Post 348: The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Mark Zusak. ISBN: 9780307433848 (eBook).

There is a moment when Liesel walks into her first library. It's a private library, but I think most of us who are readers and lovers of books can appreciate her joy that there is such a room, and that it is filled with walls and walls of books. There is something very powerful about that much potential and that much dedication filling a room. I say potential because until you open the book, it is just sitting there. Libraries are awe-inspiring because they represent what you could have if you had the time, energy, and effort to absorb and comprehend the words inside the book.

I will admit, eReaders are less inspiring in this way. It is amazing to be able to fit a library of 1500 books (or more) onto an eReader, but it is something different to see spines on a shelf. But the fact remains, if you aren't reading or haven't read those books they aren't much better than paperweights. This is why I feel so disappointed to hear some of my favorite authors bemoan the eReader and deny allowing their books to be made into digital copies.* I understand you want your readers to have the same experience with literature that you had, but isn't it better to have readers to begin with?

I don't think the book is going away. It it still the easiest and best method for preserving text and pictures. But it would be foolish to deny that eReaders do not have some part to play in the future of reading, even if it is only a stepping stone to The Next Thing. There is of course concern that children aren't using their imaginations with new children's book applications, and this is a valid concern. But there is undeniable power and appeal in having access to millions of works for reasonable prices and almost instantly. It is easier for me to take my eReader on an airplane than it is to find room in the measly carry-on they allow for several paperbacks (I finish one about every 2-3 days on average, you do the math for a week's vacation).

So if eReaders make reading easier, why are so many authors against it because it is "not a book"? I can tell you the eReader fits in my hand much like a book would, although it is not as hefty. And my leather cover evokes many of the same memories a traditional book binding would. I get the same amount of pleasure from reading on a digital screen as I do on paper. They are certainly different experiences, but when it comes down to it, I am more interested in the story inside of the book than I am the physical container.

True, I don't like reading in front of a computer screen, but the eReader is small and requires the same amount of light as a book and manages to create a similar intimacy. I wonder how many of the authors have judged eReaders without even picking one up. They really ought to. It would sort of be like a librarian refusing to transition from typewriter to keyboard. Just because this isn't the way they did it when you were growing up, does not mean you get to opt out of the change. You don't have to like it, but you do have to accept that it's happening and either work with those changes, or risk being passed up for promotion.

I don't want libraries to disappear. I don't even want libraries to become "bookless." I don't think that will happen anytime soon. We are still awed by the physical presence of knowledge, and I think we need those sacred places. But libraries do have to change, just as everything else does.

An awesome video review can be found on bandgeek8408's channel.
LibsNote: Copy checked out from my library via Overdrive Media.
*Although I can more easily understand their concern for pirated copies once they've been digitized.

Post 347: The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Mark Zusak. ISBN: 9780307433848 (eBook).

I really loved the smattering of German throughout The Book Thief. I love the German language. I don't speak a whole lot of it, but I know enough that I could probably find my way to the Bahnhof (train station) or buy some food. I have found pantomime to be incredibly useful no matter the language, and it tends to elicit laughter from everyone involved.* In fact, I miss hearing German in my daily life.

I think a lot of Americans have the wrong idea about foreign languages. There are people who think just because they can't understand another language that it automatically has no value, but there is a kind of music to it. I would listen to my German coworkers just for the pleasure of hearing foreign vowels and consonant combinations in a very familiar pattern (the rhythm of the German language is very similar to English). I found this translated to other languages the longer I was away from Germany.

In fact, I distinctly remember sitting at a table at Antioch with some Polish exchange students and they were speaking to each other in Polish. When they realized that I couldn't understand them, they turned to me and apologized.

"Oh, no," I said, "please continue, I lived in Germany for 10 months, so I'm used to it, and to be honest I miss hearing a random smattering of languages during the day."

So, even though I already knew the meanings of the words Zusak threw in and then (usually) translated for the reader, it was still wonderful reading them again. It was wonderful to hear them in my head, and shape them with my mouth, to chew on them again. And even if they have the same literal meaning as they do in English, there is a definite difference in the connotations the German words bring to mind. Perhaps they are not the intended connotations of the language, but autobahn automatically sounds different to me than highway. Authobahn brings up images of sports cars and tunnels and hills and valleys. Meanwhile highway reminds me more of deserts and tumbleweeds and endless, mind-numbing boredom.

