War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia

#11
Title: War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia
Author: Chris Beyrer
Publisher: Zed Books
Year: 1998
Genre: Medical/Political

246 pages

+ Well written and engaging

-  Now 9 years out of date, thus inaccurate

I wish that Chris Beyrer would publish an updated edition of this terrific book, or even a new edition with an additional chapter with timelines and significant events. One of the best books on HIV/AIDS I've ever read, largely because Beyrer infuses his facts with stories about people with HIV/AIDS who live in these countries, his own experiences as a researcher and interventionist, and the political surround in which violent juntas and opiates abound. At once emotionally intimate and broadly sweeping, this book loses none of its urgency or poignancy despite its outdated numbers and descriptions of the political climate. Some reviewers have found it rambling but that wasn't my experience. After an introduction, Beyrer moves through Southeast Asia country by country, describing the presumed origins and spread of HIV in that country, and how its public policy, drug, prostitution, slavery, poverty, and military characteristics shape AIDS education, prevention, and treatment. He then moves to chapters on particular groups at risk across the countries, and concludes with sociopolitical analysis of human rights issues in the region and their ties to Western capitalism. It's an engrossing read, one I began in 2006 and looked forward to finishing, saving it as a treat. After the wretched Stout book reviewed below, it was an even greater pleasure.

The Sociopath Next Door

#10
Title: The Sociopath Next Door  
Author: Martha Stout, Ph.D.
Publisher: Broadway Books
Year: 2005
Genre: Social Science

241 pages

+ Case studies illuminate the range of expressions of sociopathy

-  Overgeneralizations abound, factual errors, contradictory interpretations of behavior

I rarely pan books. Even when I was reviewing for Publisher's Weekly, I tried to emphasize the good points of the books. It seems irresponsible to identify good points in The Sociopath Next Door without pairing them with their caveats. This is unfortunate, because Stout's case studies are vivid and, while not particularly complex, illustrate a range of expressions of sociopathy in familiar contexts (home, work, and relationships). 

I also don't usually write giant question marks or rebuttals in the margins, or have cause to circle egregiously inaccurate statements. My copy of this book is highly marked up. In recent years, only Edward O. Wilson's Concilience: The Unity of Knowledge has evoked comparable frustration and disgust, and in fact I put it down after only a few chapters. Rather than go into exquisite detail about my many notes, exclamations, and Post-its, I will try to summarize the major flaws of Stout's book, with an example of each.

1. She casts doubt on her accuracy by using outdated references. While she has a few (mostly non-psychology) references from after 2001, the majority are references from the 1990's, and some hail from the 1960's. I'm all for an historical perspective, but research on cortical functioning from 1962, if still considered accurate, should be backed up by more contemporary studies. Most surprisingly, on page 6 she cites DSM-IV as the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. As a psychologist in practice, she ought to be well aware that the current edition of DSM, DSM-IV-TR (Text Revision) was published in 2000 (that's 5 years before her book was published). She is out of standard of practice. Further, the information she cites, apparently from the DSM, is incorrect. Stout asserts that the rate of antisocial personality disorder is 4% (p. 6, no citation given). She then moves into a discussion of the DSM criteria for this disorder. I don't have a DSM-IV handy at the moment, but as luck would have it, I do keep a DSM-IV-TR in the house. It reports the rate as "about 3% in males and about 1% in females" (DSM-IV-TR, p. 704). That would be a prevalence rate of 2%, or 50% lower than her assertion here and throughout. She also characterizes this disorder as "a noncorrectable disfigurement of character" (p. 6). DSM-IV-TR reports that it "has a chronic course but may become less evident or remit as the individual grows older.... there is likely to be a decrease in the full spectrum of antisocial behavior...." (p. 704). Even if she doesn't agree with this conceptualization, she needs to clarify the dispute, and take measures not to appear to suggest that DSM is the source of her information. Egregious errors like these immediately make me question the quality of her scholarship.
2. It is over-generalized and sensationalized. She uses the word "insane" to describe all sociopaths, including those who are parasites rather than aggressors. If her contention is that lack of conscience equals insanity, this ought to be a more central premise, and more clearly explored. Though she avoids exclamation points, at many points the book still reads as if she's shouting.

