The Saxon Tales

No pics. Too many damn books. 

Books: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of The North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, Pagan Lord

Author: Bernard Cornwell

Series: Warrior Chronicles

Year published: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013

Pages: Between 350 and 400 each

Time It Took To Read: A few hours each

So, I got married. And in doing so, I forgot how much I read when my shiny Kindle came. Mainly because, to alleviate wedding stress, I re-read THE ENTIRE SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series. What a series it is! Bring on Winds of Winter.

Anyway, before I got married, I read this lot. I love the Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. They were the first fantasy books I read, back when I was about 12. They focus on the deeds of Arthur, and there is magic and Merlin and battles and angry women.

This series is pretty much the same. It covers the world of Alfred the Great, and attempts to be vaguely historically accurate. There is one major problem though. The narrator, one Uhtred of Bebbanburg is an absolute arsewipe. He's a nasty, unlikeable, cocky, vicious twonk. And whereas this is fine in some books because sometimes anti-heros are a good thing, Uhtred is not a good thing. 

As I read, I bitched, and my betrothed asked "Why are you reading them if you hate them so much?" To which the only answer was "I'm a completionist, how do you not know this yet? You don't know me at all. Maybe we shouldn't get married."

Jokes. We did. It was great. 

Book count: 35/50

Time of Contempt and Baptism of Fire

Author: Andrzej Sapkowski 

Translator: Danusia Stok
Series: The Witcher parts 2 and 3

Year published: 1995 in Polish, 2013 in English. 1996 in Polish. 2014 in English.

Pages: 352 and 352

Time It Took To Read: A day each

I didn't read Baptism of Fire in Spanish...I just couldn't find an English translation cover.

I love this series. It is a bit different, a lot awesome, and doesn't BORE. But I am fed up with Gollancz. They're taking forever to translate it (with no plans to translate the last books of the series), and the translation is roundly criticised by those who've read it in original Polish. I can't read Polish, but this series is  a damn good reason to learn. The idea that I can't finish the series because Gollancz are doing such shit translations (apparently that's the root of the publishing problems) PISSES ME OFF! 

Anyway, Geralt the Witcher has care of Ciri, who may or may not be the most important person alive in the world at that point. He is sharing her care, and protecting her with his long time love Yennefer, a sorceress of insane power. And war is brewing.

If you've played The Witcher, read the books. If you like fantasy novels, read the books. If you want to read something written with a bit more bite than your average elves/dwarves/humans saga, read the books. Just please give Gollancz a good reason to translate the last few.

Book count: 28/50

Storm Front

Author: Jim Butcher

Series: The Dresden Files, book 1

Year published: 2000

Pages: 336

Time It Took To Read: A day

 

I bloody love supernatural horror. Not the ghosty-bump-in-the-night type, because that's freaky. But wizards, vampires, demons. The Southern Vampire Mysteries (True Blood) are my favourites, but as that's now finished, I needed a new series to get into. BEHOLD, this came up on a trip to Forbidden Planet and is amazing. So much so that I've got hold of the WHOLE series already. 

Harry Dresden is a real wizard, who earns a meagre living by consulting for the police and offering a private eye service to the public. He is the only wizard in the phone book. When a horrible double murder occurs, the police (who are largely sceptical about his powers) call him in to have a look. This leads to an unfortunate series of events, in which Dresden's life is threatened repeatedly, by demons and wizards and storms. 

It's a bloody good read. Kinda trashy, but with good characters and just the sort of fantastical horror I love. Escapism at its finest.

 

And there we go. FIFTY new books read this year, with about 7 weeks to go.  I will continue blogging reviews of all the new books I read. I think my favourite was Wolf Hall.

