March was a very busy month for me, and my reading pace suffered. There is only one book I feel is worth writing about that I read last month. It is not, however, the only book I read. I read five or six, but they aren’t at all worth saying anything about. But that won’t stop me from elaborating after I write about the one real book I read.

Casino Royale

Ian Fleming

I bought most of the Bond series in another Kindle sale, but this first book does not fill me with hope that I will enjoy reading them. Because frankly, I did not like this book at all. I thought it was crap, but with the germ of something interesting buried in the crap.

I knew the gist of the story from the fairly accurate, if significantly expanded, movie. That likely did not help my enjoyment, since I knew most of the twists already. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here to grasp on to other than the plot. The writing is terse, with only the barest of description or detail provided. It is simply bad writing. Perhaps it is social change in the intervening 50 years since this book was written, but Bond came off a prejudiced and unlikeable (worse so than even his worst movie portrayal) with no challenge from the book that he might not be right. Not that he is anything like the superspy he is in many of the movies. He is actually quite ineffective. Mostly, the book is watching an asshole do his job poorly.

Others

What else did I read in March? A bunch of crappy, free romance novels I got from the Kindle store. I won’t name any names, but they were uniformly bad. Why did I keep reading them then? Because it was easy. I would download one to my phone before work, then read it when I was supposed to be working. I was working 70 hours a week, and I needed something to do at work. What else was I going to do? My job? Ha! So instead of reading any of the numerous worthwhile things I have for my Kindle, like a load of Chabon, I read crappy romances. Because since I was a working, I was frequently getting interrupted. That really hampers one’s ability to really get into to a book. So I read something I didn’t really care about. That is what I read in March

Yeah, I missed getting this up in March. So February’s is happening now, and March’s will happen in a day or two. I thought about doing them both at once, since I had about as much time to read in March as I did to write blog posts, but doing so would mess up my monthly format even more.

Dodger

Terry Pratchett

Pratchett is an author that has long been on my to read list, since his stuff sounds like just my thing. However, I have never really managed to do it. When I saw Dodger on sale on Amazon, I figured it would be the best chance I would get to read some Pratchett on the cheap. I’m not sure this was the best place to start with Pratchett, though.

Dodger is the story of a London orphan who helps out a distressed young woman. Early parts read like a love letter to Charles Dickens, with Dodger being obviously inspired by the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, and he has a Jewish mentor who is actually totally unlike Fagin. Then Dickens himself shows up, proving that it is just such a love letter. Not just ot Dickens, though, but to Victorian London in general. It doesn’t whitewash the bad parts, the main character is an orphan who makes his living digging things out of the sewer, but the novel is largely upbeat and humorous.

Unfortunately, by about the halfway point the supposed cleverness of the Victorian references and Dodger’s combination of street smarts and ignorance starts to wear thin. Instead of continuing the plot, too much time is spent with Dodger rubbing shoulders with famous people. In the end, it goes from amusing to somewhat tedious.

The Mapping of Love and Death

Jacqueline Winspear

Another Maisie Dobbs book. This one is about the death of an American Cartographer (hence the mapping in the title) in WWI under suspicious circumstances. His family hires Maisie to find out what happened once and for all. Perhaps more importantly, it is also about the deteriorating health of Maisie’s mentor Maurice.

Honestly, I ran out of things to say about this series several books ago. I find Maisie and Co a compelling enough group to read about even if the mysteries don’t blow me away. I do think this is one of the better entries in the series.

The Black Echo

Michael Connelly

I’m not really sure where I stand on this book. It’s not really my sort of thing; I received it as a Christmas gift. I didn’t not like it, but I’m not rushing out to get the next Harry Bosch novel. I simply have trouble taking this noirish sort of detective novel seriously. Especially when you get characters like partners Lewis and Clarke. That stupid sort of name knocked me right out of the story.