3. She poses rhetorical questions and then answers them with reference to how "we" all agree with her assertion. We don't.

4. Overgeneralization, part 2. She does not adequately differentiate between sociopathy and passivity plus entitlement. While she does describe some differences between sociopathy and narcissism, she does not explore many other reasons that a person might be construed to be sociopathic, but actually be something else. She glosses over the cycle of violence model in which being abused as a child may cause the person to abuse others as an adult, failing to delineate why a person with complex PTSD or Borderline Personality Disorder might engage in behavior that appears sociopathic, but isn't. She does not address autism spectrum disorders and their possible relationship to, or confound of, her definition of sociopathy. She notes the high rate of sociopaths in a prison population, but does not address the high rate of ADD in the same population, or explore whether these are alternative, overlapping, or coincidentally occurring characterizations of the same people.

5. She seems almost oblivious to the conscience-dulling, judgment-impairing effects of substance abuse, which she mentions only in passing (on p. 105, for example, she raises and then dismisses it out of hand). Stout seriously undermines her argument by citing statistics on sociopathy, then describing behaviors that may have varied etiologies, and ascribing the lion's share of distasteful interpersonal behavior to sociopathy.  

 
6. Stout describes sociopaths' higher mean Pd scale scores on the MMPI, which is all well and good. She does not mention that psychologists and police also have higher means on this deviancy score on the MMPI than does the average person. So does a person with a history of illegal substance use, even if they've stopped. So does a gay person or anyone whose behavior does not toe the social line or has caused them to stand up to even unjust authority (more on this below).

7. She equates sociopathy with evil. This is problematic if, as she asserts, the research suggests a high heritability for sociopathy. Is evil genetic? Apparently she believes that it is.

8. Statements such as this make me want to hurl the book across the room: "...hundreds of thousands of brand-new Americans are now living the insecure existence of unwanted children simply because a physical appetite eclipsed their parents' consciences for just a few minutes in each case" (p. 54).  Has she never heard of rape or coercion? Of failure to use adequate birth control for religious reasons? Of poverty and its effects on both birth control and the means to raise a child?

9. She castigates sociopaths for not following the rules, but one of her admonitions to people trying to resist sociopaths, whom she sees as gravitating to positions of power and control, is not to follow the rules. Not only is this contradictory as expressed, but failing to follow the rules of an authority, even if that authority is a sociopath, will earn you a higher score on the aforementioned Pd scale of the MMPI.

10. In her "Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life," she does not mention an important rule that, if followed, would have decreased much heartache and damage in her extended case studies: If you discover that you have been compromised by a sociopath, admit it. Nobody wants to admit their bad behavior, indiscretions, or blackmailable offenses, but be a mensch and take the rap. I would argue that covering for a sociopath (or your own bad judgment) keeps you vulnerable and perpetuates the offender's power to negatively affect others. I think, if pressed, Stout would say that people who allow themselves to be coerced in this way are not sociopaths because they feel shame. This is cold comfort to whomever the sociopath next compromises or harms.

I enjoyed Stout's philosophical musings and attempts at theory-building, though I don't agree with all of them. The weakest chapter by far is the Introduction. A good editor could have helped her make this tighter, though I would still disagree with some of her basic premises.

If you want a good book on personality disorders, you'd do better with the David Shapiro's classic text, Neurotic Styles. More empathic toward its subjects, this was the work that led to the codification of "personality disorders." It is well-written (though you may disagree with some of its basic premises) and substantially warmer, though more formal in tone.

Capsule reviews

As people ask me about books I've read in the past, I'll post my capsule responses.

Here's a reply to a question about the works of Chuck Palahniuk:
I've now read all of his books. In my opinion, the best are Lullaby, Choke, and Invisible Monsters. I don't think that Haunted is worth reading except to fill out the list. Diary was great until the last few pages, where he used a literary technique that diminished the impact of the novel.