Blood of Elves

Author: Andrzej Sapkowski 

Translator: Danusia Stok 

Series: The Witcher Saga, book 1

Year published: 1994 in Polish, 2008 in English

Pages: 314

Time It Took To Read: A day

I am really pissed off at Gollancz, who have the publishing rights to this series. I hate waiting, and after a three year delay, the second book of the series was published a few weeks ago. The next isn't due til next year. This is apparently because of legal difficulties. For gawd's sake, everyone ELSE in Europe has had translations. Get on it! Gollancz are also responsible for the fact that I have to wait A YEAR for the last True Blood book to be published in paperback. Who wants that many bloody books in hardback? They don't make you wait a year for the kindle edition!

Ahem.

Anyway, this book begins the Witcher Saga properly. The short story collections (The Last Wish, and The Sword of Destiny, which hasn't been officially translated yet) were written first, and this book refers to several incidents in these books. But it's not essential to have read the short stories first. 

The story revolves around Geralt, the witcher and his ward, Ciri. Ciri begins the story being trained as a witcher as well, but her magical ability needs a wizard's touch. This is recognised first by Triss Merigold, and later Ciri's care and training is given to Yennefer.  Meanwhile, everyone and his dog is after Ciri, for reasons that aren't completely clear in this book. 

If you've played the game, it's interesting to see Triss in a position of such weakness, and to see Yennefer at all as she's AWOL by the time the game starts. Dandilion, the bard, makes a welcome appearance as well. The descriptions of battle are among the best I've read, but this series has a gentler side as well. I really want to read the rest of the series. Would anyone like to teach me Polish? It'll probably be quicker than waiting for Gollancz to pull their finger out.

Book count: 34/50

The Magician's Apprentice

Author: Trudi Canavan

Year published: 2009

Pages: 752

Time It Took To Read: Two days

 

This book is a prequel to the Black Magician and Traitor Spy trilogies, also by Trudi Canavan, and I bought it because it looked like my sort of thing. I wanted to see if the trilogies were going to be worth my while.

It took me a couple of days to read, in the baking sun. The story starts in Kyralia, with Tessia, who wants to join the Healer's Guild with her father, but is effectively barred from joining as she's a woman. Meanwhile, Lord Dakon, the local leader, is entertaining a Sakachan lord who he neither likes nor trusts. When Tessia, Lord Dakon and the Sakachan meet, Tessia discovers she is a 'natural' magician. This is a world where magicians can train anyone who can afford it to be a magician, but are obligated by law to train 'naturals' up. Magicians rule the whole country, and also defend it from foreign magicians who are less scrupulous.

Underpinning all this is the idea that Magicians keep apprentices so they can draw power from them, and become stronger themselves. This 'higher magic' can be taken from anyone, but is considered part of the magician-apprentice bond. However, Sakachans keep countless slaves for the same purpose.

So far so interesting. The story is good, though it is written with the expectation that you've read the trilogies, even though this book is set hundreds of years prior to them. It is obvious from the way the book ends that Tessia, as well as a Sakachan woman whose story runs concurrently, becomes somehow important in the future.  I didn't feel overly invested in the characters. The Sakachan subplot, regarding a woman called Stara, comes from nowhere and seems to go nowhere, except to highlight how vile the Sakachan culture is to women in general.

There are strong feminist themes throughout.Despite it being the basis of much of the story, I felt like the magic was underdescribed. Apparently, this author writes to include a young adult audience, and I think this story would have been much better if written with more adult themes - there was no sex, and death was muted. Women are either virgins, or married to impotent/homosexual men, although promiscuity is implied. Tessia's parents are murdered and then rarely mentioned again.

I don't plan to buy anymore of Trudi Canavan's books based on this, though I do plan to get them from the library and see if they're better - certainly, reviews on Amazon suggest this is not her best work. Ultimately, I was hoping for more of a saga, especially after the brilliance of the last book I read!

