I loved parts of Dragonsbane but found other parts quite annoying and frustrating, so I’m not sure I’ll want to read the rest of the series. (A quartet, not a trilogy, interestingly.)

John is a local lord in a small, isolated, poor northern holding. Jenny, his lover, is a witch/healer/midwife. One day a young noble arrives, seeking John’s help. John, you see, once killed a dragon, and is therefore the only Dragonsbane alive. Now the people in the south need his help killing another one. He only managed to kill the first one with the help of Jenny’s poisons and magic, so she goes with him. And of course the situation turns out to be much more complicated than they expect: the dragon is there for a reason, and that reason might be more of a danger than the dragon itself.

Things I really liked about this book:

• The unheroic hero. Jenny is middle-aged, not pretty, not even described as looking “strong” or “fierce” or “having character”. Or even witchy. Just small and plain. She is disappointed in the weakness of her magic, and frustrated in always having to choose (and not being able to choose once and for all) between spending her time on increasing her magic, or on her lover and children. She doesn’t regret any of her choices, because she couldn’t have done anything differently, but still wishes that things were different. She loves John and her children, but also resents them for taking up so much of her time and keeping her from growing her powers, and feels guilty about her inability to choose. “She should have loved, she thought, either more or less than she had.” All of this is taken seriously and not turned into a funny quirk. She is annoyed and tired in realistic way, rather than entertainingly, wittily grumpy like frustrated people often tend to be in books.
• The unheroic sidekick. John is a Dragonsbane, but neither looks nor acts like the hero that folks in the South expect. He dresses in brown plaids (because the North is both poor and cold and muddy), and he wears spectacles. He’d rather read a book about history than go out hunting dragons. And if he has to kill one, he won’t do it the glorious, honorable way, but would rather sneak up on it after it’s been weakened by Jenny’s poisons.
• Their mature relationship. No dewy-eyed romance, no “will they, won’t they”. A solid, long relationship between mature adults.
• The unheroic mood. This whole book feels like November. It’s muddy and gray and cold and windy. Of course dragons don’t wait for the best adventuring season.

Things I really disliked about this book:

• The ornate similes. Barbara Hambly really, really likes describing colour and light, in as fancy terms as possible. Dew drops don’t just twinkle – “brightness spangles the wet grass like pennies thrown by a careless hand”. Rain pouring from a gutter is “like a string of diamonds in the moonlight”. The metal of John’s jerkin “gleamed like a maker’s mark stamped in gold upon a bolt of velvet”. Descriptions like that are empty posing: they may sound impressive but they do nothing to help me imagine the thing or place described.

  Is the sparkling of the light truly the most essential part of this scene? I wish she spent more time telling me what the city looked like, or the path to the mountains. Several times we are told that the gnomes have light eyes, and their hair is white and wispy like cobweb – but what does the rest of the gnome look like? More about the shape of things, less about the light, please! Jenny is no court poet, she’s a down-to-earth witch!

More mildly I disliked the one-dimensional secondary characters, especially the evil sorceress who turned into more and more of a caricature as the story progressed.

The Bear and the Nightingale is what I think of as fairy-tale fantasy, like Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. This one is based on Russian folk tales, in particular the one about the poor stepdaughter who sent out into the woods in the middle of the winter and told to bring back snowdrops (or violets, or strawberries, or other variations).

Vasya is the youngest child of a wealthy boyar somewhere in the North of Russia in medieval times. Her grandmother was known/rumoured to be a magical princess. Vasya’s mother died giving birth to her, and tasked her father with watching over her because she knew the girl would inherit her grandmother’s gifts and would have something important to do.

As the girl grows up, people notice her talking to thin air. When she tells them of the spirits she speaks to, and grows ever wilder and more unpredictable, the family convinces her father that the girl needs a mother. He remarries, bringing home another high-born lady, rumoured to be mad. When she arrives at the manor, it turns out the woman wasn’t mad but instead saw spirits just like Vasya.

The story is full of spirits. The hairy, bearded house spirit, and the toad-like lake spirit, the forest spirit and all the others. While only Vasya and her stepmother can see them, being friendly to them is part of normal life. Even the women who don’t see them, leave offerings to the domovoi.

But the stepmother forbids Vasya to ever mention the spirits or give them offerings, and invites a priest to the household to drive the creatures away. Vasya’s second sight and the creatures may be the only thing standing between the village and disaster, but the priest is determined to drive them all out.