I don’t mean to say that The Black Echo is bad; I found it entertaining enough. Det. Harry Bosch gets a case that has ties to his days as a soldier in Vietnam and eventually pits him against the FBI. There are some good twists, some bad twists and an overall good story. It is just not the sort of detective or mystery story I like.

I started this year reading a lot of Wheel of Time. I stalled in the second half of my reread for too long and really had to rush to finish before A Memory of Light hit. I did just manage it, but reading four Wheel of Time books doesn’t really leave a lot of time for other reading during the month, as I managed only 2 other books. One of those, Outlining Your Novel by K.M Weiland, I don’t have anything to say about. It is exactly what it sounds like.

Knife of Dreams

Robert Jordan

The Gathering Storm

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Towers of Midnight

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

A Memory of Light

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

I still plan on writing reread posts on the last few WoT books, but I will have to do that later. I’m kind of taking a break from the series. It has been more than a month since I read A Memory of Light and in large my thoughts haven’t changed. However, the more I think about it, the more I think of the book as Sanderson’s rather than Jordan’s. There are parts that are clearly Jordan, but the tone feels largely Sanderson. A lot of it has to do with how much of it is a battle scene, a detailed campaign. I realize that the series has been building to Tar’mon Gaidon, a literal last battle, so there would be war, but in the Jordan books battle scenes tend to be short, chaotic and horrific. In AMoL, it is more clinical, more a historical recounting than caught in the moment emotion. Not that there isn’t any of that, or that it isn’t well written. It is just different from, say Dumai’s Wells. Still, AMoL is a better ending that we should have been expecting.

The Last Dragonslayer

Jasper Fforde

This is Fforde writing a Young Adult novel and it is exactly what one would expect. This feels a lot like his Thursday Next series, only a touch simpler and with a generally younger focus. This is in no way a bad thing. It is different enough that is doesn’t just feel like Thursday for kids, but it maintains the same wit and imagination. The world of The Last Dragonslayer is interesting in its own right, with it touch of Harry Potter with big magical organization, though here the big problem is magic in recession. I’m not generally a big reader of YA fiction, but as long as Fforde keeps his sense of humor, I’ll keep reading what he writes, no matter how it is classified.

I spent most of the last two days steaming through A Memory of Light, the final book in the Wheel of Time series from Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. To say I was greatly anticipating the book would be a bit of an understatement. As my (soon to be completed) reread shows, I love this series. I am more invested in this story and its world than I have ever been in a fictional world. Which is why it is hard for me to process my reaction to this last book. I have never anticipated an ending like this and had it actually meet my expectations.

A Memory of Light is a nearly perfect ending to this monumental series. It is not the best book in the series, probably not even in the top half of the series, but it ties up nearly everything in a better way than could have been reasonably expected. There are flaws to the book. It often feels scattered and rushed. Part of that is obviously intentional, as the forces of the Light are scattered. Also, many pages are devoted to relatively new characters and threats while storylines that have been building for book or in some cases the whole series are finished off in a few short pages. These flaws do little to detract from the overall experience. A Memory of Light is filled with moments. Moments of incredible heroism and bravery, moments of triumph and moments of bone deep tragedy. If you have any connection to these characters it is a hard book to read, to see their final fates. However, it is also incredibly well worth the bittersweet moments and the tragedy. It is awesome.