It doesn't matter that there are problems and inaccuracies with both of those words and the connotations created in my head. The fact remains that I have them and I like to think that most people attach different feelings to different words. That is why I like hearing foreign languages spoken. In some ways it makes it easier to understand the meaning of the words spoken, even if it just means I know someone is talking amiably to a friend, or kvetching to a coworker. The fact that I don't know the words does not mean I do not know the context of the emotion, unless their inflections and/or body language are completely different. But I also get to add foreign words to my vocabulary and so I am able to relish the emotions, memories, etc. that these words evoke. The same sentence could very well paint completely different pictures in my head depending on the language it's spoke in.

The cat is black.
Le chat est noir.
Die katze ist schwarz.
El gato es negro.

They are all images of a black cat, but for instance I see the French cat sitting in an open window at night with a ribbon tied around it's neck and a large bottlebrush tail. The German cat is in the barn earning his keep by chasing away all the mice. Maybe I'm the only one who does this, but I guarantee that expanding your mind in this way makes life infinitely more fascinating. I can stay inside my head for hours thinking about words and language and painting all sorts of different emotional and visual pictures. Does anyone else think this way?

An awesome video review can be found on bandgeek8408's channel.
LibsNote: Copy checked out from my library via Overdrive Media.
*I have stories about a Frenchman trying to get the idea of "turkey" across to me, and me trying to get the idea of the word "asshat" across to yet another Frenchman. What can I say, French wine is very drinkable.

Post 346: The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Mark Zusak. ISBN: 9780307433848 (eBook).

So I mentioned in my general update that I like stories told from the perspective of Death and/or his minions.I especially like this Death, he has a sense of humor I feel I jive with. He understands the necessity of his role, but he also seems to take some amount of pride or at least care in his work. In this story, Death is less the agent of The End and more like its janitor. I especially like this because it takes away any sort of decision or direct guilt on his part. This is particularly powerful in Nazi Germany, where almost everyone had some role to play in the death of so many people, even if it was only as someone who kept their heads down and tried not to draw attention to themselves.

It makes a very nice contrast in displaying true helplessness or lack of choices versus what is perceived. We see the Nazi soldiers who take an active role in antagonizing and torturing the Jews; we see Liesel and her foster parents who recognize the wrong and assist Jews whenever possible, but still throw Heils in order to escape ostracization; and then there is Death himself who has absolutely no control over the lives of humans. And yet it is Death who was given control of the story.  The least powerful "person" was the only one left to say, "This is what happened."

I like this for a number of reasons. For one thing, it takes away the right to tell history from the usual winners. One might say that Death always wins at the game of life, but even Death recognizes that he's not really playing that game. In fact, Death sometimes sounds bitter that he doesn't get the chance to really live or die. His "life" isn't  a neat story with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather a never-ending conglomeration of other people's deaths. He can piece together bits and pieces of a single life from various intersections of others' deaths in one persons life, but without the aid of Liesel's words he would have been otherwise unable to experience The Daily Moments: Liesel's struggles to learn how to read, Papa's accordion music, the nightmares, her friendship with and love of Rudy Steiner. Those Moments are what make life and yet Death only catches the rare glimpse of them, because for most of us Death is not a daily part of our lives. We may have to live with the aftermath, we may carry a small piece of him around, but most of us do not see it every day.

But the lives that Death is able to piece together and create a whole from seem to be all that more important to him. He seems to understand that Liesel and everyone else is made up of bits of good and bad. He calls Rudy both a fruit stealer and a bread giver with almost the same amount of respect for each title, perhaps because each requires a certain spark of Human Spirit that Death admires. This is something I forget to appreciate, and so when Death narrates, it tends to be both a literal and metaphorical reminder of what is important in life.

An awesome video review can be found on bandgeek8408's channel.
LibsNote: Copy checked out from my library via Overdrive Media.

Post 345: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation by Steve Stanton.  ISBN: 9781550229547.

There's a scene at the very end of the book where the main characters are chopping down a tree. This is in no way going to spoil the plot, by the way, because it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. You don't expect trees in cyberpunk novels. But this scene got me nostalgic for my younger days, cutting down trees in my grandparents' backyard.