Past Reading (2006)

Here are the books I read in 2006 (italics indicate a re-read):

1. Lemony Snicket: The Penultimate Peril
2. Mark Haddon: The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time
3. Chuck Palahniuk: Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon
4. Jonathan Lethem: Amnesia Moon
5. Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking
6. Gene Wolfe: The Urth of the New Sun
7. Kim Stanley Robinson: Fifty Degrees Below
8. Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere
9. Tom Standage: A History of the World in Six Glasses
10. Neil Gaiman: Anansi Boys
11. Chuck Palahniuk: Choke
12. Chuck Palahniuk: Diary
13. Chuck Palahniuk: Invisible Monsters
14. Orson Scott Card: Magic Street
15. Anthony Swofford: Jarhead
16. Julie Powell: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
17. Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point18. J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince19. S. M. Stirling: Dies the Fire
20. S. M. Stirling: The Protector's War
21. Andrew X. Pham: Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
22. Chanrithy Him: When Broken Glass Floats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge
23. A. J. Jacobs: The Know-It-All
24. Spaulding Gray: Swimming to Cambodia
25. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
26. Susan Brownmiller: Seeing Vietnam
27. Carolyn Swearingen: The Role of Internalized Homophobia, Sexual Orientation Concealment and Social Support in Eating Disorders and Body Image Disturbances among Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Individuals
28. Truong Nhu Trang: A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath
29. Loung Ung: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
30. Chuck Palahniuk: Haunted
31. Loung Ung: Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind
32. Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch: Phaic Tan: Sunstroke on a Shoestring
33. Christopher Tolkein: The Treason of Isengard
34. Erin Hunter: Into the Wild
35. Frances Mayes: Under the Tuscan Sun
36. Amy Thompson: Through Alien Eyes
37. Nick Jans: The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears
38. Chuck Palahniuk: Stranger Than Fiction
39. Dan Koeppel: To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime Obsession40. Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn
41. Cornelia Funke: Inkheart
42. William Goldman: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (The 'Good Parts' Version) (25th Anniversary Edition)
43. Patti Smith: Auguries of Innocence
44. Jonathan Stroud: The Amulet of Samarkand
45. Charles Wright: China Trace46. Jonathan Stroud: The Golem's Eye
47. Jonathan Stroud: Ptolemy's Gate
48. Ursula K. Le Guin: Voices
49. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
50. Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
51. Andrea Seigel: To Feel Stuff
52. S. M. Stirling: A Meeting in Corvallis
53. Vann Nath: A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21
54. Diny van Bruggen: Flowers on the Cactus: AIDS and Orphan Care in Cambodia
55. Rickard K. Morgan: Woken Furies
56. Jeffrey Smith: Where the Roots Reach for Water
57. Graham Greene: The Quiet American
58. Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly
59. Lemony Snicket: The End
60. Jeff Greenwald: Shopping for Buddhas

Edit: Renumbered to include Morgan in about the right place.

Strange Piece of Paradise

#9
Title: Strange Piece of Paradise
Author: Terri Jentz
Publisher: Farrar, Straus Giroux
Year: 2006
Genre: Autobiography/True Crime

542 pages

+ Extremely detailed and interesting account

-  Slow going at times, small print in hardback edition

In 1997, Terri Jentz and her bicycling companion "Shayna" were attacked in Cline Falls State Park near Redmond, Oregon. As they slept in their tent, an unknown assailant drove his truck on top of Terri, then attacked both young women with a hatchet. Fifteen years later, Terri returned to Oregon to investigate these events.

Some reviewers have faulted Jentz for what they see as repetition and a lack of editing. I believe that this criticism arises from an understandable misidentification of the book's genre. This is not a "true crime" story, in which it may be expected that the author would streamline events for a more concise narrative. Instead, it should be read as autobiography. At that, it is not autobiography in which the writing itself aspires to transparency; instead, the form of the narrative reitterates the preoccupations and mental state I associate with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Conversations are reviewed and details returned to multiple times. Small nuances are scrutinized and labored over. The theme of urgency and press to tell one's story recurs throughout. This is not to say that Jentz did not edit and highly structure this account. It's also clear that even at 542 pages of small type, the tale has been highly condensed and the emotion highly contained. Rather, I'm suggesting that reading Strange Piece of Paradise is very similar to listening to a friend (or psychotherapy client) over a long period of time, witnessing her striving to resolve a trauma born of inexplicable events. 