Book count: 33/50

 

The Last Wish

Author: Andrzej Sapkowski 

Translator: Danusia Stok

Year published: 1993 in Polish, 2007 in English

Pages: 280

Time It Took To Read: A day

 

My boyfriend got The Witcher 2 for Christmas on Xbox. I borrowed it off him, after he said the combat system was a bit difficult, and completed it in a fairly sleepless week. It was my sort of game - swordy, some magic, traditional RPG elements and good characters. I bought this, the first collection of short stories which the games are based on, when I found out that they existed! Originally written in Polish, the books are slowly (painfully slowly) being translated into English. Only three of eight have been done so far. This is vexing. Get on it, publishers.
Geralt is a witcher and he kills monsters for money. Witchers are mutants, removed from their parents at birth and treated with hormones and poisons to make them superhuman. They use magic, but aren't exactly sorcerers. They have great alchemical skill, and a mastery of lore. Although they are mercenary, they have a strict code of honour. They are mistrusted by most of the regular population, and seen as a necessary evil by much of the elite.They are supposed to have their feelings destroyed in the process of becoming witchers, but this has not wholly happened to Geralt.

The Last Wish is a collection of loosely interlinked short stories about Geralt's adventures. There is a great deal of humour, life and warmth in the stories, as well as gore, horrendous monsters and fantastical elements. It has helped that I've played the game, and had an understanding of the subset of magic that's used in the book, but I found it a really good read regardless. If you enjoy playing RPGs in the Baldur's Gate/Elder Scrolls genre, or, indeed, have played The Witcher, I can't recommend it highly enough. It makes me wish I could read Polish so I could get them all now!

Book count: 32/50

A Dance With Dragons

Author: George R.R. Martin

Series:  A Song Of Ice and Fire, book 5

Year published: 2011

Pages: 1300, over two volumes

Time It Took To Read: Three days

 

Alas that I have finished the published books for now. Alas. I'll be dreaming of flying round on the backs of dragons for ages now.  This book picks up pretty much exactly where Feast for Crows left off, following the different paths of the multiple main characters. The first half concentrates on the action around King's Landing and the second half concentrates on the South and the wall. The two join up towards the end of the second part. 

People you think are going for the long haul die, others reappear when they shouldn't, and someone finally gets a little comeuppance. But the reason I love these books is because there is no linear action-judgement-consequence. Someone does something vile and gets off scot free. Someone else leads an apparently good life and suffers all manner of hell. Nobody is wholly good or bad (though some are wholly stupid) but it doesn't matter if what they are - if they're in the way of the story, they die.GRRM is a twisted puppet master.

Hopefully, Winds of Winter will be released next year and I won't have to writhe in expectation waiting for it for six years.

 

If you haven't read these books, and you like fantasy or sagas, and you think you'll enjoy them, try and read them all consecutively. It gives you a much better idea of who's who, family trees (the appendices help, but they're not very well written) and WHY things happen. I read the series with long gaps between books 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 and it made somewhat disjointed reading, while I tried to remember who was who. I will re-read the lot when the next one comes out.

Book count: 29/50

A Feast For Crows

 

Author: George R.R. Martin

Series:  A Song Of Ice and Fire, book 4

Year published: 2005

Pages: 778 + appendices

Time It Took To Read: Three days

Oh, Game of Thrones! Oh, George R.R. Martin! Oh, misery! Oh, death! Oh, despair!

I read the first three SoIaF  books last year, on recommendation from multiple sources. The first one took ages to get into, the second was a bit slow going, the third was a neverending, heart wrenching tale of WOE. This is similar to the third. GRRM does not pull his punches. He's not writing a fairy story. It is difficult to fathom whether anyone will get a happy ending, at this point, especially considering he's writing another two volumes of the series, and writes them on a slow timescale.

It's difficult to know where to start when describing this series. It is set in a massive, realistic world. The scope of it is enormous. The amount of central characters is huge - nobody's story is really secondary. Instead of there being one protagonist, there are loads, and they are regularly killed off. Considering most fantasy work is based around one or two characters, who you know are almost certain to survive, it can be quite jarring. GRRM will not be second guessed, as anyone who saw the recent Red Wedding episode of the show can tell you. Imagine Lord of the Rings, but with more sex, and with Frodo brutally murdered halfway to Rivendell, and you may have a bit of an idea of what kind of epic you're dealing with. I don't actually watch the TV series, because of plot differences and the fact the TV show might give away things I haven't read yet.

