The Fall of Gondolin, J.R.R. Tolkien

The two novels, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, are among the most memorable and loved reads I've had in my lifetime. They are simply magical. I imagine this is the same experience for many millions of his fans over the decades since he published his amazing tale. There have been a few other of his stories that I have read and tried to read. "Smith of Wootton Major" and "Leaf by Niggle" are a few that come to mind that have that similar magic, but not the epic majesty. The Silmarillion I tried to read years ago, but ultimately grew too weary of.

This book is said to be the last of Christopher Tolkien's efforts to publish his father's unpublished work. Some might say that he simply took advantage of his father's fame. But I got a sense of his real devotion, love, and respect for his father. He seems lost not in establishing his own legacy, but preserving as much of his father's as he could have. So, I have a lot of respect for that. He also gives some insight into the character of his father and his passion for his own work; and even the frustration of getting his work published due to the high cost of paper shortly after the conclusion of WWII.

The Fall of Gondolin is not one of the works that I would call magical. In fact, it is missing much. It is not a complete tale, but rather some fragments. What gave The Lord of the Rings and The Hobit so much magic was the fact that the main characters were so common. They could have been the runts of the classroom or the little guys that no one could take notice of. Yet, they do what the most noble and awesome of warrior and wizard could not: defeat the mightiest villain and avoid corruption.

The Fall of Gondolin is well written. The first fragment reminds me of something that might have come out of Arthurian legend. The second has some magical descriptions in it. But in the end, the main character throughout, Tuor, is an extra ordinary super macho alpha male type character that was so popular with characters like Tarzan and Conan and their like. It's good. But it's just not really what I look for in what I read. There's also a lot of superfluous stuff in the last 1/3 of the book: character lists, for example.

I came very close to putting The Fall of Gondolin down to remain unread a number of times. I probably would not have read it if not for the high ratings I found online for it. There is some serious quality to it. But I will probably not recommend it to anyone.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for some of the plot elements: in some ways, it's the story of what happens to a culture that builds too great of a wall between itself and the world as the world is consumed by an all too powerful force. When Tuor discovers the city, hidden in part by magic, he tells the king to participate in the fight against evil. But the king does not want it, and ignores the problem. Eventually, once the other cities have fallen to the evil Morgoth, Morgoth spares no pain to discover the hidden city.

I'm no longer a huge fan of the type of story where there is this caricature of good vs evil with no real insight as to the motivation that burns in the evil adversary. I wonder if I would be as spell bound by The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit as I once was.

Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury

   I can't recall where I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's collection of short weird fiction, Dark Carnival. In any case, I must say that I don't recall ever having read any of his fiction. This, despite his name being legendary in the golden age of science fiction. Despite my associating him with science fiction, here are a few lines from Wikipedia that describe his fiction:

Bradbury was once described as a "Midwest surrealist" and is often labeled a science-fiction writer, which he described as "the art of the possible." Bradbury resisted that categorization, however:

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time -- because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.^[35]

Certainly, there is nothing of science fiction in this collection of short stories. I would classify it as weird fiction. I am not an authority on anything except my opinion, of course.

   I'm not going to go over each of the short stories. I'm only going to mention the few that stood out for me.
   Death and the undead often come up as subjects or characters throughout many of the stories. There is a vampire who doesn't like to be a monster like the rest of his relatives. There is a story, "Uncle Einar", about psychic possession where a girl, to prove how awful she is, possesses a relative hated by the family until he kills himself. All the time he is looking for her to help him, completely unaware that it is she who has haunted him, leading him to his own extinction. There's another story, "There Was an Old Woman", of a woman who refuses to die. When death comes to her and separates her from her body, she manages to retake it from the funeral home which has already gutted and embalmed her. She has her blood replaced in her veins. She then goes home and from then on refuses to answer the door (perhaps to make sure that Death does not trick her again).
   The final story which stood out for me is "The Next in Line", which is about a couple who go to Mexico for a holiday. The woman is haunted by the tour of the unburied: the poor rent plots for a year but cannot afford a second year. So, the bodies are exhumed and left in a kind of cavern, standing. There is a series of macabre descriptions of the dead: one woman who is buried alive. Another who dies giving birth along with the baby. All of them held together and stiff with wire. She begs her husband to not leave her there. But, he refuses. On his way back to Texas, he seems quite happy that she is no longer beside her.
   If you're looking for a series of good horror tales, this is not a bad choice at all.

