"Dracula" by Bram Stoker

I do wish there was more horror that was also Christian fiction. I do occasionally enjoy a spot of horror fiction, and I feel like also being Christian fiction would put a damper on anything too outright scary. Which is good, because I like to sleep at night.

But! Dracula exists. It's exactly the sort of horror that I like. It's suspenseful, it's spooky, and it's not going to keep me up at night from how horrifying it is. (Horror has occasionally been known to do that to me, as proven when I first stumbled onto a small piece of SCP Foundation several years ago.)

It's honestly impressive how well the suspense is done. I hadn't read the actual book before, but I'd read the Manga Classics version, so I knew the basic plot. And yet, the sense of impending doom and "something is very wrong here" still gripped me throughout the opening arc of the book. Also I practically inhaled the last forty pages or so, which should tell you something.

The afterword in the edition I read points out that the titular vampire is basically the embodiment of everything Victorian society was afraid of (but also secretly fascinated with because humans are like that). And, yeah, he really is.

I think that the "What if we just shot him?" mentality would do wonders for a lot of other horror fiction. Granted, most of the horror fiction I read is for kids and thus doesn't make a lot of sense, but still. Having the idea to try defeating the horror monster by sheer force of arms makes your protagonists look competent, and if it doesn't end up working, if you handle it right it can make the horror monster even scarier. (If you don't handle it right, you end up just looking like "oh niuuu the bad guys are so scary how can we possibly fight them?" and killing suspension of disbelief.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence, blood (this is the archetypal vampire novel), and some suggestive themes. And also for Renfield.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I wonder how the book would have gone had Jonathan succeeded in bonking Dracula with a shovel.)

"Carry On, Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse

I read this instead of reading some dystopian YA fiction, because I wanted something less depressing and more fun. Carry On, Jeeves did not disappoint. It's about as far from dystopian YA as it's possible to get.

This is a collection of ten (ten? *checks* yes, ten) short stories, most of which have the basic plot of "Bertie Wooster or one of his friends gets into a scrape, and Jeeves gets them out of it." The stories are:

"Jeeves Takes Charge", which details the first meeting between Bertie Wooster and his inimitably competent gentleman's gentleman Jeeves. It wasn't the first story written, but as far as I know it's the first one chronologically.

"The Artistic Career of Corky", which features the memorable phrase |"The Adventures of Baby Blobbs"|. (Spoilered to avoid spoiling the joke, which is best experienced out of the blue for the first time.)

"Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest", "Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg", and "The Aunt and the Sluggard", three fairly normal stories of the "Bertie's-friend-is-in-the-soup-and-Jeeves-gets-him-out-of-it" type.

"The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy", one of the few times it is revealed that |Jeeves did not simply spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, and in fact does have relatives|.

"Without the Option" and "Fixing it for Freddie", two instances of the "Bertie-is-in-the-soup" type of story.

"Clustering Round Young Bingo", one which features the recurring characters of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia and her French cook Anatole. Possibly the first one with them, but also possibly not, because these weren't written in any particular order.

And finally, "Bertie Changes His Mind", the only Jeeves and Wooster story ever to be narrated by Jeeves. It is exactly like what one would expect from something starring him.

Despite my general dislike for stories about people getting into trouble, I can't help but like P. G. Wodehouse books. Perhaps because you always know, reading them, that no matter how deep in the soup anyone is, Jeeves will somehow get them out again. He will also prevail over Bertie's occasionally atrocious fashion sense.

Jonathan Cecil, who did most of the audiobooks, is forever enshrined in my head as the voice for all of these characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I deeply regret that I couldn't say "Roderick Spode" anywhere in this review. This is for the simple reason that he's not in the book.)

Mini-Reviews 19: Remaining Quest Objectives

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I can see why this is such a popular book. I mean, it kept me interested while I was sleep-deprived on an airplane, and that is no mean feat.

Treasure Island doesn't use all the pirate tropes, it started all the pirate tropes.

My mom reviewed this, and this mini-review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for reckless violence.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, classics, pirates, rated E10+

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I didn't enjoy reading this, and I think the reason for that is twofold: A) I'm too old for it, and B) it was meant to be read aloud.

This mini-review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. It's meant to be read aloud to children.