I really enjoyed the Russian flavour of this book. I could relate to it much more personally than to standard Western European fantasy. Western European fairy tales and fantasies with sword-bearing knights and impressive castles have always felt distant, like the stories would only ever happen in some other world. But the Russian environment, with birch forests and muddy lakes, log farmhouses, and wooden forts instead of grand stone castles, is all like old Estonia. Mostly gone now, but I’ve seen enough of it to make it feel real. And extended families living on a large farm, with grandma sleeping on the masonry stove, all that is relatable.

Many times I noticed the author using an expression which I sounds archaic, even a bit overdone, in English but immediately felt less so when I mentally translated it into Estonian. Estonian is not at all related to Russian linguistically but has centuries of close cultural ties and has borrowed a lot of idioms over time. Likewise the names, probably exotic to most English-language readers, are familiar and homey to me, after all the Russian tales and books I’ve read and heard.

The storytelling in this book is slow, but in a good way. It’s magical, beautiful and sharp.

I also liked the balance that the author found. Despite appearances, this is not a story about organized religion vs traditional beliefs. Most of the people in the book see no contradiction between them, just like it was in real life. Folk beliefs survived for hundreds of years after Christianity arrived in Estonia. And Vasya’s own tale is not about rebellion vs obedience. The two can coexist. Vasya may refuse to accept a woman’s traditional lot, but doesn’t put herself above the other women who do, or think herself a hero. She also serves, in her own way.

The book is apparently a part of a trilogy, but worked very well on its own.

Sometimes I find a new book to read by reading other people’s recommendations online. The difficulty is not finding passionate reviews of fantasy books, but in finding reviews that I can trust. I.e. reviews by people whose tastes are at least somewhat similar to mine.

The Riftwar saga has been recommended more times than I can remember. People on /r/fantasy keep mentioning it as their favourite book ever. A few months ago I thought I’d try it out.

I’ve rarely been as disappointed in a popular book as with this one. This book was just so simplistic in all ways. There is no subtlety or complexity whatsoever. It’s fantasy for beginners; no thinking required.

The story is simple and linear. The characters’ actions and emotions are always the most predictable ones. Any foreshadowings are pointed out with a heavy hand – “watch closely now, this will be important later!” It’s almost a caricature of a popular book, so bland and so full of clichés.

I keep records of the books I read. When I was noting down this one, I saw that I had read it before, almost exactly ten years ago. I have no memory of it at all. Apparently it made no impression. That doesn’t surprise me.

Note to self: try to remember to never read this book again.

PS: And now I see I even reviewed it back then. I was indeed no more impressed the first time.

Maia is the teenaged fourth son of the elven emperor and his goblin wife. As a half-goblin he is gray-skinned and ugly. He has been living in banishment, loneliness and poverty for years, with an abusive older cousin as his guardian and only company. One day his father and brothers are killed in an accident, and he suddenly finds himself the new emperor.

The elven court is built upon tradition. Dignity and composure are valued above all. But under the surface there is scheming and treachery like in any court. Maia, with his background unlike anyone else at court, brings kindness to it, but struggles to fit it into his role as emperor. He feels lost and out of his depth. Surrounded by bodyguards and servants around the clock, he is almost a prisoner still, now of custom and schedules and expectations. He is also lonely. After years of abuse and isolation, he is socially awkward and has no confidence. He doesn’t expect anyone to like him, and is more or less resigned to a life without ever finding any friends or freedom.

As you can hear, this is a melancholy tale. But it’s not a dark one: Maia’s kindness lifts it into beauty. His intense desire to do good, his fairness and gentleness make this an uplifting tale of hope.

This world of elves and goblins is alien but vivid and full of detail. Reading this book I really feel like there is a whole complex world out there, a web of people and relationships, of which we through Maia’s eyes only see a tiny part. This is a small-scale story which mostly takes place in a handful of rooms in the palace. Confined, just like Maia. But also focused: this isn’t a story about a series of events but a story of Maia’s inner life. We see him learn and develop, and by the end of the book there is reason to hope that Maia will not only survive the treacherous court but become a good emperor.

The writing is excellent. Elegant, masterful, precise. Here is a writer who can craft phrases to express exactly what she intended, so that no word could be added or taken away without breaking the magic. I savoured individual words and phrases in my mouth and tried to make them last longer. Indeed I wish that the whole glorious book could have lasted longer, and if there ever was a book that deserved a sequel or maybe a whole slew of sequels, it is this one.

I was sad to realize that Katherine Addison hasn’t written any other books. Then I found out that the name is a pseudonym, and the author has written other books under her real name, Sarah Monette. Unfortunately those are described as dark and leaning towards horror, so they won’t satisfy the hunger for more of this.