My paternal grandparents owned two acres more or less at the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (a wonderful place, by the way, if you like parks). Their backyard was four times as long as it was wide, and sloped down the entire way into a series of two tiers. The first tier was just normal lawn, but as the ground gave way toward the rearmost part, the trees sprung up everywhere, and the land turned marshy. Every year or two, my entire extended family would get together to chop down trees in the marshy area and have a bonfire.

These were not mere saplings, either; everything back there was full grown and had been around forever. We went after diseased trees first (I recall the willows in particular didn't last long), but eventually it just became a ritual to take out something that grandma and grandpa didn't want there.

We would make a day of it, usually playing bocce or croquet (with wickets set so that you had to really whack those balls uphill to get through them*) before getting to the dirty work. Then out would come the chainsaws and hand saws, the work gloves, the riding mower and its wagon hitch. I was allowed to drive it when I got old enough, but mostly I just enjoyed riding around in it.

Our target chosen, the adults would set about making cuts in the trunk to weaken it enough that it would fall. Picking the right direction was imperative, to keep it from flattening any of us or getting tangled up in shorter trees.  Invariably, one or two would be stubborn and refuse to topple despite the constant cutting, which was always hilarious.  We rooted for the designated lumberjack, who was on a razor's edge, ready to run the moment the trunk started to give.  Then would come the unmistakable sound of a falling tree: a crack, a groan and the endless crashing as it toppled to the ground. Twigs snapped, bark ripped, large limbs sometimes buried themselves deep into the mud.

Felling a tree is an amazing experience. Suddenly, the sky has changed, you can see more of it. The tree's shadow is gone, the area brightens up. There is an incredible, primordial stillness that settles around the death of a tree. I remember the pungent smell of freshly exposed wood, and being covered in saw dust and wood chips. If we were felling a maple, sometimes we would sample the sweet sap, although that too was full of sawdust and wood chips. I would stand on the horizontal trunk and walk its length, even if I was small enough that I needed dad's help getting up and down, and take stock of fungal infestations, insect colonies, and odd formations in the bark.

Chopping the tree up was where everyone was able to pitch in, either sawing or trimming off smaller branches, or carting the brush and logs around with the mower. Of course, most of the behemoth would be destined for the bonfire, which we liked to build high and burn long into the night. We would roast hot dogs and marshmallows and have a great time, going home smelling like wood smoke, a scent I still love to this day.

Lately, I've been having some weird ideas about trees, admiring them in, well, a tree-hugging sort of way. We tend to think of them as simply part of the scenery, and I sort of understand why: contemplating each of these monsters as a living being is kind of mind-blowing. They've been around for decades, often centuries. They were here before we were, they'll be here after we're done. They don't care about a whole lot; they just sort of hang out and try to get as much of the good stuff as they can. Killing one is sort of a travesty, even if one intends to use a tree for something constructive or if it was suffering from disease. Still, cutting a tree down with your bare hands is one of the most primal things a person can do, a perfect example of humankind's power over nature. I imagine we felt only a smidgen of what the American settlers did, as they cut through swaths of forest to build and heat their homes on the frontier. I consider it a way of communing with nature, of participating in the end cycle of life, and I recommend everyone try it if they have a chance.**

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

***This post was originally written March 1, 2011 to give the regular blogger a chance to recover from a horrendous cold.

LibsNote: I received an ARC directly from the publisher and passed it on to Dan. My posts about the book are here.
*That's what she said.
**Preferably with purpose, LibsLIB does not condone random acts of tree mauling.

Post 344: Lift

Lift by Kelly Corrigan. ISBN: 9781401395056 (eBook).

I love my mother.

She makes it almost impossible some days, because we are both incredibly hard headed. Strangely, we manage to be hard headed in completely different ways. I like to do things alone, to work out my own problems, and to work with people I know I can rely on and/or am reasonably sure I have some control over. My mother likes to forge ahead into projects without doing much research in advance, working out problems as they come up instead of anticipating them. She sees instructions more as guidelines, and gives a lot more faith to minions coworkers or underlings than I am likely to extend. What can I say, occasionally astrology fits, and I am most definitely a Capricorn.