2 stars. Star ratings are a subjective measure of how much I liked a book, not a more objective measure of how good a book is, and I didn't enjoy reading this.

Tags for this one: 2-star, classics, rated E, talking animals

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

Honestly, I like this better now that I'm older. When I was younger, I found the book too tense, but I think it's just right for me now. Also it's about a mouse, so that's a definite plus in my opinion (I am, after all, the person who named his blog "Sam the Library Mouse").

I really enjoyed how the toy motorcycle works. You make it go by making motorcycle noises. It's just such a fun explanation. |And it's made even better by the toy ambulance, which shows up later in the book, being powered by making ambulance noises.|

This mini-review, too, is part of my first completed quest. Hence the title of the collection.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, rated E, talking animals

(Endnote: Oddly enough, all three of these books have prominently yellow covers.)

"Pinocchio" by Carlo Collodi

This book is odd.

I thought, from its reputation, that it was written sometime in the 1700s. It wasn't. It was written, and is set, in the 1880s. But it seems older. It's also shorter than I expected; I thought it was going to be really long and take me forever to read, and I was wrong about that.

Pinocchio (which I always want to spell Pinnochio, with two N's and one C) is one of those morality stories that don't even bother to stop just short of hitting you over the head with their moral lessons. It hammers home its point of "boys should be good and not lazy or disobedient" with what may as well be an actual hammer. And also with some really strange situations -- Pinocchio's entire school class going to the Land of Toys for five months and then spontaneously transforming into donkeys comes to mind. As I said, this book is odd.

Early on in the story, Pinocchio visits the Inn of the Red Lobster. I can only assume that they have good biscuits there.

For all that "Pinocchio's nose gets longer whenever he tells a lie" is what everyone thinks of when they hear "Pinocchio", that's not actually a major part of the book. It's in a grand total of one scene. The getting-eaten-by-a-giant-shark, however, is a more major part of the book.

Pinocchio does get better, eventually, but it takes being put into a situation where getting better is literally his only option. It also takes him almost the entire book before he gets put into that situation, so for most of the book, despite his efforts (of varying sincerity) to get better, he keeps being lured away or presented with an easy way out. Which makes him slightly annoying to read.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being weird. There's bits of it that are honestly creepy if you think about them for long enough.

3 stars. 

Favorite lines:

    "I am the ghost of the Talking Cricket."

    Page I-haven't-the-faintest-idea-because-I-read-this-on-Project-Gutenberg-and-it-was-just-one-long-text-file-with-no-page-breaks. It's said by the ghost of the Talking Cricket, and it greatly amused me for some reason. I'm not sure why.

(Endnote: Sadly, my endnote was swallowed by the Terrible Shark.)

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain

First, I would like to say that all the written-out dialect does get easier to read eventually. A little easier. But you still do have to translate things like "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place" into "I was almost to the foot of the island before I found a good place" in your head, which can get rather tedious.

Second, I would like to make another note about the racial slurs. Yes, they're in there. Yes, there are more of them than there were in Tom Sawyer. In modern times, we shouldn't say them; they shouldn't have said them back then either. However, the book was written in a time when they were commonly used, and set in a time when they were even more commonly used, so it wouldn't make sense for people not to use them.

And also! It should be obvious to anyone who's read it that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply anti-slavery book. As my mom said in her review of the Manga Classics version, the racial slurs are in there for a purpose: "to show the cruel thoughtlessness of racism." That said, they are offensive to black people today (and almost certainly were back then as well), so let the reader be aware.

This concludes my note about the racial slurs. Now we can get to the rest of the review.

I wish we hadn't spend quite so long with the king and the duke. Really I wish we hadn't spend any time with them, but if we had to, I'd rather it have just been a couple chapters. They annoyed me. I'm pretty sure they annoy everyone.

I do like Huckleberry Finn as a narrator. I just... like how he narrates, and I like him as a character. He's an oddly endearing combination of cynical and innocent.

The ending, which can be described as "Tom Sawyer tries to turn this into an adventure novel while everyone else stands there looking bewildered," was one of my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer clearly knows that Jim |has already been freed|, but he can't resist the temptation to make rescuing him as dramatic as possible. Meanwhile, Huckleberry is taking this seriously, and being increasingly confused as to why Tom wants to do things like saw through the table leg holding Jim's ankle chain when it would be much easier to just lift the table and take the chain off. That, I think, is what really sold me on Huckleberry Finn as a character.