A trip to Myrorna, with 14 boxes of books. Then another trip to Science fiction antikvariatet with 3 more.

That’s the equivalent of about 850 pocket books. (I know this because the SF bookshop counted the contents of the boxes I gave to them, and gave me a gift card in return.) Assuming each cone cost about 80 kr, that would be 68 000 kr worth of books.

In a way that sounds like a terrible waste. Those books face a very uncertain future, and I’m guessing that a good chunk of what we gave to Myrorna will later end up being thrown away. The man at the SF bookshop told me that there’s a guy at Myrorna whose only job is to throw away books. The mere thought is depressing.

But each of those books has been worth the money at some point, and we’ve enjoyed reading them. So they have absolutely been worth the money. This is no more a waste than having paid for cinema tickets, which, after all, we also use once and then throw away.

It’s rare that I buy and read a book that I really don’t like. I usually do my research before buying books. I read reviews and skim the book. In the past half year I’ve read two books that are very popular and highly recommended, that I was really, really disappointed in.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman gets rave reviews by all sorts of reputable sources like The Guardian. It’s supposed to be this warm and joyful story of a traumatized, isolated, socially awkward woman, who finds a friend and comes out of her shell and lives happily ever after.

The big problem I have with this book is that – even though mental health is at the core of the story – it is apparently written with zero insight or understanding of mental health problems. Eleanor is a random jumble of symptoms, picked not because they make sense but because they fit the author’s romantic ideas of what a person with mental health problems should be like. She’s like a collage of one part autistic spectrum, one part PTSD, one part schizophrenia or something like that.

Her thoughts and behaviour and speech likewise are inconsistent, and the author jumps from one quirky thing to another dependent on where her mood takes her. Not Eleanor’s mood, that is, but the author’s. She turns Eleanor’s life into a comedy.

For no apparent reason, Eleanor sometimes speaks like an eighty-year-old lady who’s learned English from antique books – and other times she’s eloquently funny. She clearly has problems relating to people and interpreting emotions, and yet at other times she has deep, poetic insights into human emotions. She’s been to university and worked in an office for years and gets promoted to manager – but cannot use a phone and is clueless when trying to buy a computer… There is no consistent self, and it just doesn’t make sense.

And then Eleanor gets a nice haircut and finds a friend and has a couple of sessions of therapy, and suddenly she’s cured of all her problems! Tada, problem solved, now we can all go home and be happy!

This is a book where mental health plays such an important role, and yet it trivializes mental health problems to such an extent that I find it insulting. I guess the book’s message is supposed to be that we shouldn’t look down at “odd” people because we can’t know what’s going on in their heads. But that message could be delivered with respect, without made-up mental conditions and silly “oh she just needed a haircut” “fixes”.

There are people close to me who struggle with actual, real mental health problems. Therefore seeing this topic treated with such lack of respect and, frankly, ridicule really annoys me. This book deserves none of the attention it has gotten and I wish I had never come across it.

Theft of Swords by Michael Sullivan is a very different book and disappointing in a rather different way. This is a fantasy story about Hadrian and Royce, a pair of thieves for hire, who just can’t help taking on good causes. It is one of the most recommended books on r/Fantasy.

I read somewhere that the author wanted to write a book somewhat like Harry Potter – easily flowing and straightforward, fun and yet with darker elements. And funnily enough many of the problems I have with this book are exactly the same things that I really disliked about about the Harry Potter books, and why I stopped reading them after the first few.

This book is a part of a series, and the author’s main focus is clearly on the big picture and a long story arc. Everything leads toward an ultimate resolution somewhere on the horizon in book six or whatever. The problem is that the author is no good at keeping us entertained on our way to that resolution.

The writing is pretty dull and clunky, interrupted by info dumps. Occasionally Sullivan seems to have felt (or maybe been told by his editors) that he needs to get some more evocative detail in there, so he suddenly stops to describe the coat of arms of some warrior, but he doesn’t do this for any other lord’s or warrior’s coats of arms, so it just feels like he needed to show off the heraldic terms he had looked up on the internet. Or he stops to describe the clothing of one particular person in a lot of detail, in a way that feels technical rather than full of life.

Adversaries stop in their tracks to make long speeches to give us more backstory on Hadrian and Royce. Poor, uneducated peasants stop to make poetic speeches full of wisdom. The pacing is awkward. At times we leave the main story and get long expositions about politicians and their machinations.

The language is often awkward, which I find really jarring. Sullivan has no feeling for the feeling of words; I think he’s sometimes just picked words from a dictionary without understanding their connotations. He can describe a senior barmaid as “a bright and cheery waif”. The woman is bright and cheery and yet looks homeless and neglected? He describes a magical wall of flame as “monolithic” – the fire is a block of stone? Heavy and immovable? The man makes no sense!