As I said, I am having trouble processing actually liking how this concluded. While I am more invested in the Wheel of Time than any other series, I have had several other book and movie series that is was into. I was big into the Harry Potter books, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, the X-Men and Matrix movies and everything Star Wars. All of those series invariably let me down at their conclusion, to one degree or another. The first Matrix movie was terrific, but the two that followed it up were all but unwatchable. The third X-Men movie failed similar spectacular fashion. Those I didn’t like, but it didn’t affect me much. Harry Potter is a little different from the rest. For one, by the time the last book came out, I had kind of outgrown the series. I was at the target age with the first one, but I was a few steps outside of it by the end. By then it was not a book for me. Also, it didn’t really disappoint me as much as the rest. It abandoned a lot the things I liked about the previous books, most notably the school setting and focus. That had to go for story reasons, but that part of the series was what I liked most about the series. I wouldn’t call the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows a disappointment, but I definitely didn’t like it as much as the rest of the series. The Dark Tower, on the other hand, killed any interest I had in reading anything else by Stephen King. Up until the seventh book I greatly enjoyed the series, even the interminable asides into past stories with little relevance and King’s degeneration into laughable self-insertion. But the second half of that last book was insultingly awful. It somehow manages to both pander and deliver nothing that reader wants. King’s in book defense of his ending simply proved that he knew it was junk. Then there is Star Wars. I am actually talking about the Expanded Universe novels, which I know have not ended, but the New Jedi Order series was the ending for me. The original trilogy was already complete before I was born and though RotJ is likely the weakest of the three it is still a fine movie. When they first started publishing post-RotJ novels, I was there to snap them up. Not all of them were great. When a dozen plus writers are all taking shots with the characters the story is not going to be perfectly cohesive and the quality is going to vary. But I liked plenty of them. Then came New Jedi Order. It came with a mandate to shake things up, but to me it seemed to be burning down and salting the earth of my then favorite fictional world. While I don’t have specific criticisms, it did end my interest in reading any more books from then on. What all of these series have in common is that none of the endings lived up to my expectations of what they should be. But A Memory of Light did and I do not know how to react. What do I do when the destination is as good as the journey?

I haven’t touched the Harry Potter books since I finished book 7, I will never read another Stephen King book, and when I come across The Matrix or X-Men on TV, I change the channel. I am completely finished with those series. But I have been reading the Wheel of Time pretty much constantly for the last ten years. My good friend Bob turned me on to the series in high school and since then I have read the first six books in the series at least five times apiece, and the rest aren’t far behind. Now that is it finished, that I am no longer going to be pouring over each tome in search of what is to come, I still think I am going to keep reading the series. A break is coming, as the last two months have been nothing but Wheel of Time for me, but I know I will pick up the series again. The Wheel of Time really got me into reading fantasy, it made me want to be a writer and for that it will always be special to me, but based on my past experience, I expected the ending to kill my desire to relive it again. But it hasn’t.

A Memory of Light is the conclusion to a monumental journey, one that took nearly a quarter of a century and has held readers in suspense that whole time. The series set the bar so high for a satisfying conclusion that I thought getting one would be impossible, but Sanderson and Jordan greatly surpassed my expectations. The Wheel of Time is the greatest work in its genre, and its ending further cements its place as the best fantasy series ever written.

Crossroads of Twilight

There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. SO starts each Wheel of Time book and it is never more true than in Crossroads of Twilight. There are no new plot threads started in CoT, and none of the continuing stories end. It is just incremental steps forward. Crossroads of Twilight is easily my least favorite book in the series. It feels both slight on developments and bloated. It takes the flaws of the previous two books and leaves their strengths. It feels in large part like the second half of Winter’s Heart that didn’t make it into the previous book. More than half of the book takes place before Winter’s Heart ends. In all, Crossroads of Twilight is the nadir of the series, where the increasingly unwieldy structure finally collapsed, at least in part.

Crossroads does accomplish a reset of all of the character’s timelines. The cleansing of saidin in Winter’s Heart is a world changing event, as well as one that could be immediately felt all around the world. It provides a spot to sync all of the characters. Since they have split up over the last few books, there is little way to tell when they are in relation to each other. For first half of this book, plus some, it is merely showing where they are and what they were doing when Rand cleansed the taint. While it could have been done with more elegance, having the characters all at the same time is a good thing. It is also notable that the big events of Crossroads of Twilight are not actions, but choices. Characters do come to crossroads, and they must make important decisions.