However, I suspect that if I hadn't known beforehand how the ending went, I'd have liked it a lot less.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for some violence and all the racial slurs. It would be a good thing for a child to read with parental guidance, so the parent can explain things to them.

3 stars. I liked the ending, but the ending being good does not, in my mind, outweigh the chore that is reading the rest of the book.

Favorite lines:

    ...and I'll think of you a many and a many a time, and I'll pray for you, too!' -- and she was gone.

    Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size.

    Page 200.

(Endnote: Despite Tom's insistence to the contrary, Sid does not appear in this.)

"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift

Did you know that this book doesn't actually end when Gulliver leaves Lilliput?

Well, it doesn't. Lilliput (the land of the tiny people) is just Part 1, and there are three others. I suspect that Lilliput may be the famous one because by the time most people get through it, they've had about enough Gulliver's Travels for one lifetime.

(Also, the Lilliputians are supposed to be like six inches tall, so they're usually drawn much smaller than they're acutally supposed to be.)

Part 2 is in Brobdingnag, which is the opposite of Lilliput: it's full of giants. Their society is apparently so much more perfect than 1700s England that Jonathan Swift (through Gulliver) feels the need to spend multiple chapters expounding upon this.

Part 3 doesn't confine itself to one fictional society, instead moving rapidly (for this book, at least) through the following:

-Laputa, an island city-state (of normal-sized people!) that flies using a giant magnet. They're good at astronomy and geometry, and almost nothing else.

-Balnibarbi, Laputa's vassal state. They aren't even good at astronomy or geometry. They are in fact an incredibly obvious satire of 1700s science, hence the utterly ridiculous science projects they get up to.

-Glubbdubdrib, an island with magicians (the kind who summon ghosts). Gulliver spends a while talking to the ghosts of random famous dead people, and we get to see Jonathan Swift fanboy over Brutus for a few paragraphs.

-Luggnagg, the most normal of the made-up islands. Its only quirk is that it has people who don't die of old age, but they do age normally so that's not as awesome as you (or Gulliver) might think.

-And finally, Japan, which is literally just Japan. We spend like one chapter there.

And Part 4 involves Gulliver's journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms. It doesn't have an actual name, it's just called the land of the Houyhnhnms. In this land, horses (also known as Houyhnhnms) are sentient and humans (also known as Yahoos) aren't. We spend frankly too much time lampooning modern 1700s European society and comparing it to the much more perfect and truly beautiful utopian society of the Houyhnhnms, and using Yahoos as stand-ins for all the vices Jonathan Swift thinks are ruining the world.

If you ever wondered where the term Yahoo comes from, look no further. It's from this. 

Gulliver's Travels is occasionally oddly prescient (among other things, it did predict magnetic levitation and the moons of Mars), and it should be cut a bit of slack for being one of the first books about entirely made-up places and societies. However, it's also long and mostly rather boring. The biting social satire was mildly interesting in Lilliput, and got increasingly dull with each subsequent new land full of people who symbolize what Jonathan Swift doesn't like.

Let no-one say that nobody ever goes to the bathroom in books, for in this one, people do indeed go to the bathroom. Let no-one also say that said bathroom-going is a point in this book's favor.

I should probably also mention that this Book is written in the older Style of the English Language, wherein all Nouns are begun with capital Letters (as German Nouns are in this Age), and all foreign Words and most proper Nouns are set in Italics. That Style took me some Time before I acclimated to its Difference from the Style of the modern Day.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: I think T15+ for crude humor, violence, sexual references, and nudity (including one rather bizarre section where {T15+ a bunch of Brobdingnag women use Gulliver as a sort of pseudo-sex-toy}). If that section weren't in there, it would probably be T.

2 stars. It's not that the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun, but... actually, the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun. I'm glad to be done with it. I'm also confused as to why this is on a puzzle of children's books (from which I took my first completed quest), because it gets increasingly less appropriate-for-children after we leave Lilliput. Maybe the people who designed the puzzle didn't realize that the Lilliput sections, which are reasonably family-friendly, weren't the entire book.

(Endnote: I shall now say "Houyhnhnm" and "Yahoo" several times until they lose all meaning.)

