Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
July 2003 Archives
Dreamer by .
Tomorrow's Wizard by Patricia MacLachlan. The six connected stories in this book reminded me of fairy tales. They're all about a wizard named tomorrow, his apprentice, and the wishes they fulfil as their job. There are also a shrewish girl, beautiful girls, a giant, and a talking horse. Cute, but a little obvious. It's definitely what I think of as a "J" book in that regard.
Ben didn't want us to read it to him because it had no pictures. We tried telling him to make the pictures in his head, but he wasn't having anything to do with it.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: 20th Annual edited by Gardner Dozios. Purchased this one to read while on vacation, as I didn't want to run out of reading material like I did last year. (This turned out to be less of a problem than I expected, as there was less time to read.)
So far, I'm finding the stories at the beginning of the book to be less entertaining than some of the later ones. As I explained to my husband, many of them seemed to be either pointless or incomprehensible. [... more to come ...]
Oh, and what the heck is "slipstream", anyhow? Dozios mentions it in the introductory material as if it's a common, self explanatory term, and I find it utterly opaque.
Addendum, 7/30/2003 A definition/discussion (the original one?) of the term "slipstream".
Murder, She Meowed by Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown.
Another book I picked up to take to camp, but didn't have time to read. An enjoyable little mystery, though I spotted whodunnit before the end. I'd never read any of these "cat mysteries" before, and the conceit is amusing.
I did find the cast of characters somewhat hard to keep track of, especially all of those characters with names beginning with "M": Mrs. Murphy (this one was easy; it's the cat), Miranda, Mim and little Mim (who is totally mysterious because she wasn't in the cast of characters at the beginning of the book.) And everyone got introduced in a big crowd scene in the first chapter, too. I get the feeling that if I'd started with the beginning of the series, it would have been somewhat easier to learn the new characters.
One other structural thing that stuck out at me was the varied chapter length; some of them were only a couple of pages long, and others were longer. I don't usually notice that sort of thing, so I'm not sure why I did with this book. I may have been focusing on the book differently because I was trying to keep the characters straight.
There was also one glaring loose end -- just how did those two characters that the heron showed Mrs. Murphy die? A simple car crash, or something more? As far as the human characters were concerned, those two just disappeared.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Read this one as an ebook after renting Treasure Planet.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling. I managed to wait to read this one for an entire week, while I waited to go on vacation. The first couple of days were easy, as the book was in transit from the UK, to match the UK editions of the other volumes.
There's one point partway through the book, where, during a DA meeting, someone can't quite remember that Harry recovered the Philosopher's stone during his first year. I'm going to have to sneak a peek at the American edition to see just how that was rewritten to be a confusion with "sorceror's stone".
This book seemed less self-contained than the other books in the series -- very much a middle book, wrapping up some loose ends from previous volumes, and setting things up for the future books.