This book concentrates on half the characters, with a note at the end explaining that there was just too much to fit in one book, so the other half of characters are in the next volume. I don't want to tell you WHO it concentrates on because I can't remember if there's a question mark over their deaths in the first few books, but I don't think I'm giving much away when I say this book is mostly concerned with the Lannisters, the Starks and the Ironborn. There are brutal murders, plots that seem straight out of the court of Henry VIII, religion, and lots of misery. Nobody is happy, nobody is safe and there seems no end to the endless suffering in the realm. And I love it. I saved the last three books to read after my exam, partly to stop myself becoming wholly entrenched, partly to give myself a goal. I started reading this literally as soon as I got home after the exam. It can be quite difficult to follow the myriad plot threads, especially when they cross over, but there are full character lists in the appendix of each book.
I prefer A Storm of Swords to this one, but I think that's because all the characters are involved (and it was SLIGHTLY less relentlessly grim). I would've been quite pissed off had I bought A Feast for Crows when it was released and had to wait six years to find out what happens to everyone else in A Dance With Dragons. As it is, A Dance With Dragons is sitting next to me, and I'm about to start reading. SQUEE for these books. SQUEE for them, and their refusal to comply with the usual fiction tropes of a happy ending, or hope, or even a little bit of happiness. SQUEE for complicated characters! SQUEE for female characters with actual plot! SQUEE for fantasy treating its readership as intelligent adults, not teenagers, with no knowing wink!
Squee indeed.

Book Count: 28/50

Procrastinating? Moi?

So, I decided my fifty books should all be books I hadn't read before. Otherwise, there's no challenge for me. I'd just re-read the top two shelves of my bookcases and be done.
Now, thus far, this hasn't been a problem. However, with my exam looming in less than a week, I shouldn't be reading anything other than endless coursebooks about health. Health, health, health. Where everything you'd think is a good thing is actually bad, and they use big words like salutogenesis and iatrogenesis and expect you to understand and recite their  meaning verbatim (a paradigm of wellness in spite of disease, and medicine making you worse, in case you were wondering). Reading for pleasure at this point in time comes with a whopping great side order of GUILT and PROCRASTINATION. So, I've not really been doing much of it.
I've been reading magazines. Mainly the Radio Times, because I prefer reading about telly to watching it, but also cardmaking, Private Eye and food magazines, because I am crafty, snarky and greedy.
I've also been re-reading a few old favourite books. First, The Lord of The Rings because reading The Hobbit made me yearn for all that hobbity action, and elvish bollocks. Then The Pillars Of Hercules by Paul Theroux, which is a travel book about a man who meanders around the edge of the Mediterranean, carping furiously at everything. I love him. I also read French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David. She really started the food revolution in this country after rationing ended, introducing garlic as a non-terrifying foodstuff, and increasing interest in things like pasta. Her books are poetry, and her recipes all seem pretty legit. I admit, I read them for the food porn rather than as a manual.
Currently, I am reading...slyly and guiltily... Sunrise With Seamonsters by Paul Theroux, which is a collection of his journalism. It's mostly based around travel and other writers, and covers the first twenty years of his career. I'm also reading, less guiltily, The Art of Eating by M.F.K Fisher. If you have never heard of Mary Kennedy Frances Fisher, you are MISSING OUT. She was basically the US's version of Elizabeth David, waxing lyrical about French food and inspiring two post-war generations (she started writing between the World Wards) to eat better. The Art of Eating is an anthology of her first five books, and her autobiographical The Gastronomical Me is one of the best examples of food writing I've ever read. It is delicious. I am evangelising. Go read.