"The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien

One does not simply review The Hobbit.

I'm serious. You read it, you nod and you're like "oh, yup, that was a really good book," and then you go on your way. Nowhere in there does "reviewing" factor into it, because honestly, what would you even say?

Apparently, this.

I liked it reasonably well, although sometimes the narration style (with occasional asides of "of course, if he had known this, he would have...") got on my nerves. But as we later learn in Lord of the Rings that this is originally told by Bilbo as a story to small children, it does kind of fit.

Smaug is the best dragon. (He agrees with me on that point.) He's arrogant and powerful and terrifying and dramatic, and most importantly, he's villainous. All fictional dragons should aspire to be Smaug.

As it turns out, one also does not simply review The Hobbit because one does not have much to say about it.

My mom reviewed this, twice (first review, second review). This review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and giant spiders.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Most of this book is actually based on a much older text by someone named Bilbo Baggins.)

"The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I actually rather like The Secret Garden.

That may seem a tad weird coming from me, because I don't usually like slice-of-life or slice-of-life-adjacent things. However, most of the reason for my dislike of such things comes from the fact that I don't often care about the lives of the random people they revolve around. And I actually do care about Mary Lennox; she's a character I like to read about. The same goes for Dickon. I care less about Colin and his dad, but even without them it's still two characters who do interest me from the start, which is two more than most slice-of-life or slice-of-life-adjacent books can boast.

Having said that, I will now also say that I think the first half-ish of the book is better. The second half is where the kids (mostly Colin, but the other two as well) decide that Magic is a thing that exists (and must be capitalized). I entirely forgot about that, probably because I like the first half better.

To be entirely honest, I don't have much else to say. (Although I realize, writing this, that the previous two paragraphs were written under the assumption that you already know what happens in the book. If not, I'll take a stab at clearing it up a bit for you: Mary Lennox is the protagonist. Colin, Dickon, and Colin's dad are not the protagonist.)

Colin's dad is named Archibald. I know his last name is actually Craven, but my brain insists it is in fact Asparagus.

My mom reviewed this. Also, this review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E, probably.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This should not be confused with "The Secret Garden," by G. K. Chesterton, which I have also reviewed.)

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain

This review was definitely not written by a bunch of random other bloggers who I tricked into thinking it was a great privilege.

Does anyone remember Sid? I didn't. He's just so eminently forgettable next to Tom. So much so, in fact, that I forgot about him again between the middle and the end of the book. 

This book is full of little bits that remind me of myself at that age. Coming up with elaborate fake battles, falling into the depths of despair then getting right back out when something new happens, bits of aimless trolling... It's good to know that the vibes of being an eleven-ish-year-old boy haven't changed much since the 1830s. (I know this was written in 1876, but it's set in the 1830s.)

Also, getting into trouble. I have never liked getting into trouble, and thus have also never liked reading about people who do. So Tom Sawyer, who purposely does stuff he's not supposed to and then gets into trouble for it, is initially not very fun for me to read about.

But he's one of the rare characters who annoys me to start with and then gets less annoying as the book progresses. He proves he can take things seriously if needed, and there is a good heart in him. It's just buried under a lot of antics and a conviction that he is most definitely the coolest person around.

Sigh. Okay. Brief note about the racial slurs. Black people get called "negroes," among other things, in this book. In modern times, we shouldn't say that; they shouldn't have said that back then either. However, this book was written and is set when that was what they were called. Yes, it's offensive to modern people, and it was offensive back then too; however, it's also period-correct, as we know because it was written by a person in that period. I'm not saying it's good that people are saying slurs, but it honestly wouldn't make sense if they weren't; while not good, it was widespread at the time. This concludes my brief note about the racial slurs, which is also the longest paragraph in the review.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scariness and some mild violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Shenanigans! Many shenanigans are had in this book. I wanted to use that word in the body of the review, but couldn't find a good place for it, so now it's in the endnote.)

Mini-Reviews 17: Again

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

My mom reviewed this, here. Go there for some actual thoughts on the book.

I honestly wouldn't have done even this utter placeholder of a mini-review normally. However, this (sad excuse for a) review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, classics, junior fiction, magical realism, rated E10+

Quaint Creatures by Andrew D. Meredith

This is a book about a veterinarian in what's basically a D&D world. It's quite fun and I wish it were a series so I could read more of it.

