Where Star Trek Fails to Dazzle

Star Trek: Titan #4: Sword of Damocles: Titan 4 Sword of Democle by Geoffrey Thorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was okay. I enjoyed parts, just enough to finish and give it a 3.

But I was leaning 2 or DNF for a lot of it.

This is the fourth book in a spin-off of Star Trek: the Next Generation, with Riker and Troi as familiar characters, and I hoped to enjoy it. It didn't really work for me. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I had read the first books, but this is the one I found in the used bookstore, so....

I found the action very slow, based almost entirely on characters talking about what they were doing or talking about how far along they were on doing it, with almost nothing heroic or exciting taking place. Most of the action was repairing broken technology or adapting technology, but in a very static way. Titan was trapped by strange waves similar to warp technology, and a shuttle sent to the planet surface was lost (actually split up across time, somehow) and Riker believes Troi has died. On the planet and on the ship, the crew members fight to get free of the phenomenon. Bad things happen. Good guys do their best. Not everybody makes it.

If more of the characters had been familiar to me, maybe I would have cared about them, and maybe it would have been more fun. I dunno. I might try others in the series, maybe hunt up the first ones. Not feeling it right now.

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Where Constantinople Falls

The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell by Lew Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was an amazing book. Two volumes--over 1000 pages--lots of characters and settings--and it was entertaining throughout. I loved it.

These are my thoughts--bit of a jumble:

There is a sort of quirk about the book. The main character, the so-called "Prince of India" is a figure from legend known usually as the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to long life for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. He's an interesting character, a brilliant man who wants to end religious strife, who travels the world, learns languages, makes himself wealthy so that he can have access to important people, and espouses a sort of unification of religion. Though he does some awful things before the end of the novel--causing a deadly fire before helping the Turks defeat the Greeks--most of the time I found myself very sympathetic to him, particularly as he tried to get the leaders of Islam and Christianity to recognize their connection, their mutual belief in a loving god. He reads like a sort of Gandalf figure, or some other wise man who is endowed with a little supernatural ability. (He's immortal, rich, intelligent, and a capable astrologer. He's not magic, exactly, but he can do some stuff.)

From time to time, the author's overt support for Christianity comes through, rather like you find in Quo Vadis or similar novels (which I also liked, actually), but it's generally no more overt than most Regency or Victorian literature, for example. (We don't get any readings from Fordyce's sermons, thankfully. And we don't get a Jane Eyre preparing to go preach Christianity in India.) It's mostly a romance like Sir Walter Scott or maybe Dumas, with action across Arabia and Syria and, especially, Constantinople, with hidden treasures, sailing ships, war, and abducted maidens who need to be rescued.

The sultan's best friend, Mirza, the best warrior in the story, is the heart of the second half of the novel. He is a loyal fighter who was stolen from his home in Italy as a baby. He is sent to the city as a spy where he is intended in part to gather information for the invasion, but he's tasked even more with the job of watching over and protecting Irene, the beautiful cousin of the emperor. (The sultan previously traveled to her home, disguised as a storyteller, and fell in love with her, intending to marry her.) Mirza falls in love with her too and starts to rethink his identity, taking back his name and title as Count Corti. When the friends meet again, both men pledge to protect Irene, no matter the outcome of the coming war. (They honor this pledge, and in the very end the sultan marries Irene while the count returns home to the mother who never stopped searching for him, where he discovers the sultan has long since paid to rebuild their home and restore their fortunes. But that's a spoiler, so shhh.)

There are about 10 really great characters in this novel, any one of whom should have their own book. Sergius, the idealistic Russian monk, might be my favorite. Irene, the iconoclastic and stoic noblewoman, unbowed after long imprisonment, and who refuses to wear a veil as honest women were expected to do, is admirable and captivating. Lael, the young Jewish woman adopted and educated by the Prince of India, is sweet, and the wealthy Demedes, the epicurean son of a courtier who abducts her and hides her in a cell floating built in the giant underground cistern of Constantinople, is a great villain. The African servant of the Prince of India who helps Sergius find her and free her is a a cool character, too.

The novel concludes with the siege and capture of the city. It's a great retelling, stretching over many packed chapters, all given from the POVs of characters we care about. Very affecting. Very informative.

I enjoyed this from beginning to end, and even though I don't align with the author's central religious belief, I applaud his ecumenical philosophy, the one he gives mostly to the Prince of India and, in some measure, to Queen Irene and the monk Sergius. It's surprising in a novel like this, published in 1893, and I give him some credit. Lew Wallace is better known for Ben Hur, and now that I've read this one I realize I need to read that one, too.