The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani

   This book was among many from a pile of books that were international NY Times Bestsellers for 2018. It's also a winner of a Prix Goncourt prize, whatever that is. I do believe it's a translation. So, it's another effort to get into contemporary literature. "Insanely good," is stamped at the top of the cover from Kate Hamer. I guess so. Insane is perhaps a good word, but the word good and insane in this case do not go together.

   I almost wish I hadn't read this book. I don't know what I was expecting. The perfect nanny is perfect except for the fact that she kills the children in her care. This is shown in the beginning. Slowly, we're shown the severe issues that built up Louise, the main character. A bad childhood, a bad marriage, a bad child, a bad set of debts and debtors, and a bad job, all somehow end in a wasted woman doing something terrible.

   When I say I wish I hadn't read the book, it's for this reason: I just felt queasy, uneasy, and very uncomfortable from beginning to end. Almost like I was going to take a bath in someone else's cold bathwater. That feeling never goes away. The tension doesn't snap at the end as it seems to lose its elasticity.

   Imagine Mary Poppins: the perfect nanny. Then, she falls apart and kills the Banks' kids. But, you see that in the opening scene of the movie. You know that after all the magic and the fun and dancing and singing and walks in magical places and pigeons, that Mary Poppins has already been seen killing these kids and you know that you will get to revisit the killing in gorier details at the end. That's what this book is like. Enjoy.

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

   I have heard the title of this book from time to time over the last year. I didn't hear many opinions on it. I just heard someone ask others' opinion of it. One of the things I want to do this year is read a few more very recent tales. Mostly I love to let time act as a literary filter. But, I have decided to change this very old habit of mine this year. I don't know if anyone actually reads my blog: but if someone does, let it be known that spoilers will exist.

   The story covers the life of a girl, nicknamed Kya. The girl lives alone and is intensely lonely. She's been abandoned by everyone: her parents, her siblings. She is all alone. A few times people try to capture her as a child in order to take better care of her, but she manages to evade them all. She meets a few men, falls in love with one who leaves her, and falls in love with the idea of life with another before he chooses another woman for his wife.

   Owens' timeline shifts back and forth between Kya's life growing up, and the mystery surrounding a young man's death. The mystery is not entirely resolved until the very end when it is shown that Kya was in fact the person responsible for the death of the young man. The motive is established: he attempts to rape her and beats her badly enough that it takes her more than a month before she is fully physically recovered. But she constantly lives with the fear of him coming upon her and further visiting violence on her.

   During the trial, it seems quite absurd that she is suspected at all for the murder of the young man. This was no accidental murder: it was coldly calculated. She had an established alibi and witnesses. Timing was a major issue. It would seem nearly impossible for her to have done it at all. But it is not until the last chapter, when she has died and her partner has discovered a hidden trap door with her secrets hiding underneath, that it is revealed that she indeed was the author of the murder.

   I cannot imagine a sheriff or any decent investigator taking the whole affair to a court. Considering the witnesses and the alibi in favor of her not having done it vs. the witnesses of her having been in the area at the time would have made it difficult for a reasonable prosecutor to make the decision of taking on such a case.

   Color: for almost the entire book, I thought Kya was black. That is, until Owens described her as a white girl. I guess I don't know southern accents very well, so maybe that had something to do with me seeing her as black when she wasn't. I thought she came from a poor black family. Also, she associated with a black family better than any of the white families. But then, suddenly, she's white. I wonder if Owens did all of this intentionally: did she try to make me think that she was black and then suddenly, near to the end, revealed that she was white? If so, why? What's the point? If she hadn't meant to deceive me, why mention the color of the girl so suddenly and concretely?

   Another thing that jumped out at me was the character of Kya. She's been alone for so long, yet seems to have a better comprehension of human behavior than someone having lived in isolation ought to have had. Further, she goes from being barely literate to an academic superstar. She has been gifted with paints and canvas and becomes an expert in them, all by herself. Becoming an expert in anything in such isolation seems almost an absurd proposition.

   I guess, in a book which does not really exist within the framework of science fiction, or horror, and attempts a semblance of realism, ends up being scrutinized for realism in a way that I don't apply to works of the other genres.

   All of that said, I think that this novel is quite a remarkable achievement for a debut novel. It was very easy to read and enjoyable.