Jentz, a highly effective and apparently quite counterphobic woman, does suppress emotion in the narrative, as she reports doing in her life. For me, the most emotionally engaging (and painful) sections of the book convey her deep longing for Shayna to join with her by witnessing their mutual experience, a testimony that the amnestic Shayna does not want to hear.

Jentz manages a multidimensional portrait of Oregon, capturing both the state's terrifying and engaging aspects. In some ways, this parallels her experience of the "meticulous cowboy" who attacked her, and who inspires her anger and, at times, her compassion.

The Beatrice Letters (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

#8
Title: The Beatrice Letters (A Series of Unfortunate Events) 
Author: Lemony Snicket

Illustrator: Brett Helquist

Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2006
Genre: Childrens/Epistolary
72 pages

+ Very Fine Design

-  Vexatious Fragmentary Dispatches

As has been true of Mr. Snicket’s published oeuvre thus far, this collection of letters between Lemony and Beatrice raises far more questions than it answers. It is unfortunate that this volume requires the reader to be conversant with that oeuvre. I’ve recommended several fine books already, such as The Abhorsen Trilogy, which features two delightful orphans who experience a Veritable Fantastic Denouement, so there is no reason whatsoever to read The Beatrice Letters. I soon will report on World War Z, which is about zombies and yet still a better prospect than the Virtually Feculent Disquisition under consideration. The reader is strongly encouraged never to open this epistolary tome, nor to punch out and anagram the included letters then tuck them carefully in the included file folder.

Fans of Bantock's Griffin and Sabine will recognize the basic graphic style of this book, readers familiar with the tragic Baudelaire orphans will recognize the content, and tragically uninformed cakesniffers will be entirely lost, which may be just as well.

The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker

#7
Title: The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker Editor: Matthew Diffee
Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
Year: 2006
Genre: Cartoons
272 pages

+ A number of fun cartoons not fit for The New Yorker

-  Some duds, though this is not unlike reading The New Yorker

An enjoyable collection of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Often, this rejection appears to be based on sexual, religious, and scatalogical themes too risque for that august publication. Many feature these images: Small piles of feces, vomit, mutant sperm, gender-bending or cross-dressing males, couples in bed, puppets. If that sounds like a good time, you'll want to take a closer look at this volume. The collection is presented as short folios of each cartoonist's rejecta following a questionnaire filled in by each that is generally more entertaining as a blank form than as a completed document.

A good companion piece to Playboy's Kliban, sadly out of print but available here and there on teh intarweb. 

Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

Title: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America 
Author: Steve Almond
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Year: 2004
Genre: Memoir/humor
266 pages+ An affectionate romp through candy nostalgia, not omitting biting commentary on the politics of big corporations vs. independent manufacturers-  Frequent forced humor

Not the easiest book to read on the treadmill, filled as it is with virtually pornographic paeans to a variety of candies. Motivated by his great love of candy, Almond tours several independent candy companies still hanging on in the U.S. If you like Americana or still bore your friends with tales of a local candy you enjoyed in your youth and have never seen again, you'll enjoy this book. Almond's love of candy is endearing and the book is both entertaining and informative.

Almond is at his worst when he strains to be funny rather than trusting that his observations are amusing on their own, or in juxtaposition with his rather pathos-saturated analyses of what sounds like a reasonably average American childhood. I’d rather read a book that simply includes exposition on the author’s various inadequacies and failures without also having to suffer his attempts at wittiness. The Prologue and Chapter 1 particularly suffer from what I can only describe as a failed attempt to emulate Woody Allen. Don't let this dissuade you from plowing onward to the rest of the book, which is considerably less self-conscious.