Very good writer. Highly recommended.

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Where Kriemhild Gets Her Revenge

The Nibelungenlied by Unknown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In part, I'm rating the translation and additional material, not just the original text. I didn't love the book itself--maybe 3 stars--but the appendices and other essays at the back are really good, and I thought the translation worked fine.

Curiosity drew me to the story and carried me through to the end more than the story. Some of the action and the overall plot is interesting enough on its own, but learning something about beliefs and norms and attitudes in Europe 700 or 1000 years ago is entertaining in a different way. Also, this story (or the Norse version) inspired the Ring Cycle of Wagner, and I always kinda wondered about the original. (It must be mentioned: Wagner was a racist dickhead and inspired a whole generation of racist nazi dickheads who looked to these stories as a source of ethnic and racial pride which they turned into war crimes, and they can all burn wherever dead racists burn--but I don't think we can blame the anonymous poet who wrote this 800 years ago for their antisemitism and bigotry.)

I wondered these things: what kind of story was it really? Was it mostly a kind of fantasy with River Maidens and magic weapons? Or was it mostly military, with lots of Arthurian jousts? Or was it romance? (The answer is yes to all of those, it seems to me.) Also, what were the characters like? What was the society like? What did they value?

Supposedly based on oral traditions going back to the 5th or 6th century, written about the 12th century, it does feel a lot like King Arthur stories. Knights have a strangely aggressive code where some killing, even murder, is just shrugged at, and other killing, when it seems very reasonable under the circumstances, is treated as heinous. It creates strange conflicts, like when Rudiger, a vassal of King Etzel, is sent to fight the Burgundians near the end of the book, and he can't figure out what to do. His daughter is pledged to marry one of the party he is sent to destroy, and he himself entertained them at his castle, so he can't honorably fight them. But he is pledged to his lord and can't honorably refuse. It's a strange scene when they're all crying about having to fight each other. In general, I found the points of honor confusing, since the knights were so dishonest and unscrupulous so much of the time that it was weird to think they still considered themselves honorable men.

I'd say the fighting dominates the story, but it started as a love story about two couples (Siegfried and Kriemhild, Gunther and Brunhild) each falling in love and getting married before they come into conflict. And there is a decent amount of fantasy stuff mixed in, including Brunhild's superhuman strength, though it's not treated as remarkable. As far as genre, it's an epic, but calling it a courtly romance (like the Arthurian stories) seems pretty apt, too.

Like in the Iliad, the named characters are all fantastic warriors who can kill dozens without getting a scratch. It's only when great knights face one other that someone has to die. The battles are very unrealistic as a result, and I find it super annoying that a hundred regular guys can die without upsetting anyone, but when one famous fighter dies, everyone cries. I guess that's the class system showing itself even in such old literature--only the noblemen matter. And the higher the rank, the more we're supposed to care about them.

There's a lot to notice here and a lot to take an interest in. I found this old work compelling enough that I want to find copies of the sagas related to it, and see if other cycles (like the story of Dietrich, also known as Theodoric) are available in English outside of crazy expensive textbooks. We'll see.

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Where Jack Loses His Memory

In Too Deep by Lee Child
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a pretty good read that got better as it went along. I was leaning 3 but the last 100 pages or so hooked me, so a 4 is probably the right call.

I've only read a couple Jack Reacher books, and I only got this one because I was wasting time at the drugstore and wanted something to do. I wasn't hoping for too much, actually. But it moves along with a pretty good pace, and though I don't have a strong attachment to the main character, he is growing on me. Also, the plot gets more interesting about halfway through, so my interest in the story also grew the more I read. It's a solid action-thriller (or whatever category you prefer to put it in) and should satisfy most readers of the genre. I suspect.

Reacher is an interesting character. As a big, smart guy with lots of skills, he's like an underpowered superman, or something of a Sherlock with more punch and an affinity for weapons. Maybe a bit like Doc Savage, now that I think about it, with lots of mental skills, like a great memory and a lot of expertise in investigation. But he has weaknesses that leave him vulnerable in some areas, raising the stakes in many scenes. He doesn't have amazing tech skills or even a phone, so if something needs to be looked up, he has to rely on connections. He also doesn't keep a car, so he's pretty much gotta bum rides. And in this book, he has an injured arm, so he can't come out swinging like he usually does. In one scene, he's in the water trying to climb out onto a dock and just can't manage it with his bad arm, and that changes how he goes after the bad guys. I thought it was a nice touch.

This will probably never be exactly my type of book, but it's pretty good to jump into from time to time, and I enjoyed this one.