A Case of Two Cities, Qiu Xiaolong

This is the fourth book from Qiu Xiaolong involving his star character, Chief Inspector Chen Cao. I have greatly enjoyed the series. There are a few things that bothered me about this volume. In perhaps the first 1/3-1/2 of the novel, I was bothered by bad grammar and bad grammar choices. By bad grammar, I mean run on sentences and sentence fragments. Bad grammar choices involved far too many commas creating a jerky narrative. Together, these two issues almost made me hit the delete on my Kindle. One of the style choices I didn't like in the first three books was the inclusion of poetry lines jammed together like prose, separated by the forward slash /. I suppose he might have saved a few pages and a few trees by doing so. But in an electronic copy, what's the point? In any case, that was improved upon perhaps 50%+ of the time. That is to say, in volume four, maybe greater than 50% of the time the lines of poetry were on their own lines as poetry ought to be displayed.

The story itself is otherwise fairly well told. But, while not really an issue I guess, I didn't get a very good look into China. Most of the story takes place in the US. There was the issue of corrupt people stealing Chinese public funds or taking advantage of Chinese laws meant to stimulate the economy to give themselves leverage they needed to create vast sums of personal wealth, in order to build luxurious lives for themselves in the US before their corruption caught up with them.

Chen is given 'the emperor's sword' to deal with going after Xiao. But he doesn't get far, and there is a great deal of risk to him. One detective who may have been assigned to the same file was killed. The first person he questions has information about Chen before Chen has had a chance to question him. The target becomes too dangerous for him, so the next person he goes after for questioning he gets the leverage of some pornographic photos with another official, Jiang. She ends up dead in short order. Then, Chen is sent to the US to get him out of the way or to make it possible to get a roundabout inroad towards the defecting Xiao. But he goes not for the investigation, but as a special envoy. Perhaps a kind of undercover operation where everyone knows who he is, but not exactly why he is there. This includes himself. Someone tries to kill him, but gets someone else instead.

In the end, he attempts to thwart Jiang's escape to Canada, but the outcome is left out. The end of the narrative has many loose strings. I don't object to that entirely. But I suspect many readers might. Loose strings are easier to pick up later than a narrative which is carefully and surgically sutured to have no loose ends.

I'm sure I'll get into book 5. My theory is that this book had a different editor than the first four. I tried to find out by looking up the book on Amazon and Goodreads. But getting that information isn't so easy. I'm sure if I spent more time I could eventually figure it out. But how important is it? I'll just leave my guess here.

Goodreads first three or four reviews had similar experiences to my own: enjoyed the first three novels. This novel is of inferior quality.

Cheyanne wrote, "But this case has two many murders, with victims and killers we barely get to know. We also get barely a glimpse of several recurring characters."Shabbeer Hassan wrote, "A rather disappointing book in the Inspector Chen series, with a weak story (as usual) but much weaker character motivations and horrid pastiche of Inspector Morse by Colin Dexter.

I don't know who Inspector Morse or Colin Dexter are. 

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) wrote, "Golly I hate to say this, but I was disappointed. Four novels into the Chen Cao chronicles, I guess it's normal that the author should lose a bit of headway. The case looked promising: an older, respected cop is found dead in a fancy brothel, and Internal Security gets a "confession" from the terrified young prostitute far too quickly. What's up? Well, you won't find out here."

There were some positive reviews. Follow the links and I'm sure you'll find them at Goodreads.  

Cruelty, Roald Dahl

For modern readers of English literature, Roald Dahl has probably been at one point a favorite author. Adolescent boys and girls almost universally love his stories. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, are just two stories I read as a very young person, and still remember the stories to this day. How many books stick to the brain that effectively? Very, very few I would wager. In any case, so, I saw this title and it piqued my curiosity. Cruelty.

Cruelty was copyrighted in 1986, but it appears that it was only released in 2016. Spoilers abound. So, there's no point in complaining since you've been warned.

Cruelty consists of 10 short stories:

"The Butler"

 Some 'nouveau riche' types have just come into a fortune. They want to buy their way into the good graces of the bourgeois. But of course, it takes a lifetime, I'm sure, to learn how to behave as the bourgeois do. Without much concern for money, they purchase all sorts of expensive things. They invite everyone to dinners. They buy the most expensive wines under the advisement of the expensive butler.

But, the joke is on them! The butler had replaced all the expensive wine with cheap wine. But that does not stop them from bragging to their 'friends' about how expensive this and that wine was, and the vintage, despite it being all the same.

The butler, no longer able to tolerate his employer, confesses that he had replaced the expensive wine with the cheap, and drank it himself.


