to recruit a mysterious species for the New Republic while Luke, Han and Lando are searching for a long lost fleet of starships that could turn the course of the conflict between them and the remnants of the Empire.

The best part of these books are the characters.  Zahn writes the heroes exactly as you remember them from the movies.  Their personalities fit perfectly.  His new characters, especially his villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn, are well fleshed-out and believable with realistic personalities and motives.  Thrawn as a villain is way above what you would expect from a Star Wars novel.  He is well-cultured, subtle, intelligent and devious.  There are plenty of times when the heroes are one step ahead of him, but many other moments that he outwits them.

There are plenty of plots and counterplots to weave, on both sides, in this book.  It reads as a kind of treasure hunt.  Both sides are looking for the same thing, the Dark Force, a fleet of 200 powerful dreadnoughts, and they bounce around the galaxy following leads and false-leads.  As the end of the book approaches it turns into a race, the victor of which may tilt the balance of power in their favor.

Another thing that I particularly like is the level of detail included in Zahn's universe.  Zahn describes things like spacecraft controls, weapons effects and even Luke's Jedi powers in very believable and engaging ways.  It makes the experience much more immersive when these details are done right.

Overall, the book is a lot of fun.  The characters are accurate and familiar, the villain is sufficiently devious and challenging and the action is non-stop.  If they would make this trilogy into movies it would be many times better than Episodes 1-3.

9 out of 10.

Book 35: A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

I'm back on schedule now and ready to get back into this series.  I nearly burned myself out on it when I read the first four books in one month.  At around a thousand pages each, that was a bit much.  I'm eager to read this one because the last one felt a bit like half a book.  The author, instead of showing half the story for all the characters, decided to show all the story for half the characters.  Unfortunately, the characters that I really enjoyed were, for the most part, absent from the last book.  This one should show the events surrounding those missing characters and, hopefully, advance the plot a bit further.  I know that he plans at least 2 more books in this series, so I'm not expecting a resolution, but we'll see where he goes with it.

1040 pages means about 150 pages per day, quite a lot.

REVIEW:  As I mentioned before, the previous book in this series, A Feast for Crows, followed the stories for most of the characters in the Seven Kingdoms.  This book follows the stories of the remaining characters, most of them either at The Wall or across the Narrow Sea in the Free Cities.  This was good for me because the characters that this book focused on happen to be some of my favorites.  Tyrion, Jon Snow, Daenerys and Arya were all there and it was good to catch up with them.  What look to be some momentous changes are also beginning in this book.  Jon Snow has taken charge and is putting that authority to use and Daenerys’ dragons are finally starting to show their power.  Once Martin has brought the narratives int his book up to the time of those in the previous book he starts to show us how some of them may eventually tie together.  It’s just a tease, but it’s definitely starting to look like something more than just a lot of random character plots.

Unfortunately, his writing style has not much improved.  More than anything, it seems like he just needs  a more assertive editor.  He has a tendency to use repetitive descriptive phrases such as the dreaded “useless as nipples on a breastplate.”  He also has entire chapters of questionable relevance.  It’s admirable that he’d want to flesh out his side characters and their motives but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.  It just serves to detract from the real action.  These overelaborations and the distractions of skipping around so much between chapters drag the plot to a snail’s pace.  He reminds me of Robert Jordan, the writer of the Wheel of Time series.  Jordan would spend an entire 800-900 page book moving an army from one city to the next with the only action at the very end.  Which, of course, is another problem here. Because this is the middle of the series, there is no resolution to any of the plot-lines.  Martin's series is not like Jordan's where there is a fight with one of the "little bad guys" at the end of each book.  It is the middle of a single, very long narrative.  Like chapter 40 through 70 of some 20,000 page epic.

Overall, the book is slowpaced and meandering, though there is still a sense that, somewhere in the future, the many, many threads that Martin has woven will come together to form a whole.  I can't say that the series is my favorite of all time, but it is still in the top ten and I will continue to read the sequels when they are released, if only to see where all this is leading.

7 out of 10.

Book 34: The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg

As a former linguistics student, I still have a lasting love of languages.  English, I think, is one of the most interesting languages, though it's difficult to see sometimes, as we're all native speakers here in the U.S.  But even here, people are mystified by the strangeness of the language.  People ask themselves, why do we pronounce this set of letters one way in this word, but in another word it's pronounced differently.  Well, a lot of the inconsistency and seeming randomness comes from the strange and turbulent history of English.  This book traces that history in a novel fashion, that of a biography of the language itself.  I'm unsure how successful this approach will be, but I couldn't resist the title when I first heard of it.  At 299 pages, it shouldn't be too hard to finish at around 43 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book definitely delivered what I expected of it.  The author, Bragg, traces the history of the language with each chapter outlining one significant stage in the evolution of English.  He shows Alfred the Great, defeating the Danes and unifying England, the revolt against the Church and Latin by William Tyndale and his English Bible, the rise of English literature with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson writing his dictionary but, overall, his main character is the language itself.  There were multiple points where English could have simply gone extinct.  When the Danes invaded England they nearly wiped out the English speaking natives, when the Normans invaded they imposed their French language on the land, but it was the "deep obstinacy" and "astonishing flexibility" that enabled the language to survive and eventually thrive.

It is interesting to see the course of a language all at once.  And it's difficult to think of another language with a similar history to English.  Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, who were themselves invaded by the Vikings and Normans, then the consolidation of British English and then outward to America, India, Australia, the West Indies and beyond.  Now, some 1,500 years later the language is spoken by some 1 billion people, worldwide and is established as the modern Lingua Franca.  And it is the amazing ability of English to adapt, to repair and reinvent itself that seems to have made it possible.

As a linguist, I've always been fascinated with our aberrant language and the reasons that it makes so little sense to non-speakers and learning speakers.  We follow grammatical rules that we hardly understand; We have words that are pronounced nothing like their spelling; We have multiple sets of rules for conjugating verbs, etc.  It is illuminating to see the tumultuous history of the language, not to see that there really is an underlying logic to these things, but to see that there are good reasons that it makes so little sense.  The book did get a little dry in places, after all, it is historical linguistics in essence, but Bragg does a commendable job of making it all make sense as a single narrative.

7 out of 10