The most critical observation I have to make about Candyfreak is that Almond's nostalgia for the golden age of American candy is paired with his contempt for today's analogue of the family-owned candy company of yore: The small organic, gourmet, or specialty candy manufacturer. Though he uses a candy-sampling vocabulary that would do a wine snob proud, Almond presents himself as a proletarian kind of guy who wants nothing to do with the bourgeois piggery of new small candy concerns, and prefers instead to bemoan the crushing of the old candy companies by the Big Three large candy corporations. Yet confusingly he praises and appreciates Lake Champlain Chocolates. Other reviewers have criticized him for his self-disclosures and personal narrative in this book; I'd have liked to hear more, particularly about this seeming paradox, which I can only understand as a conflict between his image of himself and self-conscious image management versus how he actually behaves in the here-and-now. It reminds me of people who enjoy a local microbrew but want to complain about how much it costs; how stupid everyone is to drink it; and how when they were a teen "local beer" meant Ortlieb's, which by god cost $5 a case and wasn't any good, but still evokes one's callow youth. (Note: Not that I know anything about "Joe's beer.") I don't mean to suggest by this comment that Almond's book isn't fun to read, but that there's an inherent schism between what he wants and what he chooses to do. If candy is about the little guy, Almond should visit the little guys who have figured out the niche market for specialty candies; if it's about nostalgia, he should own this as his personal, Proust-like odyssey. The book would be better for it.

Note to Algonquin Books: It's really obvious when you spell agar agar both correctly and as "ager ager" several times in two pages. For a modest fee, I'll correct your proofs.

Note to the author: You consistently eat a great deal of candy, don't gain weight from this, and describe hypoglycemic reactions. Get your blood sugar checked now and then, Steve. I'm not a doctor but you sound like somebody at risk of developing adult-onset Type I diabetes.


My favorite small candy concern: Euphoria Chocolate Company. Feel free to reply with yours.

Girl in Landscape

#5
Title: Girl in Landscape 
Author: Jonathan Lethem

Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1998
Genre: Science Fiction
280 pages

+  Worldbuilding, careful word choice, not over-expository

-   Ending a little rushed

This is the third novel I’ve read by Lethem, and I may have to read them all. In this genre (he writes in several), Lethem creates what I’d call literary science fiction. Here (and in Amnesia Moon) the reader is immediately in medias res with little preliminary exposition and even less later clarification. This works only because Lethem is so skillful at evoking environments and social circumstances through spare, nuanced prose. Though their styles and concerns are not particularly similar, Ursula K. Le Guin’s most recent novels utilize similar techniques. The characters know where they are and why it is the way it is; the reader enters almost as an accidental observer, able to see only a small segment of a broader but obscured world.

Girl in Landscape is a bildungsroman in which the main character, the 13-year old Pella Marsh, comes of age on an alien planet, and in doing so, perhaps also signals a greater coming of age for humanity. Lethem deftly captures both adolescent angst and interpersonal complexity and shows the relationship between the qualities of the characters’ psychology and expectations and their ways of seeing and understanding the world they inhabit. The landscape of the title is interior and exterior, physical and social, real and metaphorical. Overtly a tale of misplaced hopes and xenophobia, this is also a narrative of self-discovery and acknowledgement. I only wish the concluding sections had been about 20 pages longer and slightly more archetypal. Still, a terrific read.

Books in progress

Coming soon:

Candyfreak (Almond)
Girl in Landscape (Lethem)

Coming soon:
The Beatrice Letters (Snicket)
Inkspell (Funke)
Plus memoirs of life under the Khmer Rouge

Update:My sweetie just found me a source for Phoebe Snetsinger's Birding on  Borrowed Time (currently selling used at Amazon.com for $85 and at Amazon UK for a mere £173.95. Oddly, Amazon.ca has it for only CDN$ 23.25, and the publisher, American Birding Association, has it for $19.95 [here].) Dan Koeppel spoke of it admiringly in To See Every Bird on Earth, so I'm really looking forward to it.

The Road

#4
Title: The Road 
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2006
Genre:  Fiction/Speculative Fiction
241 pages

+ A bleak and probably realistic evocation of life after apocalypse

- Why no apostrophes? I could make the case that the author stripped everything out of the text to match to narrative, but I find it intrusive

A bleak, generally monochromatic view of the post-apocalyptic period, centered on a father and son. As compared to similar works about life after the Bad Event, this novel is more of an allegory than anything else. Where a book like Stirling’s Dies the Fire is busy with plot, character, and change, The Road is concerned with a world that is essentially static. The unnamed father and son toil through a landscape of grey ash. The plot is subtle and largely psychological (or, perhaps, moral).