I think it balances the slice-of-life aspect with the plot quite well. That, however, is my personal opinion; other people might think it needs more plot or more slice-of-life.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It could be a reasonably good videogame; I'd play it.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, fantasy, rated E10+, slice-of-life

The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray by E. Latimer

This book involves (posthumously) Dorian Gray, of The Picture of Dorian Gray fame. That would be a spoiler, but come on, the book's about spooky magic paintings and the protagonist's last name is Gray.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for scary scenes and {T15+ implied past homosexuality, thanks to the subject matter involving Oscar Wilde. It's pretty veiled, and if you didn't know about Wilde you probably wouldn't notice it, but it's there and it bugged me. It was also kind of sprung on you near the end, so I'd already read most of the book before I noticed.}

1 star. Honestly I probably should have quit reading it, but I wanted to know how it ended. It's rather a shame about the above-mentioned redactedness, because Bryony herself could have been quite a compelling protagonist.

Tags for this one: 1-star, magical realism, rated T15+

(Endnote: Zac Efron is in none of these books.)

"Prince Caspian" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, book 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia, no matter what number it says on the cover.

Now that I'm doing the whole series, I should probably explain the thing about the reading order. Basically, there are two different schools of thought regarding the proper order to read the Narnia books in, and they are a matter of some debate.

The one most collections use is the internal chronological order, namely "The Magician's Nephew / The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / The Horse and His Boy / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Silver Chair / The Last Battle." There are several problems with that one, most notably that if you haven't read any of the other books, The Magician's Nephew is hard to understand and kind of boring.

The other one is the publication order, which goes in "2 4 5 3 6 1 7" or "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy / The Silver Chair / The Magician's Nephew / The Last Battle." That's the order people following the books for the first time would have read them in, it's the order in which Lewis wrote them, and while it doesn't get rid of the continuity errors it makes them less jarring. This one is the order I personally prefer, and the one I'll be doing this review series in.

(Wait, I just ended a sentence with a preposition! *cue screams of horror*)

Anyway, enough minutae. Time to talk about the actual book.

I'm not sure it's actually an allegory, unlike the first one. If you have any idea what (if anything) it's supposed to be allegorizing, please let me know, because I don't.

Here we are introduced to the Telmarines, who weren't originally in Narnia. They're actually pirates who came through a portal to Narnia "a long time ago", and yet somehow arrived in the 1300ish years between the first book and this one... time in Narnia is weird, man. We also have our first mention of the country of Calormen, which won't properly show up until The Horse and His Boy.

There's a bit in this where some side characters show up and attempt to summon the White Witch to get rid of the evil king. The character who introduces them uses the logic of "any port in a storm and we're losing pretty bad right now, plus she might not have been as bad as the legends make her out to be, right?", while the characters doing the summoning use the logic of "haha we're evil." They get smacked down pretty much instantly in the book, but in the movie version they partially succeed; I mostly mentioned this so I could point out how good a job the special effects people did at making that scene look intrinsically wrong.

You can see Lewis fleshing out the lore as you get farther along in the series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. There actually was a videogame of the movie of the book; it was rated T and apparently wasn't very good. I think it could be possible to make a good videogame of this, though I'm not sure who you'd play as (maybe a Lego The Hobbit-like system of swapping between characters?) and a fairly significant chunk of the book would probably have to be reduced to cutscenes.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like," said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.

    Page 144.

(Endnote: I can neither confirm nor deny that the title character is named after the Caspian Sea. Nothing I can find has a definitive answer.)

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C. S. Lewis

This is another one of those books so classic it feels weird to review them. Like, sure I've *read* Pride and Prejudice, but I'm not going to review it.

Except I have this lovely thing called my first completed quest (which wasn't really ongoing for a while but now it is again), and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe happens to be part of it. So... here we go.

Again, this is so classic that pretty much everyone knows the basic story (and if you don't, read the book, it's good and you'll suddenly get a lot of references). The Pevensie children go through a wardrobe into Narnia and go on an epic Aslan-assisted quest to stop the White Witch; also it's an allegory for Jesus. In this review I'm going to assume everybody knows the basic story and just expound at length about minutae.