"The Great Automatic Grammatizator"

This story is a bit of interesting science fiction. A man invents a story and book writing machine. Just pull on a set of levers, and the machine will write a mediocre short story. With an upgrade, it produces novels. Within a short while, it is used to take over the creative industry. How far away from just such a reality in the form of an AI powered writer? 

"Royal Jelly"

 "Royal Jelly" is a bit funny. It's about a man who is born with a natural connection to bees. Later on, he has a baby. The baby is dying. So, he feeds it some royal jelly. At the end, the wife discovers that both her baby and her husband look part bee-part human. It's like a B-grade horror story. 

"Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat"

This is a comedy. A woman gets a parting gift of an expensive mink coat. But she wants to make up a silly story as to how she gets it. She takes it to a pawn shop and gets $50 for it. Then, the husband goes to get it. When he brings it home, it's a cheap mink wrap while his secretary gets the original. I didn't see that coming. I knew something was coming, and I guess that was the most obvious in hind sight.

"The Swan"

Some very bad boys do some bad things to a poor boy.

"Poison"

A funny story about someone who believes he has a venomous snake on his stomach. Eventually, it's discovered that there is no snake. 

"Skin"

I enjoyed this one. A man gets a young boy, destined for greatness, to give him a large tattoo on his back of his wife. The young boy is in love with the wife. Later on, the young boy becomes a famous artist. The man shows off his tattoo at a gallery. A multimillion dollar canvas stuck to his back. One of the men offers to take care of the old man in exchange for his customers to see the great artwork on his back on the beach. Not too long after, the artwork reappears, minus the old man. Pretty cruel.

"The Princess and the Poacher"

This one was a cute story, a fairy tale really. A very ugly boy, but talented and powerful, is shunned by all. He's a great hunter, however, and manages to poach birds and other animals for his family's dinner table.

One day, he decides to take a chance and try to poach around the castle. While he's there, he sees the princess in danger of a boar heading straight for her. Already in love with her, he takes on the giant boar head on, and breaks its neck.

As a reward, the king proclaims that the poacher can rape and ravish any woman he chooses. The poacher chooses not to. Eventually, the princess falls in love with him because he chooses not to ravish the maidens. He is the only one not to chase her and has respect for her.

Certainly, not a story for children. Perhaps a good story for all the incels idiots out there in the world today.

"Genesis and Catastrophe"

A young woman has lost three children. She's afraid to lose the fourth. The reader is invited to worry about her, and hope that she doesn't lose her fourth child. That is, until you realize that her newborn son is Adolph Hitler.

"Claud's Dog"

A big con: a man finds an identical dog. One dog is fast, the other slow. They're both greyhounds. He tries to conjure a great con by running first one, against whom the odds are calculated he cannot win, and then running the much faster dog with the big odds. The con works. Except all the bookies refuse to honour the bets that they made. In the end, they lose out.

-------------------

In the end, it was an enjoyable book. "The Princess and the Poacher" tickles the romantic side of me and would have to be my favorite of the lot.

Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie

   Murder on the Links was published at around 1923. At the time, Agatha Christie was an up-and-comer. Wikipedia writes that a review of the time compared Agatha Christie's Poirot to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
   Poirot is asked by Paul Renauld to save him from some kind of plot. But ultimately, it is too late. When he arrives, Renauld is already the victim of a murder. Renauld is a rich man. Surely if he was worried about being murdered, why wouldn't he hire some security? I guess then we wouldn't have a murder mystery novel then, would we?
   Christie creates another detective to act as a kind of foil to Poirot. He is comically illustrated as being arrogant. Sometimes, at the scene of a crime, he is on his hands and knees looking for evidence. While doing so, he discovers an unburnt match and a cigarette butt. They are of South American origin. All of this plays along the idea of some foreign interests being behind Renauld's murder. Meanwhile, he ignores a pipe which Poirot finds to be noteworthy. Poirot mentions that any evidence, big or small, is important. They jostle with each other, but in reality, Detective Geraud is quite dedicated to doing his detective work. Later on, he is discovered disguised as a bush so that he can overhear conversations.
   Ultimately, he identifies Jack Renauld, Paul's son, as the murderer. Certainly, it seems likely. Jack even confesses to the crime. But while all of this is enough for Geraud, it is not enough for Poirot who sees that the confession is false. Jack wants to cover up for the person whom he loves and believes to be responsible for the death.
   Ultimately, it is his other love interest who murders his father in a case of mistaken identity. The intended target was Jack, who was losing interest in the beautiful French girl, Marthe.
   I enjoyed this book.