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Knights Against Monks

The Templar Detective and the Unholy Exorcist by J. Robert Kennedy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first book by this prolific author.

I liked it okay. I'd say this was a pretty good 3, even a 3 1/2, but it's too much a pulp-fiction novel for me to bump it to a 4 or 5. The language makes it a quick read, but it doesn't evoke Medieval France in any way. (It kinda reads as if modern Americans were dropped into the story.) There's a pretty good attempt at being accurate about history, about knights and the Church and so on, but I don't think much of the history would stand up to rigorous criticism. And all that's okay, as it's just supposed to be fun and quick and full of action, which it is. Good pacing. Straightforward language. Decent stakes. It's entertaining, which is what I hoped for.

The characters are mostly sketched rather than fully developed, but it works for the genre, and the writer (who's sold a bunch of books) is genuinely good at keeping the prose punchy and the plot moving along. The chapters are short at about three pages usually, with lots of POV characters, and even if one POV or part of the story doesn't interest you, the scene jumps every few pages, keeping it rolling. The premise of the series is fun, too, with a group of Templars who solve mysteries. In this one, young women are being abducted by a priest and some monks, supposedly to exorcise demons, and it's the Templars' job to track down a young woman they know, along with others, and determine who is behind the abductions and why.

A good novel? Not really, not in my opinion. A fun read, though? Yeah, I'd say so.

Recommended for readers of action and pulp fiction.

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Where Jane Inherits a Mystery

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy by Stephanie Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[This is a reread. I didn't write a review first time.]

I love these Jane Austen mysteries. It's the main character that brings me back. The crime-solving version of the beloved author is really likable, sympathetic, and great fun to watch. And we get all of that here, once again. I'm sad when she's sad, I'm amused when she's amused, and when she confounds her enemies by putting all the pieces together, she's awesome.

As much as I like it, this one is slightly less fun, since it includes a very subdued Jane who is reeling from the death of someone she really cared about--was in love with--and she is a bit less active as well. Perhaps as a result, we get most of the reveals and most of Jane's brilliance near the end, though it's still a successful mystery. I liked the journal entries from Lord Harold's papers, and though I would have liked seeing them to impact the plot a little more, they do still play their part.

The setup: Jane and her family are settling in to the cottage in Chawton where they famously lived for many years, and they're not being well received. Not only that, there is a body in the cellar when they first move in. It's a rude welcome, and things don't get better very quickly. Jane needs to figure out who's responsible before there's more violence...

I had a little bit of character overload reading this, even though I read it once before, about 15 years ago. It's the connections between kinda minor characters that I lose track of, and then they turn out to be pivotal details. Well, I bet the third time's the charm.

As always, recommended.

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Where Roland Plays His Horn. Eventually.

The Song of Roland by Unknown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Battle of Roncesvals took place in 778. This epic poem of the event comes from maybe two centuries after, give or take, and it can't be relied on to be accurate history, but it serves as a quality literary attempt at telling the story. Honestly, it feels quite foreign to me as a 21st century reader in America, and I suppose that makes sense--I'm not French or Spanish or Catholic or Muslim, and I'm definitely not from the Middle Ages--but it's strange to read the story and just not understand why they do what they do. That's part of what makes this so intriguing and entertaining: trying to understand people from a remote time and place, seeing how they are different and still like us, just the same.

This is an action story, with exaggerated battle scenes like you'd find in King Arthur tales or the Iliad or the Shahnameh or other epics, with one warrior or another wiping out scores of opponents. The army sizes here also have to be wildly exaggerated, but it works in epic like this. The good guys and the bad guys are all heroic in battle, capable of amazing feats, though the Christians are made righteous and the Muslims are slandered horribly. (The poet clearly understood nothing about Islam, even naming Apollo a focus of Muslim worship. The author's errors are as illuminating in their own way of the times and people and general milieu as the stuff he/she/they got right.) In battle, though, even a bad guy can be admired for his heroic feats, and there's a lot of that.

I'll never understand why Roland would rather sacrifice himself and all his troops than blow his horn and call for reinforcements. It's explained, in a way, but I just don't get it. It's just bad tactics, and it's a terrible waste of lives. And the court martial at the end for the traitor--who makes a case for his actions, claiming that Roland deserved it, that his betrayal wasn't treason against the king--ends with thirty of Ganelon's kinsmen being hanged. What? Why?

It's a wild story but entertaining, and brief enough that it's still a good read despite the challenges it poses to a modern reader. The copy I have includes a really good afterword by Guy Gavriel Kay, and he does a good job of putting the poem into perspective for the reader. I recommend getting that version.

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