The reviews on Amazon are relentlessly positive. I hate to nitpick, but I had a couple of concerns that intruded on my suspension of disbelief. First, I don’t believe that all animals and plants could be destroyed or killed by some sort of conflagration, yet enough humans could survive that we encounter individuals and bands on the road, and learn that there are also communes. Granted that there is cannibalism and a certain supply of canned goods, I still can’t believe that this many people survived but not a bird, dog, fish, or potato did. This repeatedly pulled me away from the story. Second, and slightly spoiler-y, I was disappointed with the conclusion. The son and father’s moral development was interesting and I enjoyed trying to understand the sources of some of the discomfort I felt as the novel progressed. For reasons related to the moral issues raised, the end of the novel felt incongruous rather than a compelling next step. In addition, while the ending seemed to resolve the parable, it did not resolve the plot, instead merely deferring the relatively meager plot’s non-moral dilemmas. Perhaps I should be content with the parable, but a novelist of McCarthy’s caliber ought to be able to resolve the narrative on all levels.

Addendum (1/10/07): I'm told that McCarthy generally eschews punctuation, so it's not unique to this novel.

Abhorsen

#3
Title: Abhorsen
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: Eos (HarperCollins)
Year: 2003
Genre: Young Adult fantasy
518 pages
 + Strong female protagonist; coming-of-age elements; fast-paced action
 -  Rushed narrative at times; plot issues; character development subsumed by action; multiple points of view, often lapsing into exposition, which also increases the reader’s emotional distance

The third of the Abhorsen trilogy. This is really a “part 2” for Lirael, making the shape of the series a little less of a triptych and more of a single story plus a diptych. A relatively satisfying book, and a reasonable end to the sequence (though there are hints that more could follow), it nonetheless has less emotional power than the previous two volumes. Perhaps this is a function of the characters’ outward rather than introspective focus; perhaps it is the difficulty inherent in writing a parable of such apocalyptic portions, but I did not find the characters as interesting or compelling, and their developmental changes and epiphanies seemed somewhat empty and distant compared to the first two books. Bigger plot holes; more deus ex machina as people (and animals) suddenly remember or know things that they didn’t before. 

Both the girl and boy with the magical dog who knows things, and the pace of the action, reminded me more of Diane Duane’s Young Wizardsseries than did the first two books, though I like what Nix did with both the Disreputable Dog and Mogget in Abhorsen.

Certainly I was exhausted by the end of reading it, and could empathize with the characters who were even more sleep deprived than I.

Plot problems large and small, which I hope will be inexplicable if you haven’t already read the books, and therefore not spoilers. Caveat emptor:

1.       Why is Nick necessary to Hedge’s plan?

2.       Why would Sam have been preferable?

3.       How was the splinter removed from its presumably impervious site of origin?

4.       I’d have liked to see Nick’s empirical side before his encounter with Hedge in Lirael. His behavior after the encounter with Hedge and in the Old Kingdom would have extended more logically from his nature.

5.       I’m unclear on the sequence of some of Nick’s actions, since the narrative now jumps somewhat asynchronously between several characters. I hope that he ordered the work at Forwin Mill after he saw the Lightning Trap.

6.       Powerful as she now is, I don’t think that Sabriel would undress with a Wyverly teacher in the room.

7.       I’d find the business about the circuit breakers more convincing if Nick and Tim didn’t come up with the idea independently.

8.       I grew a bit weary of the Dead who behave in a particular way and have particular characteristics—except for these Dead over here who are different—oh, and those Dead over there who defy the previous knowledge we have of the Dead. If the Dead can be held at bay as well as they are (and in great numbers) by pipes and bells later in the book, why so much fuss about combating relatively small numbers of Dead earlier? If running water only keeps minor Dead away, shouldn’t Abhorsen’s House have better defenses?

