Discworld #4: Mort by Terry Pratchett

Read: 2007

Mort was an awkward farm boy with the horticultural talents of a dead starfish. Eager to send him into a trade that might better suit his dispositions, his family agreed to place him in an apprenticeship with Death.

As far as coming of age and first love stories go, this is one of the better ones I've read. That's the major aspect of the Discworld novels I've always liked - they are hilarious, but the stories would still be quite good even without the humour.

Like most of the Discworld series, I loved the book right up until the climax. At that point, I usually feel like Pratchett is letting some fumbling inner author take over and I lose interest completely. It's usually a struggle for me to read the last 10-20 pages.

Overall, though, I highly recommend Mort as well as just about any other Discworld novel for anyone who enjoys comedy, particularly the more word-play witty humour of Britain rather than the slapstick/situational humour of North America.

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Read: 2006

Ruth is a Victorian Social Problem novel about a young orphan working as an apprentice dressmaker. Ruth Hilton is seduced and then abandoned by the wealthy Henry Bellingham. Discovering herself to be pregnant in a society that frowned and even criminalized single motherhood, she enters the home of the kind Thurston Benson and his sister under the assumed identity of Mrs Denbigh, a recently widowed cousin of the Bensons. Soon after, she takes a job as a governess with the tyrannical Mr Bradshaw.

The novel deals with a topic that was very controversial in its time and, in many ways, is still very controversial today. Reading it, I realized how many of the stereotypes her contemporaries held about "fallen women" and unmarried mothers that Gaskell deliberately set out to break are still with us today.

I felt that her treatment of Ruth was very balanced. When dealing with this sort of topic, is so simple to either make the main character too rebellious or too pathetic. But Ruth, who admittedly has a very mild personality (Gaskell trying to paint her as the model 'angel of the home'), she does come into her own and fight for acceptance.

I was also impressed that Bellingham was brought back into the narrative. It seemed easy for the story to simply end at Ruth, leaving Bellingham off the hook for the "sin" of Leonard. But Gaskell brings him in and she highlights, underlines, and paints in neon the total lack of punishment given to Bellingham by society while Ruth and Leonard are made to suffer so dearly. And again, this sort of unequal gender-based moral standards are very much still with us.

The one topic that had my Victorian Literature class arguing hotly was Ruth's death. About half of us argued that despite all Gaskell had done in the novel, she still let Ruth have the only fate available to the "fallen women" of Victorian literature - death. The other half of us argued that Ruth was being caste as a sort of Christ figure, sacrificing herself to save all those sick, including Bellingham himself. Rather than dying as a fallen woman or even redeeming herself through death, she had already redeemed herself and, in her newfound self-agency, indulged her innate goodness and self-sacrifice. For my own part, I see a lot of the former, but my understanding of Gaskell leads me to assume she meant the latter. But I will leave that up to better readers than me to decide.

Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend by Miranda Green

Read: 25 November, 2007

I have no idea how accurate the information in this dictionary is because I know just about zilch about Celtic mythology. However, I do like the book based on a purely "how interesting is it?" criterion. While it may be read through from cover to cover (as I did in about two days), I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Because it's a dictionary and because each entry is intended to stand along, many of the stories and ideas are repeated several times. It would be much better used as a reference book.

The entries are fairly short, ranging from about a paragraph or two as the norm to about a page as an extreme. Because of their shorter length, they obviously are not terribly detailed. Each entry gives a general overview of its concept and includes other terms and names that may also be looked up. In essence, it's a great place to get a vague idea to start with, but other books are needed if a more in-depth study is to be conducted.

Stupeur et Tremblement by Amélie Nothomb

Read: 6 November, 2007

The story is fairly simple. A Belgian woman was born in Japan and returns in her early twenties to work in a large shipping company. Once there, she discovers a rigid code of conduct that demands she suppress her individuality and intelligence for the company. The autobiographical story is a fairly short and simple read. It is alternately thought-provoking and comical.

The story's greatest strength lies in its characterisations. The narrator and her boss, Mori Fubuki, receive the most attention in this respect, but the pictures Nothomb paints of the other characters are equally enchanting and, at times, frightening.