Minutae, I choose you!

With 90% certainty C. S. Lewis didn't actually intend to make a whole series out of this. It's not like Tolkien, who I'm pretty sure had a mostly complete picture of the Legendarium's lore in his head even before he finished writing The Hobbit; there's bits of the lore in this that don't quite mesh with the rest of it, particularly The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew.

With The Horse and His Boy, I ask you: What's going on in Archenland and Calormen while all this is going on? The White Witch's paranoia about humans and surprised reaction to the Pevensies showing up would be kind of weird if she had two entire nations of humans within army-sending distance of Narnia. So I'm going to guess that Lewis hadn't come up with Calormen or Archenland when he wrote this one.

(Actually I do have a diegetic theory about what's going on with those two countries, and it boils down to: She's waging a border war with Archenland, and she and Tash [the evil god of Calormen] have a mutual thing where they stay the heck away from each other because neither is sure who'd win if they fought. That would explain why Archenland has a reasonably good standing army despite not having been invaded by Calormen for a while, explain why Calormen the Imperialist hasn't invaded Narnia already, and provide a reason other than "sheer overpowering paranoia" for why the White Which has maintained an anti-human police force all this time despite the Pevensies being the first humans to enter by portal since The Magician's Nephew.)

(Granted, I haven't read The Horse and His Boy in a while, so I may be remembering stuff wrong and have to revise my theory when I reread that one. Feel free to poke holes in it.)

The discrepancies with The Magician's Nephew are mostly to do with lore on the White Witch herself; her Magician's Nephew origin as Deplorable-Word-using Empress of Charn conflicts with Mr. Beaver's exposition of her origins here. My diegetic theory for that problem is that Mr. Beaver was just mistaken about it.

But enough about lore discrepancies.

Aside from being famous for, y'know, being Narnia, this book is also famous for being an allegory for Jesus. Unlike many allegories (coughPilgrim'sProgresscough), it can stand on its own merits as its own story without needing "Look at me I'm an allegory" to carry it. Not everything in it represents something, it's actually pretty light-handed as allegories go. It hits that sweet spot between the two extremes of "so subtle as to be unnoticeable" and "IN YOUR FACE".

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most obviously allegorical of all the Narnia books (except, perhaps, The Last Battle). You can tell what it's representing, whereas with some of the others I honestly have no idea if they even are allegories or if they're just their own books.

 

Lewis is quite insistent in the early parts of this that You Should Never Ever Shut Yourself Inside A Wardrobe. I assume this is to prevent adventurous children from deciding to imitate the book, shutting themselves inside wardrobes, and getting stuck.

 

Edmund is a pretty interesting character because his bad deeds and his bad personality traits are almost completely divorced from each other. He's a jerk, but he doesn't betray his siblings because he's a jerk, he betrays his siblings because the White Witch makes him.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

4 stars.  

(Endnote: I may or may not ever review the rest of this series. If I did there would probably be a lot less minutae.)

"Death on the Nile" by Agatha Christie

This book takes place on a cruise ship. I read it when I did so I could read (part of) it while I was on a cruise ship. We weren't on the Nile River, but still.

Pretty sure many people know the basic plot. A bunch of people are on a Nile cruise, including two newlyweds on honeymoon. One of them gets murdered and the other one gets shot in the leg, and the murderer would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids that meddling Hercule Poirot.

I watched the 1978 movie version a few years ago (yay Peter Ustinov!), so I was a proud member of the ranks of people who already know the plot by the time I read this. This time around, I was struck by how much I actually liked |the murderer (well one of them)|, Jacqueline de Bellefort.

 

(Mildly spoilery text from here on out; I'll redact anything too incriminating, but you might be able to pick up on some stuff from the unredacted bits.)

 

She's a genuinely intelligent and funny person, and she has |the perfect motive for the murder... but she's still broken up about it. Granted, it's possible she's mostly faking, and she actually did conspire to murder, but it's hard not to feel sorry for her in the early pa|rts when there hasn't been any murdering yet|. Poirot also clearly recognizes |she's trending that way|, and |tries to talk her out of it| several times.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for murder and some bad language.

 

4 stars.  

(Endnote: This has nothing to do with Death from Discworld. Although that gives me a crossover idea...)

"Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott

I probably wouldn't have read this again for another decade at least if it hadn't been for my first completed quest. Yup, I've started that up again, mostly because I was running out of ideas for things to read. Maybe I'll finally make some headway on it.

This is a classic of slice-of-life, and as such, it is boring as nouns unless you care about the characters. Who did grow on me, eventually, but for the first third or so of the book, it wasn't a terribly enjoyable read.

Now, if you do care about the characters, it's pretty good. Once I got past the first third of the book and got invested in these people's lives, the book went pretty fast.

Oh, and did you know |Beth| doesn't die in this? That's actually in the sequel, also titled Little Women (or Good Wives in Britain), which usually gets smushed together with this one in a single volume. Faced with the daunting prospect of this already long book being twice as long, I decided to just go with the first one.

In case you hadn't guessed, this review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable. Old books are nice like that.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I was three days ago years old [when I wrote this post versus when I published it] when I realized I didn't have a slice-of-life tag on this blog and should probably make one.)

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft

Behold, Baby's First Lovecraftian Horror.

 

I realized early on that most of the chapters in this can be summed up in a sentence apiece; behold my best efforts at doing that.

 

Chapter 1: Dunwich is spooky because spooky things happened there.

Chapter 2: A weird lady has a very ugly and creepily mature baby.

Chapter 3: Weird lady, her insane grandfather, and the creepily mature baby do spooky offscreen stuff in their house.

Chapter 4: The creepily mature baby becomes an eight-foot-tall creepily mature toddler.

Chapter 5: The evil kid discovers the Necronomicon and a professor tries to stop him.

Chapter 6: The evil kid says an eldritch ritual and sort of dissolves.

Chapter 7: A giant invisible monster terrorizes Dunwich.

Chapter 8: Three professors translate the evil kid's equally evil journal and devise a plan to stop his plans.

Chapter 9: The three professors arrive in Dunwich and start trying to find the monster.

Chapter 10: The professors yeet the monster out of realspace with an eldritch ritual.

 

The book could have had the first three to four chapters condensed into one without much detracting from the story, aside from making it a bit less atmospheric.

 

The eldritch rituals used by both the three professors and the evil kid feature Lovecraft's trademark unpronounceability. I don't have much to say about that, other than just pointing it out.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some swearing and creepiness (particularly the somewhat overdramatic description of what the giant invisible monster looks like when it's temporarily rendered visible, which is pretty disturbing when visually represented).

 

3 stars. I have now taken a small nibble of this genre, and it's not really to my taste. That said, the overall quality of the story wasn't terrible.

 

(Endnote: This is the only rendering of the cover I could easily find that doesn't have an artist's picture of the titular horror on it.)

"The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells

Ah yes, ye (actually þe) olde 19th-century technobabble. (There was some in The Time Machine too, but that one was prescient enough to sound fairly like 21st-century technobabble.)

And about the Invisible Man himself (it's always capitalized): I'm not sure whether he's a psychopath or just evil. Or possibly both. He definitely meets the criteria for psychopathy (egotism, lack of remorse and empathy, etc).

In his early experiments, he also made an invisible cat. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. As far as I know, it never actually shows up in the story aside from him mentioning it offhand, but it's fun to imagine its invisible presence at work in the narrative. (For instance, what if all the times where people trip over nothing--and it's implied to be the Invisible Man tripping them--are actually people tripping over the Invisible Cat?)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence.

3 stars. It's much less evolutiony than The Time Machine, but Invisibleguy annoyed me.

(Endnote: When I was younger, I got this book confused with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. They are not the same book, and that one sounds rather less interesting.)

"The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells

I don't know why, but, I thought this had Martians in it. It doesn't. I also thought it had evil humans who think the main character's time machine should have a poison gas button, which it also doesn't. I have no idea where I got the Martians from, but I did some poking around and it turns out there are evil humans with poison gas button opinions. Just not in the original.

Basically, for whatever reason, the abridged version I read when I was like seven (which absolutely terrified me, by the way) decided it was going to add a Cold War-esque dystopian future section featuring the main character (who's never named; he's only ever called the Time Traveller) getting interrogated about his time machine. Which includes the very memorable line from one of the interrogators, "Where's the poison gas button?!" (to which the Time Traveller inwardly speculates that, had the guy been building his own time machine, he would have included a poison gas button.) Why the adaptation people decided to do that I honestly can't fathom, but they did.

