I don't remember the last time I finished off such a long book so quickly, without either the urgency of wanting to rush through to the end (usually to some resolution of plot), or the 不耐 that comes with repetition or simple lack of interest for the words on the page. Loved the pacing, loved it, and pretty much everything else about this book.



Defiant, unyielding, feared, hunted and revered, the great Mongolian wolf is the heart and center of Jiang Rong's epic tale of a young man from Beijing and his encounters in this strange, ancient world on the Mongolian steppe. Winner of the first Man Asia Prize and hugely popular in China, it's a stirring epic, allegory and elegy for a vanished way of life with the emotional punch of Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper. Sent to Olonbulag in the 1969 during the cultural revolution, Rong spent ten year's living among the nomads of north-central Inner Mongolia.

That summarizes the book better than I can. As for nitpicks, my only issue was that the tone of the book (the embedded philosophical tidbits) were too preachy at times, but this did not bother me much as a whole. Of course, this was because I more or less agreed with what the narrator was saying. If you do not agree with his ideas or rather, actively support the other side (of the argument that the best aspects of spirit originate from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle rather than the agricultural lifestyle), this might drive you insane. For people in my generation I don't think this would be much of a problem because our modern lifestyle is so far removed from both hunter-gatherers and actual farming farmers that it doesn't even matter. But just a heads up.

Of course, this isn't just a question of lifestyle. His overall message concerns spirit, which concerns personality and if personally you just don't empathize with Jiang's Mongolian wolves you won't like this book because you are metaphorically categorized/hinted to be useless sheep.

(Now, that's not necessarily entirely correct on the author's part, but seeing as this is a book extrapolating on wolves and not on sheep, it is permissible for the purposes of the book.)

SO! In terms of recommendation, here are a few simple tests to see whether you'd like this book:

1. If you like dogs/like wolves, if you've read Gary Paulsen's dog books (more notably the sled dog books such as Winterdance and Woodsong) and liked them, if you've read the Julie's Wolf Pack series, Jack London's Call of the Wild, or White Fang and liked those, chances are you'll like this book.

2. If you've read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and loved it, you are more likely to like this book. If you read it and hated Roark, you are less likely to like this book.

3. If you admire the spirit behind this villanelle, you'll probably love this book. If you read that villanelle and thought it was a stupid poem about old people, you probably won't care much for this book.

These examples are, of course, limited to what I have read, so I will stop here.

BUT WAIT!

Thus far I've neglected a very important point, which is this: I read the book in Chinese.

If I know anything about translation, this means the pacing will be slower and much more sluggish if you read the book in English, and the whole book will take on a much more exotic/foreign flavour, which might not be a bad thing but certainly detracts from getting an accurate feel of the culture.

Example: The wolf cub 小狼 is translated to "Little Wolf," which is literally what 小狼 means. Unfortunately, in English that just sounds awkward. The actual colloquial use of 小狼 in Chinese is more akin to "doggy" (or I guess "wolfy" in this case), just a careless colloquial name you throw out. Now consider something like "Here Wolfy! Here boy, awww that's my good Wolfy boy!" to "Here Little Wolf! Awww, that's my good Little Wolf!" For some reason, the latter just sounds slightly more awkward and Native American than the first! Yeah, that's because Little Wolf compared to Wolfy or 小狼 is three syllables instead of two. Silly, but it makes a difference.

Conclusion? If you can read Chinese, go read this book in Chinese. If you can't, consider the rec dropped from EXCELLENT to GOOD.



Books read earlier this year: 1. Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en (Ch) 2. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare 3. Life of Pi by Yann Martel 4. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin 5. The Stranger by Albert Camus 6. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler 7. The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

(wow I haven't read much for 8 months. and nope, haven't finished Omnivore's Dilemma yet.)

edit: oh wait I read 三毛's biography. so 9 in 8 months... slightly better.

So, in light of all my undoubtedly tedious emo posts of late, I’ve decided to post something a bit less depressing. Such as a book review! Oh, boy.



The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The first thing I have to say is that I would not have finished this book without Saturday school. It’s the simple truth. I would read a little, read a little more, put it down, forget about it... it just did not grab me. It was interesting, but that was just that – I did not care enough about the characters to want to keep reading. And that’s my first problem with this book.