The most obvious one is Perrin. He is still hunting down his wife in the center of the map. He is forced to make several tough decisions, like asking the Seanchan for help and getting the food from So Harbor, but the big one is his choice of the hammer over the axe. While the central philosophical dilemma still haunts him after this book, here is where he finally throws away his axe and chooses the hammer. He does it after seeing how far he will go to save Faile. He cuts off the hand of a captured Aiel and threatens to do more. Disgusted with himself, he casts the axe aside. It is a philosophical choice, leaving the axe, which only destroys, for the hammer, which can both destroy and create. Perrin is choosing to not be a destructive force, or at least not only that.

The incentive for all this crossroading is Rand cleansing the taint. To do that he used enough of the power that every character who can channel felt it. The overwhelming feeling is whatever it is that they felt was so powerful that it surely changed the world. If they world has changed, they must change too. That is right. The problem with CoT is that seeing everybody react to the giant glowing beacon is just not that interesting. It really just serves to slow everything down. It also hurts that so much time is spent on Perrin and Elayne in this book and their current stories are just not that interesting. Every other character of importance has been stripped from Elayne’s storyline. Aviendha leaves in this book, Nynaeve and Lan are already gone. It is just Elayne, embroiled in a not particularly enthralling political battle. The real problem with it is the disproportionate amount of time spent on her story. And I say this as a big fan of Elayne.

Crossroads of Twilight is almost a necessary book for moving into the end phase of this series, but that doesn’t make it not a slog to work through. The quality of the writing never falters, but the plotting and structure are completely broken here. It feels like unraveling a tangled knot. It’s not pleasant, but it must be done before you can tie another knot.

I was still below my four book average this month, but I did read most of Winter’s Heart this month. Still, October’s reading didn’t branch out much from what I’ve been reading this year.

An Incomplete Revenge

Jacqueline Winspear

An Incomplete Revenge is a continuation of the Maisie Dobbs series, and maybe it is just because I’ve been reading them one after the other but I am having trouble differentiating them, other than remembering the core mysteries of each. I guess this is something of a testament to the general high quality of the series, because I like them all. This one is notable in that Maisie and Billy get out of London for the bulk of the book, solving a mystery involving the biggest douche of a nobleman imaginable. That is the biggest weakness of an otherwise enjoyable book: a cartoon villain in a series that usually has more sympathetic bad guys. Otherwise, it is a fine addition to a fine series.

The Emperor’s Soul

Brandon Sanderson

I didn’t really believe that Sanderson could tell a complete story in this small amount of space. The Alloy of Law, which I liked a whole lot, was not a complete story but an opening chapter. The Emperor’s Soul is not even half the length of that book, but it is just as enjoyable and more complete. Sanderson lays out an intriguing magic system, giving the reader a crash course in its mechanics over the one hundred or so pages. At the same time he tells a tale around three principle characters: Shai, an artist in the story’s magic system, Gaotona, one of her captors who needs her skills and the Emperor whose soul must be repaired after a failed assassination attempt. While there isn’t space to give them more than the illusion of depth, those three characters are all very human. The Emperor’s Soul is as complex and enjoyable as its space allows.

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen

This is the last of Austen’s works for me to read, and it is easily the least. It fails largely because its protagonist, Fanny, is a passive, wet-blanket. She doesn’t really do anything. She watches and judges her friends and companions, but doesn’t try to curb their sometime excessive behavior. She gains the affections of the trifling Henry due to her pliable disdain for him. She is too timid to just tell him what she thinks and knows about him. He, of course, won’t take a hint since he believes her hesitation is due to timidity. While there are glimmers of what makes Austen’s other novels so enjoyable, Mansfield Park is largely as dull as its protagonist. There is no reason to read this when one could read, or reread, Pride and Prejudice or Emma instead. They are both multiple times more enjoyable.

That is all for this month. I think I am still going to hit my goal of fifty for the year, especially if I include all the crappy ebooks I read that I didn’t cover here.