So, in a week, I start on the enormous pile of fantasy books waiting for me. After seeing the reaction of TV viewers to The Game Of Thrones Red Wedding, I can't wait.  And I really can't wait to get this hateful exam done... Where was I? Prevention...is it better than cure? Probably not... *sigh*

The Hobbit

For some reason, the photo uploader's down. I have the 1980 Unwin edition, with a picture of Smaug and his treasure on the front. You'll just have to imagine it!

Title: The Hobbit

Author: J.R.R Tolkien

Year published: 1951

Pages: 285

Time It Took To Read: A few hours

I first read this book in 1997, when I was 12. It was one of the set texts for English that year. Unusually for a set text, I didn't immediately develop a long term loathing of it, or it's stupid author (unlike, say, Ian McEwan), but neither did I ever have any particular need to read it again. My parents bought me Lord of the Rings for my 17th birthday, and I read it annually, even though it's now battered to hell. But The Hobbit remained a vague memory.

I went to see the film earlier this year, in a cinema an hour from my house, because we almost left it too late to catch it before it stopped showing. As it was, we were late and missed the first 15 minutes because the mines of Moria have nothing on the Leicester ring road. I joked to my boyfriend that they'd split it into three films, just to fit in the endless singing, and it would appear that I am about right on that assumption.

Anyway, seeing the film rekindled an interest in reading the book, and as my boyfriend is such a geek he can VIRTUALLY SPEAK SINDARIN, he lent me this copy. I read it over a couple of long evenings getting my children to sleep.I didn't read it to them, though I did resort to reading LOTR to my four year old when he was ill a few months ago. He pronounced it 'boring'. *sigh*

It is very much a children's book - probably ideal for 10 to 13 year olds - but it's still a good read, especially if you're acquainted with LOTR either by film or book. The plot is relatively simple compared to, say, the Silmarillion, but there's enough depth to get your teeth into. The language and dialogue are gentle and there's a lot of humour throughout. Despite the intended audience, the characters are three dimensional. There is no dichotomy of good and evil, and even the so-called good guys have moments of utter prickishness (I'm looking at you, Thorin Oakenshield).

It's an excellent introduction to Middle Earth, and the high fantasy genre in general. Go! Read!

Book count: 25/50.

The Last Four Things

Title: The Last Four Things

Author: Paul Hoffman

Series: The Left Hand Of God trilogy

Year published: 2011

Pages: 497

Time It Took To Read: Ages!

I read the first of this trilogy almost two years ago, when I was postnatal and bored. I borrowed this book off my boyfriend back in July. JULY! I started reading it to procrastinate when I was staying with him, and should have been writing an essay. I brought it back with me, and put it on a shelf and there it sat until a couple of days ago. I decided to finish it before starting any of the new beauties I got for Christmas.

Gawd, how I regret ever beginning it. The story is that a rather sociopathic teenager, Thomas Cale, is preternaturally good at combat tactics, and this unusual gift has been interpreted as the Wrath of God by the Redeemers. The Redeemers are allegorical for Roman Catholicism. so, the human(ish) Cale becomes powerful and corrupted. 

The first book of the trilogy establishes the mythology, and was incredibly slow going. This book is slightly faster paced, but sketches lightly over description, making it difficult to visualise. When I read, I have a picture in my mind of what is happening. If I cannot imagine the world, then I cannot read it properly. Instead of skipping through the words, I trip up over them. It is discombobulating.
This book manages to be a dislocating in another sense. The world is fantastical, but the placenames are not. Halfway through a long, gory battle scene, reference is made to eating fish and chips in Memphis. And boom, the spell is broken by incongruity. Every time I put the book down, I forgot everything about it when I picked it back up. Cale, and possibly Bosco are the only characters with real impact.Even Cale's two sidekicks, Vague Henri and Kleist are never fully fleshed out.
Another bugbear is the lack of rounded female characters. The ones there are exist for sex, reproduction or betrayal. Part of this is due to the religious distrust of women in general, but mostly it's a very male orientated story.

It's a shame because it is an excellent premise and could be an awesome story. The writing doesn't do it justice.