The beginning is too much worldbuilding. It’s too much politics. Le Guin creates definitely a very interesting place (this is sci-fi, so it’s set on another planet; in fact it’s about a galactic envoy going to this particular planet to try to convince them to join an intergalactic alliance), but there isn’t enough personality. Part of it may be because a lot of the people the narrator’s dealing with are aliens (of a sort), and so in the beginning, especially from the narrator’s POV, they are hard to place. Cold, impersonal. You can’t get a distinct sense of the person enough to care. But that’s not the crux of it. The main problem is that it is hard to care about the narrator himself. The tale is told in first-person by the envoy, for the most part, and it takes the form of the “report” of his mission, told in a story-like way. I think that may be part of the issue. His personality isn’t particularly distinct, and I get the feel of info-dumping, particularly in the earlier chapters. To put it succinctly, I did not really start to engross myself in this book until some real trouble happens to the envoy about 150 pages in, and I did not really start to like it until the journey across the snow, which takes place after that.

This is a roughly 300 page book. If it took 150 pages to get me interested, that’s a problem.

However, I will grant that after I finished the book (and really grew to like one of the other characters whilst reading the last 1/3rd of it), it was a lot more worthwhile to go back and chew on some of the stuff from the beginning. The first time through, though. blagh.

The first chapter is especially bad. I had a devil of a time with it because I would pick it up, read, and it was just so boring. Le Guin, as in her Earthsea series, tends to take a high-handed, loquacious tone of voice, and in this setting it becomes particularly rambly. Third person’s better for that, I think.

The second chapter is better. It’s a folktale from this ‘world’, and it fits better with her tone of voice, and is an interesting little tale of its own. She has tales like these spread out throughout the book, and they are fun little reads, but in terms of the beginning it’s still more or less worldbuilding. Further extrapolation on the world, of a sort.

Another slight issue I had with this book was POV jumping. It starts out, as I say, from the 1st person POV of the envoy (with some tales interspersed), which is clear enough. In chapter 6 it randomly jumps to 1st person Estraven with no prior notification and no clear indication whatsoever. In the beginning of the narrative he mentions that the cook shakes him, saying “wake up, wake up, Lord Estraven,” but after being so accustomed to the POV of the envoy, it really takes a while into the chapter before I realized that this was somebody else altogether. The rest of the chapters jump between the envoy, Estraven, folktales, and Estraven’s journal which is fairly straightforward as it’s in journal form. You get used to it, but I think it could have been done better.

The first person narrative style is also much the same. In general, Le Guin tends to be a storyteller, with ample description tempered by grandiose flow. It isn’t straight telling, like Card, it’s storytelling telling, which tends to feel very different. Characters tend to soliloquize (monologue-ize?) dialogue. They give grandiose mini-speeches a lot more than they talk true dialogue. For example, on p.85, when a group of Orgotans “discuss” the envoy, one bit of the “dialogue” runs as follows:

“I’d like to think that you’ve been too long with the madman in his palace and had gone mad yourself.... Name of Meshe! What’s this babble of alliances with the suns and treaties with the moon? How did the fellow come here, riding on a comet? Astride a meteor? A ship, what sort of ship floats on air? On void space? Yet you’re no madder than you ever were, Estraven, which is to say shrewdly mad, wisely mad. All Karhiders are insane. Lead on, my lord, I follow. Go on!”

(all ellipses are the author’s, not mine)

So you see, a lot of the dialogue tends to sound rather like monologue. Even the short dialogue is typically very elegant and succinct. That's not to say it’s a bad thing. In fact I personally rather like it, but either way I thought it was worth pointing out.

The last little pickle I have with this book is fantasized names. I don’t know, I can take them in reasonable quantity (Robin Hobb’s names never bother me, for example), but here they began to grate on me. Karhide, Orgota, Turuf, shifgrethor, presthry-hunter... too much! Too many consonants! All the days in Estraven’s records were Gethen days/months so it was all stuff like:

Guyrny Thanern. I yadda yadda yadda did such and such today.

Odsorsny Susmy. And today I did this.

Give me a break! Gives off that aura of trying-too-hard, you know? Even if they're on a different month/day cycle, I don't see the issue of putting "Day 1, Day 2, Day 3." Who cares if it ends on Day 18 instead of Day 31. I mean, if you've "translated" the rest of his journal, why not the dates?