This gets us into trouble. We also have things we are adamant about not talking about. For me, it's my present. My present is a big dark hole of suck right now with no foreseeable end or way across. I am circling the drain of disaster and I'm not sure if or when someone is going to add a little more water to the sink, stopper it back up, or just let me slide down into nothingness. On the other hand, it's the only thing my mother wants to talk about because she's obviously (and rightly) concerned about it. The problem: it's the last thing I want to think about and I especially don't want someone in, uh, her stage of life telling me how to "fix things." We are in different professions and we have had different crises hit at completely different times in our lives. Even if her advice is valuable, it is a big, hard, gag-inducing horse pill to swallow. Basically, I don't want my mother giving me advice or telling me to go do this or go do that or talk to these people who help people find 100k a year jobs.

ARGH! I know you think highly of me, but librarianship is not a 100k a year job, these people are not going to help me!

On the other hand, my mother refuses to talk about her past. And to some point this is why I don't want to talk to her about my present. It is impossible for me to see my mother as a 26 year-old because I never knew her as such. By the time I was reasonably aware, my mother had a well-established home and family and "I have no business knowing about who she was before that happened." She treats her past as some kind of sacred thing that I have no right to, and maybe I don't, but she's cheating me and herself out of a much closer relationship.

My mother will probably never write a letter like Corrigan's, one in which she exposes all the uncertainties of parenthood, all the nagging questions: "Am I good enough to be a parent, am I doing this right?" But I very much wish she would. I would prefer that she sit me down one day and tell me how much of a hellion teenager she was, or how scared she went on her first date, so that I can have those memories of her and ask questions. I know she won't ever share those with me, but I wish I had more to tell my nephew about his grandmother than, "She was a nurse, we moved a lot, and she was angry all the time up until she divorced her husband. Then she calmed down, got really interested in drinking good wine, quilting, yoga, and feeding stray cats. Nope, sorry, I know nothing about her before the age of 35."

At the very least, I wish she would write me a letter, so I have something. Some days, I just look at photos of her from before I was born, and I have no idea who she is.

You get no review for this one because there's no way to do it without it sounding more saccharine and trivial than it really is. Some works are short enough to just be read.
LibsNote: Digital copy checked out from my library via Overdrive Media.

Post 343: Reading Jackie

Reading Jackie by William Kuhn. ISBN: 9780385531009 (eBook).

I think this book appealed to me so much because the chances of me leaving a (widely read) memoir or record of my life are pretty slim. On the other hand, I do have copious notes on the books that I've read over the past seven years now. Some of those are even interspersed with journal entries to actually give context to what I was reading and why I may have copied down certain passages, but the fact remains: you can only conjecture at what my readings meant to me at the time I read them (outside of my blog anyway). I think the same thing applies for this book, Kuhn certainly makes some interesting and probably even accurate inferences based on Jackie Onassis's publishing list, but I would be surprised if they were all right.

People say they can tell a lot about a person based on what books they read and/or have in their library. That may only be true for people who form attachments to physical objects and have the space and inclination to fill one. If you looked at the books I have waiting to be read in my bedroom right now you would (wrongly) think that I love 20 year old murder mysteries, plus the year-or-two-old publications I picked up from ALA 2010. However, if you look at my Goodreads list you might get a better accounting of my actual reading tastes. Tie that in with my blog and you actually do have a fairly intimate portrait of my reading, what it means to me, and how it connects to my life, and even then I am selective about what I choose to write about.

I am not always forthcoming about exactly what I think because a public forum is not always the best place to hash out ideas or follow certain tangents. Sometimes that needs to happen in private, sometimes I need to sit quietly with the thoughts a book brought to me and pick through them. Other times I want to share them with you and hope that you share your thoughts as well. I still strongly believe that reading is primarily a personal and intimate pursuit, but I also believe reading has the opportunity to connect us to each other by opening channels for discussion on difficult topics. It is much easier to talk about the pain of a character than our own pain, even if it's what we're really talking about.

I found a couple of great reviews; the first one by Jaylia at Goodreads, another by a blogger at Beth Fish Reads, and then my favorite professional source Kirkus Reviews.
LibsNote: Library copy from Overdrive Media.

Post 342: Reading Jackie

Reading Jackie by William Kuhn. ISBN: 9780385531009 (eBook).