And it's not like the story isn't unsettling enough on its own. First there's the whole thing with the Eloi and the Morlocks: the Eloi are a race of childlike humanoids who live peacefully in the ruins of a previous society. The narrator surmises that they're |the descendants of humanity (H. G. Wells was pretty clearly an evolutionist), who've had medical and horticultural science advance so far that they've lost all need for things like "physical labor" or "intelligence". They're dubiously sentient and very afraid of the dark|. Meanwhile, the Morlocks are |cannibalistic, subterranean humanoids who seem to be using the Eloi as livestock, may or may not have some kind of fascination with machinery, and steal the time machine for a bit|. There's all kinds of disturbing subtext in there.

And after that, |the narrator goes to the really far future. As in, far enough that the sun has turned into a red giant, plant life is now mostly green slime, and the only animal life visible is giant screaming butterflies and some kind of giant spidery antenna-y crab thing. Then he goes even farther, to an era were the sole living being aside from himself (that we know about) is a bizarre football-shaped tentacle being, which seems to act as an ambush predator of a sort|.

The story is fully sufficiently unnerving and complete without having the Time Traveller drop into a Cold War analogue, and I decry whoever abridged the story and decided making up new parts was a good idea. For shame. If you're abridging a work, your job is to make what there is shorter and easier to understand, not to add new bits.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for spookiness and |cannibalism|.

3 stars. Too evolutiony for my taste.

(Endnote: I think this is the first time travel story, and yet it managed not to be all tropey. Maybe because the guy didn't go into the past?)

"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque

This is my final essay for that literature class. Not in the sense of a final project, more in the sense of "it's ending after this year and I won't be writing essays for it anymore." So here goes.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

 

All Quiet on the Western Front is probably the world’s most famous war novel. Set during the First World War from the perspective of a German soldier, it shows the horror and brutality of war through that soldier’s experience.

The book’s setting is spread through almost all of the First World War, from the beginning to near the end. World War One is uniquely suited as the setting for a novel which aims to demonstrate just how terrible modern warfare can be. Though all wars are, by definition, violent, the First World War saw the introduction and refinement of modern weaponry such as machine guns, poison gas, flamethrowers, and tanks, as well as the first major example of trench warfare (though earlier wars such as the American Civil War displayed rudimentary forms). This, combined with the fact that it was waged on an unprecedented (though not unparalleled) scale and led to suffering in most of the European world for soldiers and civilians alike, makes it fit well with a message of “war is horrible.” In addition, the author served in this war and based the book on his experiences, lending it increased realism.

All Quiet on the Western Front is not particularly subtle with its message. It portrays the First World War and, by extension, war in general, as horrific, and through that hammers home the point that war is bad for people and shouldn’t happen. Erich Maria Remarque wrote it specifically as an anti-war novel, as well as to showcase the widespread disillusionment and trauma of the German people after the war. This is reflected in the character arc (what there is of it) of the main character, as well as the plot.

There is no real structure to the plot of this book. The main character and narrator, Paul Baumer, wanders through the war doing what he is told and internally philosophizing about it, and the plot wanders accordingly. There are no overarching story arcs, and even the main character’s arc is confined to being rendered increasingly emotionally unstable by the toll the war takes on him. It is the side characters who provide most of what narrative there is, as readers grow familiar with them and their actions; Paul Baumer himself either omits himself and his actions from the story or simply doesn’t have much of a personality (aside from the philosophizing, that is). Their deaths are thus an emotional blow to the reader, though the impact is dulled somewhat by the narrator’s detachment and stoicism. Notably, their absence has no real impact on the tone of the story, though this does serve to illustrate Paul Baumer’s attitude of “if you ignore the bad parts, they hurt less.”

In conclusion, All Quiet on the Western Front illustrates the horrors of war through the somewhat directionless journey of Paul Baumer, a German soldier, during the First World War.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M. It's violent (often graphically), depressing, and occasionally obscene. That said, war is also all of those things.

3 stars. It's famous and respected and all, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

(Endnote: This is the first book I've rated M in the entire time I've had this blog. There are nonfiction books [mostly history books about wars] who've gotten their subject matter rated M, but their content wasn't.)