Over the past few months, I’ve actually read honest-to-god novels. This flourishing of fiction is a departure from what I’ve tended to read over the past few years: a steady stream of the NY Times, the Economist, a miscellany of periodicals, the occasional history book. Yes, there were works of fiction in there, but they tended to be trashy science fiction novels or trashy science fiction short story collections, but it’s rare that I read more that couple in a row.
The odd thing about the recent set of books is that they’re ones I had read a long time ago, or should have read a long time ago, and I’m seeing these in different ways. Yes, the books from my youth are science fiction and fantasy books, but they are classics; they’ll be read decades from now, whereas the books I had been reading will be forever out of print in a few years.
Most recently, I read Dune for the first time. It’s a classic of science fiction. Why didn’t I read this when I was fifteen instead of wasting much of my time reading Conan stories? I guess the Conan stories point towards the reason: I had tended to read fantasy, and, though I had read much Asimov and Clark, I had never gotten around to Herbert before I starting reading other things.
Dune is fantastic, living up to all the press on the back cover of my copy, picked up years ago at B. Dalton’s (remember them?). Reading it now, there are inconsistencies that I may not have noticed if I had read it in my youth (daggers in a space-faring civilization? advanced manufacturing in the desert? the abruptness of the ending?), and there are spooky overtones that would have been merely exoticisms as late as a decade ago, because of Dune’s Islamic flavor and visions of a universal jihad. But, despite this, Dune is fantastic. I have Dune Messiah on order. I’m under the impression that the second book is more a coda to the first one, and doesn’t stand on its own.
Just prior to Dune, I re-read the Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. The first three books were as how I remembered them: young people’s adventures (even more obviously so, now that I’m no longer around the age of the characters), wonderfully written with touches of epic and mystery. Themes of morality and responsibility, which I probably didn’t pay much attention to when I first read these books, are clearer now, and add great depth to these slim books.
Tehanu was a revelation. I know I read it when it first came out, but apparently have no memory of it, none at all. I think I might have been disappointed with it, prehaps blotting it out of my mind: it’s so different from the first three books, and is an old people’s story. But now, the themes of regret, decline and passing are ideas for which I have a better appreciation. It’s a wonderful book, and fully worthy of standing with its predecessors, no matter how different it is. I was very pleased to find that Le Guin has written two more Earthsea books — a collection of short stories and a novel. As with Dune, I’ve ordered the next book. The novel is out in hardcovere, but I’ll wait for the paperback early next year.
Going a couple of weeks further back, I was re-reading Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; the movie was coming out, and I had read it in high school, for my Gothic literature English elective (unlike most high school grads, I didn’t read The Great Gatsby until much, much later). This was before The Silence of the Lambs was a novel, much less Anthony Hopkins’s rocket to fame. It was much better than the movie. Francis’s story is far more detailed and understandable in the book, as usual. The major change was the role Lecter played: in the novel, he as more a symbol of the possible evil that may lurk in Graham, and not as the apparently source of Graham’s ideas. The intuitive Graham of the novel was far more interesting.
The starting point for my past few months’ reading was Harry Potter. I read the first one on a whim, and liked it a lot. It’s a kid’s book, but it was entertaining. And the series simply got better, acquiring depth and darkness with each book so that it wasn’t quite a kid’s book anymore, up to the fourth one, which ends in a truly “ah! where’s the next book!” cliffhanger (but not a cliffhanger in the classical sense of, say, having Harry clinging by his fingernails to a ledge as Voldemort aims his wand, but close to what we saw at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, where the pathways into the future are many and varied, and shrouded in darkness, and you want to see where these pathways lead). Harry Potter is something I would have read in my youth, if it had been available. I’m envious of the youngsters who read it today — they’ll have their unclouded visions of the books, and may come back to them decades from now to see them with older eyes.
I had came back to Earthsea after this bit of literary bulimia with Harry Potter. I think I went on the Harry Potter newsgroup to look for information on the fifth book, hoping that Rowling had be chained to her desk to get it out sooner (alas, I found out the rest of the world was waiting in agony for number five), and ran across the usual which-is-better discussions, with Potter, Lord of the Rings, and, memories flooding back, Earthsea. Rowling isn’t as good a writer as Le Guin (who is?), and the Potter themes of valor, loyalty and friendship aren’t quite in the same league as Ged’s encounter with the shadow of his death, but the Potterverse is fun, and certainly in my case, it lead to me reading more, as good books should.
As a footnote, I read most of these on my Treo. Electronic books are the future: I carried all of Potter, Earthsea and Red Dragon in something not much bigger than a Motorola StarTac, which was the epitome of small cell phones a few years ago. The screen isn’t as good as the gorgeous screens on the Sony Clie PDAs, but it was serviceable. Of course, these aren’t official distributions of these books, but I like to justify my downloads with the fact that I either owned the paperbacks (albeit they’re at my parents’ house in Bayside) or could borrow them easily. I read Dune in paperback (which I had lying around for many years), mainly because of the complexities of the names: there’s no guarantee that the home-brew OCR job would have caught all the exotic spellings in a consistent way.