One of the things I wish had been explored more was the idea that Jackie chose to edit certain works that she wanted to learn more about. This information was taken from a Publishers Weekly article published 19 April 1993. This is certainly how I approach much of my own reading. I may never get the chance to go to India, but I can learn about the culture and the politics by reading works from Indian authors or non-fiction works about the area. I may not need to ever poison someone, but isn't it interesting how many different ways you can do it and how accessible poison really is? I'm probably never going to fly a plane, but I can easily imagine what it might feel like when it is described well enough.

This is possibly the best reason to read, and we make these decisions all the time. Even for pleasure reading there has to be some motivation behind choosing a particular title. We may originally be drawn by the title or the cover, but those things still give us some information about the content of the book (at the very least they tell us what the marketers think the target audience is). Sometimes I need that exotic setting, sometimes I need to know how or why something happened, sometimes I just need to know why everyone else is reading it.

That last one gets me into a lot of trouble. I consistently read things out of my preferred genres. But I like new things, and occasionally I come across books I love that I never would have read otherwise. I like my adventurous reading habits, and I like other adventurous readers. Not only is it fun to see what influences branch across genres, it's easier to see what storytelling elements and techniques actually work for me, which I've found is actually a better indicator of how much I will enjoy a story than whether or not it's literary fiction or memoir, etc.

How often do you think about why you're drawn to a certain book? What do you think you would learn about yourself and your reading habits if you started paying attention to that?

I found a couple of great reviews; the first one by Jaylia at Goodreads, another by a blogger at Beth Fish Reads, and then my favorite professional source Kirkus Reviews.
LibsNote: Library copy from Overdrive Media.

Post 341: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. ISBN: 9781608191666.

I've never known how to feel about unions. I've come to regard them as a double-edged sword, though perhaps one that is past its prime. It's inarguable that they were absolutely necessary back around the turn of the century. Working conditions were inhumanly deplorable and unions were the workers' only way to stand up against the elites who were holding them down. So once upon a time, unions were the only savior of the lower classes.

But nowadays, it seems that unions have grown huge and bloated, taking on the trappings of the corporations they once fought against, looking out only for their own bottom lines. They prevent employers from firing bad employees, they try to squeeze all the money out of corporations that they possibly can, whether it's best for the industry or not. Just look at UAW and the auto industry right now. In some industries (I think of Hollywood, mostly), you can't get a job without joining the union and paying their dues, however high and regardless of skill. How is someone supposed to pay dues when they haven't even gotten a paycheck? The rights the unions once fought for are now enshrined in national and state laws; what, then, is their purpose?

Really, it just seems like the corporate squeezing I mentioned is about the end of it. I worked at a college bookstore once, a national chain, that had one in-store union employee. There wasn't any option for the rest of us to join, I don't think. All that really seemed different about her was that she got extra breaks and the managers tended not to yell at her. That said, I doubt my father would be employed if not for the letter carriers' union he belongs to. The US Postal Service is a pretty shitty business to work for, and the union is often the only thing standing up for workers' rights. So, in certain cases, they seem to have a function still, but otherwise...

Well, that pretty much sums up my view as of two days before this writing. I now have a slightly improved viewpoint of the situation thanks to this book. I'm going to copy the passage that changed my mind here. For context, the author has just finished discussing what happens to unemployed workers in Europe.

"...if you are a worker in the US, you'd better make sure you hold on to your current job, if necessary through protectionism, because losing your job means losing almost everything. Unemployment insurance coverage is patchy and of shorter duration than in Europe. There is little public help with retraining and job search...losing your job means losing your health insurance and probably your home... As a result, worker resistance to any industrial restructuring that involves job cuts is much greater in the US than in Europe. Most US workers are unable to put up an organized resistance, but those who can -- unionized workers -- will, understandably, do everything they can to preserve the current job distribution." (pp. 226-7)

If you lose your job in Europe, you can get unemployment and even retraining if need be. In the US, you're pretty much finished, so of course workers who can resist will. It goes beyond the "I've got mine, jack" attitude that plagues many in the upper echelons of our society; it really is a struggle between working and being homeless.

So I've come to the conclusion that while some unions may indeed be too powerful, the bad parts of unionization are in fact understandable. It's the system that is to be blamed. Grasping at everything you can is really different when the alternative is having nothing. I just wish I had someone to advocate for me, you know?

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

*This post was originally written February 12, 2011 to allow the regular blogger to play several hours of Zuma's Revenge and spend time with her fiance. Also, this seemed poignant given the events in Wisconsin.