Overall, this was not a bad book. I really loved the last third of it, and I think it is worth reading if you need to kill some time and have nothing better to do, but it is not a favorite nor do I rec it with particular relish. The world is great, it’s strange, it’s alien, but in general I found it too wordy; too much storytelling and not enough story, so to speak.

Other people may think differently, who knows. But I have to say I liked the Earthsea books more.

In an attempt to better organize my tags, I have decided to sort book reviews out from "reading is good for the soul", and by year (taking a leaf from several people on my friendslist). Thus, introducing the new tag -- bookchomp 2009!

(Yes, this comes from scoradh's Book Glomp idea. See, she glomps her books. I eat mine! Oh, it is perfect.)

First on the list-- Cassandra Clare's City of Bones.



There are some aspects of this book that I am utterly unable to be objective on. However, there are also some things I noticed that still would have bothered me had I been entirely unfamiliar with Cassandra Clare, Harry Potter, Buffy, and Star Wars prior to starting the book. I will address those in particular.

1. Clary. She was all over the place. One moment a bratty teenager, the next a brave heroine defending herself in the face of evil, one moment so dense that she could not see a confession coming from a mile off, the next so observant that she notices a near-stranger is gay almost immediately. It just doesn't add up. And that's my primary problem with this book - a lot of things feel choppy and don't seem to add up. Also, the La I Am So Beautiful But Don't Realize It Until Someone Tells Me thing is so overdone. The fact that Clary ALWAYS had some brave or witty remark to make no matter what was happening also annoyed me. It just didn't feel realistic. In real life, you often don't think of the right thing to say until long afterwards, and on the spot you stutter or blank or say something stupid. It made her seem like someone in a TV show, and while that's acceptable to some degree on fast-paced, image-heavy television, in books it's just. No.

2. How old are these kids? First they're fifteen, then they're in a nightclub acting at least twenty from the way they talk, then somewhere later they'll make some really childish remark to suddenly remind you that they're fifteen again, only they haven't been for about the past fifty pages... again, inconsistent. If you wanted to characterize them as twenty-something, make them twenty-something. If they are fifteen they should act fifteen. Honestly.

3. Plot very generic. Felt like she took a bunch of ideas from all over the place and rolled them all into one without really introducing anything new. I liked some of the side details, such as the menu of blood drinks for the vampires and the concept/description of certain weapons, but she did not give me much outside of that. The climax I found to be fairly anticlimactic, which brings me to the next point.

4. VALENTINE. Okay, first, what kind of name is that for a villain? Second, everyone made such a big fuss about him, and when he came out at the end, he was not impressive at all. He seemed like a cheap copy of Voldemort - and yes, I know I said I'd be objective, just think of this as a simile with which to demonstrate my point - with no depth whatsoever. All right, he's cruel, he's uncaring, he used to be (and still is, when he tries to be) charismatic... why? That's all the image you ever get of him, it never wavers up until he shows up and disappears again, they never explain how he came to be this way aside from the weak attempt by Luke - so he gets a vendetta against werewolves because of his father, great, that's still utterly two-dimensional - and the whole thing essentially remains unresolved. Making Valentine into a flat, two-dimensional character, with a few key traits that any reader can put out in a laundry list. I almost feel like I can see Clare with a list of characters and a few traits under each, and when she hits each bit glances over them and goes "Oh, heartless but deceptive, better do this now," "Oh, always tells the truth, better make him tell the truth now," etc etc. So boring. So predictable. I hate it.

5. Going off the same line as above, there is no character development. Zip. Zero. Nil. If there had been the characters might not have been so painfully dull and predictable. Even some of the supporting characters which I liked - they had some personality and seemed more real, sure (probably because they're side characters and Clare didn't get to focus so much on twisting them to fit her plot), but also as side character they sure didn't develop much. That's just bland.

At this point I think I'll stop. City of Bones is not a bad book. It is simply unoriginal, mediocrely crafted, and does not particularly stand out. I would not recommend it; there are hundreds of not-that-great books out in the market, and if you're going to read, might as well read the good ones. It also (to me) had an overpowering sense of cheap television pulled out and thrusted into a novel, with the exception of Clary's personal thoughts... which could explain why they got so irritating at various points in time and why Clary seemed so unreal. I have to admit, if you treat the entire thing as a TV episode of something (Buffy, for example!) it becomes much more tolerable (after all, we allow television to be more shallow, although something must be said about actually seeing faces and hearing voices rather than just reading words), but then again if you wanted that, why not go watch actual TV?