He can’t make up his mind about what kind of society this is, and what kind of language the people speak. Is this a formal society with a large social distance between the ordinary people and the high lords? Or an informal one where class doesn’t matter much, and rogues and princes quickly move to addressing each other by first name? Do the people speak modern colloquial English, or is it all “woulda been giv’n” and “I wouldna care ’bout that, no sir”? Both are equally cheesy, but jumping between the two is even worse.

The characters are one-dimensional and utterly predictable. Royce is moody and glum; Hadrian is eternally upbeat. Their supposedly strong relationship is just there without anything to keep it alive. They rarely say anything to each other apart from everyday things like “we should turn left here”, so I really have no idea why they stay together and why they’re supposedly so close to each other. After hundreds of pages, I still know nearly nothing about them as persons.

I’m also really annoyed by Sullivan’s seeming lack of common sense and general knowledge. He describes a dirt poor village where people wear nothing but shirts (and for some reason can’t be bothered to build doors for their houses so they hang canvas in their doorways instead). And yet they cook a hearty stew for our heroes, with leeks and celery and onions and potatoes. Where the heck would poor, nearly starving villagers get celery (which requires frequent watering and rich soil), especially in the spring? Did they find it in their fridge?

The hero walks around wearing three swords, one of them on his back. What on Earth does he need three for? He can only use one at a time. Does he need the sword to match his mood, or the colour of the light? How does he swap them around to make sure the right one is accessible? Because the large sword he has on his back he won’t be able to actually use because there’s no way he can pull it out while it’s there.

This is a book for people who don’t normally read many books and have nothing better to compare it to. Sort of like Harry Potter, then, I guess.

Every November, on a small, rocky island probably somewhere off the coast of Ireland, people race water horses. These are magnificent, fierce, bloodthirsty creatures, and participants in the races are fighting not only win but to survive – to not be dragged into the ocean, or get your arm bitten off by a competitor’s horse. Or by your own for that matter.

It’s about the water horses and the islanders’ love/hate relationship with them. It’s about barely making a living, and about sacrifices to get to do what you love. It’s also about roots vs opportunities. Thisby is a small island that doesn’t have much of a future to offer to young people. It’s rustic and traditional – which is great if roots and tradition and blood ties are your thing, but not so great if you want things in your life such as rock music and job opportunities.

I can’t really say what made this book so great. It’s intelligent, somehow. Beautiful and vivid; pared down, spartan, but poetic.

The drowning girl of the title is India Morgan Phelps, or Imp to her friends. She’s schizophrenic and no longer trusts her own mind or memories.

The book is described as “incisive, beautiful, and as perfectly crafted as a puzzle box” but I just found it rambling and boring. There is too much meta content about what Imp will write about, and how she should write about it, and how she is going about it the wrong way. I kept waiting for something of interest to actually happen, and getting distracted and bored reading it, so I gave up.

Eric gave me a Kindle for Christmas. I guess he got tired of me borrowing his for trips and hikes, haha.

I love actual physical, paper books, but the Kindle certainly has its benefits. The screen is amazingly easy on the eyes. It’s more comfortable to read with one hand. And it’s scary how easy it is to buy new books! I just finished a paper book (the first in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series) and Adlibris doesn’t seem to sell it so now I have to somehow survive without the sequel until I can find time to visit the Science Fiction Bookshop. Had I been reading the series on the Kindle, the sequel would have been a few taps away.

In a land where magic is feared and forbidden, Lark has a magical gift. When she is a child, her mother takes responsibility for Lark’s small act of magic and is killed in punishment. Just before she dies, she curses/predicts that Lark will not speak again, and that if the girl dies, so will her father (who otherwise doesn’t seem very interested in keeping her alive).

When Lark is grown up, she is discovered by the king of this country, and he takes her away to his castle, thinking to use her magic. Of course they fall in love (yet another girl reluctantly falling in love with her kidnapper, I’m getting pretty fed up with this trope!) and she ends up bringing freedom to not just him but the whole country.

This book was supposed to be a lyrical, poetic, dark fairy tale. I found it to be simplistic and naive, almost childish. Like a short story inflated into a novel, it just didn’t have any weight. The characters are few and shallow. The world around them barely exists. We get little insight into their thoughts and feelings. The plot is cliched and predictable, and several of the basic premises of the plot are, according to the rest of the book, not even possible. And the language is overly flowery rather than lyrical. It’s as if it was written by a teenager. Bleh.