Post 340: a general update

You might notice that I didn't write about Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I'm going to, I just didn't feel like lugging all 600 pages of hardback book with me on the weekend I visited my fiance. So look for posts about Rushdie a little bit later. In the meantime I loaded up my eReader with all sorts of stuff (I may have been a bit overeager with that).

Reading Jackie by William Kuhn.
This is about Jackie Onassis. She's an interesting, near mythical, figure in our history. To be honest I didn't realize she worked as an editor and the thesis of the book was that she "wrote" her autobiography by the books she chose to publish and how she edited them.

Lift by Kelly Corrigan.
This is sort of a short memoir/memory book for Corrigan's children. I could not relate to it as a parent, but it did make me wish my own mother would write a small collection of memories for me.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.
I have been wanting to read this for awhile. I have a secret: I really love stories where Death or Reapers have a large narrative role. I devour shows like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me. I think I like the idea of being a grim reaper because death is possibly the most intimate moment in our lives, so it's interesting to me to see how different "Deaths" view their job.

The Caveman's Valentine by George Dawes Green.
I watched the movie with Samuel L. Jackson and it was pretty amazing. Nancy Pearl recommended the novel at ALA 2010, so I thought I'd give it a try.

The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group by Catherine Jinks.
A NetGalley book. I love the title. I was interested in this because I've been meaning to read The Reformed Vampire Support Group by the same author. If I don't like this one I know I can skip the other or at least not bother with seeking it out. I'm hoping for something a bit humorous and spoofy with this... Oh god, I hope it doesn't take itself seriously.

Rage by Jackie Kessler.
The premise behind this series is that Death has chosen four teenagers to be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Hunger is already out and death chose an anorexic teen to be Famine. This book is obviously about War...and we get Missy who is a cutter. It's almost too bad that Kessler didn't choose someone who died from a gunfight in gang violence, but I like the concept. The question is, will I like the book?

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel.
Plastic is awesome, and kind of not. It does so much for us, and not all of it good. I like non-fiction books that present the good and the bad of everyday objects. We really do need to get away from the Disposable Everything mindset. So, if you have any plastic Kinder egg capsules, my cat loves to bat them around the house, usually at 3AM.

Post 339: Three Hands for Scorpio

Three Hands for Scorpio by Andre Norton. ISBN: 9780765304643.

There aren't very many books I like that are written in an affected manner like this. It's unfortunate, because Norton has a really wonderful story, but it is inaccessible for anyone but the most devoted readers. Many of us do not have the time or patience to be devoted readers. Sci-fi and fantasy suffered from this problem pretty early in the genre.  It seemed a stylistic affectation that most writers were happy to adopt, perhaps to set themselves further apart from general fiction. H.G. Wells immediately comes to mind here. It makes sense for Norton, one of the old guard sci-fi writers, to have continued writing in the style that established her dominance in the field to begin with. Just because it makes sense, doesn't mean it is a good choice.

I do understand why she chose to write in a very "courtly" style as the three sisters were writing down their encounter for the historical record by request of the queen, but it was very distracting. I had trouble keeping track of who was talking, and the formal writing wiped out a great deal of possibility for in-depth character development. I also felt it removed me from actually being in the action so much. Obviously things worked out well for the Skorpys because they were writing down their account so there was no suspense involved with that, but it also felt more like reading the diary or letters of someone I barely knew and only have a mild interest in.

So why is it that I can enjoy the epic language and prose of Tolkien, but this particular Norton novel feels so stilted and imposed? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that this is by no means an epic novel. The magic in Three Hands seems to be well established in the world, but no one knows exactly what the rules are or what can be done with it. It just seems that Norton wanted to try and give one last hurrah from her deathbed and this is what came from it.

The thing is, I don't think she needed that last hurrah. Her mark has been left by the publication of hundreds of stories as well as influencing many, many sci-fi and fantasy writers. Would I have had the drive to write one last book with all of that under my belt, even knowing that I might not be able to finish it? Probably not, but I think Norton was more giving of herself than most people in general. And even if I don't like all of her works, I do appreciate and admire her ability to create, collaborate, and inspire the stories of past, current, and future generations.

An excellent review can be found at SF Reviews.
LibsNote: Library copy.