9.       Perhaps I missed an explanation, but I’m not sure why Lirael had to go to the 9^th Precinct to use the mirror. 

Lirael

#2
Title: Lirael
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: Eos (HarperCollins)
Year: 2001
Genre: Young Adult fantasy
705 pages
 + Strong female protagonist; incorporation of mythic and modern elements; appealing cover art that references the Magician Tarot card.
-   Illegible map in the front matter, for no good reason. It looks like a bad photocopy of the map in Sabriel.

The second of the Abhorsen trilogy. Opens with a table of contents that is evocative of Tolkien (e.g., "An Ill-Favored Birthday," "Sam the Traveler" ).The opening has a strong whiff of Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan; later, Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia may be more apropos. Since all of these writers are dealing in archetypes, this convergence is not unexpected.

While Sabriel used a single third-person limited point of view other than in the prologue, Lirael generally alternates between the tales of Lirael, a Daughter of the Clayr who has not yet gained her magical Sight, and Sameth, the younger son of the Abhorsen and the King. Neither Lirael nor Sameth is portrayed as particularly appealing; they are both suffering from heavy adolescent angst related to their career failings. In addition, Lirael is socially isolated (in part by her own choice) and Sameth is scarred both physically and emotionally by an encounter that occurs early in the action. These two teenagers provide foils for each other as their lives run in parallel and then intersect. They are realistically self-preoccupied and morose.

Lirael, like Sabriel, is bereft of parents, has a magical animal as a sidekick, and demonstrates knowledge and skillfulness beyond her teachers' abilities. Both must grope toward knowledge, and their destinies, without much guidance other than from their familiars. Like Ged and Tenar of Earthsea, they grope for ancient mysteries all but forgotten in the present day.

It's clearer in this second volume that the country of Ancelstierre is intended roughly to correspond to England in the earlier part of the 20th century, while the Old Kingdom is a sort of magical northlands, complete with a magical border wall between the countries from coast to coast.

Lirael functions as a bridge between Sabriel and Abhorsen, leaving many plot points open while crystalizing only a few. Not a good stand-alone read. It was published 6 years after Sabriel, and is more playful in tone.

Next in the trilogy: Abhorsen. 

Sabriel

#1
Title: Sabriel
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: Eos (HarperCollins)
Year: 1995
Genre: Young Adult fantasy
491 pages
+  Strong female protagonist; incorporation of mythic and modern elements; frank and contextually appropriate references to sexuality; appealing cover art
-   Some deus ex machina elements; some dangling plot elements (perhaps to be resolved later in the series)

The first of the Abhorsen trilogy. Somewhat evocative of Pullman's His Dark Materials, this volume is a coming-of-age narrative centered on Sabriel. Until she is about to graduate, Sabriel knows fairly little about her father, though he has taught her some magic. Upon receiving clear indications that her father has died, Sabriel undertakes a dangerous journey to find his body across the Wall in the Old Kingdom. As she journeys, she learns more about her father and the powerful role she must now assume.

Nix does a good job creating the world in which the narrative takes place and constructs a convincing heterotopia. Some plot points are more ex machina than I'd like. Better written than Harry Potter, though slightly more picaresque, perhaps to allow more natural opportunities for exposition. Less well-written than The Amulet of Samarkand and the other two volumes in Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. Like Stroud and Pullman, rather dark. Some imagery related to magic and death is similar to Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and other Earthsea books. Considerably less light-hearted than Duane's Young Wizards series. Like all of the authors mentioned, with the exception of Rowling, magic is portrayed as both seductive and somewhat dangerous. There is a strong moral conviction related to using magic primarily in service to others rather than for the magician's own purposes.

Given its incidental cast of thousands of the dead and almost-dead, Sabriel seems to be a good companion to McCarthy's The Road,which I'm already into, and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which is in the mail.

Next in this trilogy: Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr. 

New Year's Day

I like the idea of tracking what I read for the year, so here it goes. I have to decide whether to start Nix's Sabriel

or finish McCarthy's The Road first. 

I'll post brief, non-spoiler reviews as I finish each book.