Books in January

Let's start with books and hit the movies in a few days. This is by far the shorter list, as I only read 6 books and 3 of them were graphic novels (in my house they count as books).

First off, the graphic novels. They were all Hellboy. The Chained Coffin and Others, The Right Hand of Doom, and Conqueror Worm. In a turnabout of my usual order, I actually saw the Hellboy movie before I had read any of the comics. And I loved it; it's still one of my favorite comic adaptions. It has darkness and heart. The fact that I still prefer the movie to the comic is more of a sense of loyalty to my first exposure, I think. I'm geeked to see Hellboy 2 and am very, very geeked that Guillermo del Toro has been picked to direct The Hobbit plus sequel (or whatever that second film is supposed to be).

On to the three "proper" novels. The first, The Amber Spyglass was really mostly read in December. But I read the last 30 pages in January so it falls here. What actually happened in the end was the subject of a longlasting squabble around these parts. There is a certain scene written with a certain obliquity, and someone else in this house is convinced it's not at all oblique, that a certain thing definitely did happen. I'm of the sense that it is in fact intentionally oblique, but even so what he is certain happened most probably did not. Because it's just not terribly romantic when you're 12. That's probably a spoiler there; I'll leave it at that. I didn't emotionally engage in these books as much as others did. Very well written, but not having been raised in a hard core Christian environment, I just don't have the strong urge to rebel against its dogma that others do, I guess.

I also read The Android's Dream by John Scalzi, which I enjoyed immensely. I like his take on how politics and governments actually work. Provocative and humorous.

(In December I read The Sagan Diary, which is of novella-length but not really of story structure. It's more a series of ruminations of Jane Sagan, a character from the Old Man's War books. It's short - I read it in an afternoon - and probably not to everyone's taste; as I said, it's not properly a story. But I really liked it. Particularly the chapter on words, and the other on sex.)

The last book I read was my plunge back into Heinlein: Farnham's Freehold. I like the story and the ideas, but the story desperately needed a different POV. I would have loved to see a chapter told from his wife's POV to turn the rest of the story on its head (like the Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses, say. You've been in Leopold's head all book, Molly provides an entirely new way of seeing him). As it is, we have only Farnham's way of seeing things. Barbara gets a few chapters, but she's such a Farnham yes-man she just made me more irritated. Of course this was also the problem I always had with Ayn Rand. The people with opposing view points are always idiots and the heroes never suffer from self-doubt. So I didn't really enjoy Farnham's Freehold, but it did provide me with a handy new nickname for my husband when he gets all bossy. And no one was spanked or threatened with spankings. Always a plus.