Varon, Sara - Robot Dreams

A dog gets a mail order robot and assembles it; the two go off together and have adventures. Along the way, dog and robot are separated.

I have no idea how to sum this up. It's a wordless comic, and on the larger scale of things nothing happens. But at the same time, everything happens in the course of a few months -- friends are lost and found again, people are changed, lives go on.

I love how sweet the art is, how Varon pays attention to all the little details, how she doesn't forget that her characters are dogs and ducks and anteaters, albeit anthropomorphized ones. And I just love how the ending isn't what I would have expected, but it's perfectly right.

Definitely recommended, particularly if you liked the movie The Iron Giant (I haven't read the story) -- and not just because the two are about robots! They've both got this old-fashioned but not necessarily nostalgic tone, and both of them are about friendships.

Sacks, Oliver - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

This may have been one of the scariest books I read this year. It's not meant to be, but it deals with a subject that I find incredibly, deeply disturbing and frightening -- the oddities and malfunctions of the human mind.

Sacks has collected a bunch of essays he wrote from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Some of them are about patients with "deficits" or missing senses, like one woman who lost her sense of where parts of her body were and felt like she never quite belonged in her body, or the man who could intellectually recognize shapes, but couldn't put them together and grasp the emotional (thereby mistaking his wife's head for a hat).

The second part is about patients with "extra" senses, like the phantom limb syndrome, or the added tics of Tourette's. The third part, which I found the most problematic, is about "simple" people. As a forewarning, Sacks does call them "retarded" and "mentally deficient;" I suspect a lot of this was considered proper usage at the time he wrote the essays.

While I enjoyed reading about his patients and marveling at how complex and strange our minds were, the stories completely freak me out as well. Particularly the ones about memory loss or loss of certain senses. This is probably a very idiosyncratic reaction: Alzheimer's is basically my worst nightmare.

My problems with the third section go with how Sacks both idealizes and pathologizes his "simple" patients. He focuses on seeing them as a whole, not as a disease, which I agree with, but sometimes he goes on about how they have this inner beauty that just struck the wrong note with me. I'm not quite sure how to articulate it, but it threw me off. Actually, I got the same impression with several of his other essays, this strange push-pull of idealizing an illness while also pathologizing the person who has it, when I think he intended to pathologize the illness and humanize the person who has it.

Interesting, but probably a book I'll end up giving away.

Yuletide guessing!

Because I like comments! And because I am curious about guessing... my guessing post is still open!

Again, no author confirmation or denying, and you don't have to guess writers or fandoms or stories I know/read!

I have several guesses, but as they are informed by things people have said via chat and by process of elimination via beta'ing, I am not posting those. But I am putting up my own random speculation!

Wein, Elizabeth E. - The Sunbird

I adored The Winter Prince, was completely indifferent toward A Coalitions of Lions, and I love this one.

Telemakos is the son of Medraut and the nephew of Goewin, but he's also the grandson of an important Aksumite politician and a cousin or close relation to the new king of Aksum. I loved Winter Prince for what it did with the Arthur mythos; I love this book for its depictions of Aksum, for how distant it gets from the Arthur mythos. I was dissatisfied by A Coalition of Lions because I wanted more of Medraut and Lleu and the Arthur mythos and less of Aksum, but The Sunbird has more distance from the events of The Winter Prince while also being closer in other ways.

Plague is spreading, and to stave it off, Goewin, the British ambassador, convinces the king to quarantine his kingdom. But some traders are sneaking around the quarantine, and it's up to twelve-year-old Telemakos to find out who.

Twelve-year-olds spying should sound utterly implausible, but Telemakos is a wonderful character. I love how clever he is, but in ways that aren't difficult to believe, I love that he is afraid and unsure and that he is loved by Goewin and Turunesh (his mother) and even cold, mute Medraut. I love how Medraut's love-hate relationship with Lleu affects his relationship with Telemakos and Goewin, but in a way that informs Telemakos' story and doesn't overtake it. I love how much Telemakos wants to be loved by his stern father, how he deals with being a multiracial child, and most of all, how clever and real and bright and brave he is.

I also love all the political intrigue in this book; it hits all the spots that Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books do. And while intrigue about salt trade doesn't sound all that twisty, it is, and oh, when Telemakos goes undercover to find out more? It's wonderful and harrowing and real in a way that slick spy stories often aren't.

The side characters are also great; Goewin is a force to be reckoned with here in a way that she wasn't in A Coalition of Lions, Medraut is just as angsty and sometimes emotionally stupid, and I love all the new Aksumite characters, Kidane and Turunesh and Sofya and the king.

I'm not sure at all how to sum up the book, save that I love it to pieces and that it is entirely different from The Winter Prince in that Telemakos is loved and doesn't have his own traumas, until the events of the books. And yet, it's very similar in the complexity of the relationships and politics.

And! As if all that weren't enough, it is a historical novel set in Africa! In Aksum! With details and politics and complications!

Go read this.

Wein, Elizabeth E. - The Mark of Solomon: The Lion Hunter

I just babbled endlessly about the first Telemakos book, The Sunbird, and now I will babble endlessly about this book!

Sadly, it is actually half of a book; from Wein's Amazon blog, it seems like the editor wanted more to the original, but then decided to split the book in two, as it was getting a little long for YA. As such, a lot of this book is build-up to what will conclude in the second book, but honestly, it didn't bug me as much as I would have thought.

Much of this is because what happens in the set up is so fascinating, thanks to Wein's clear prose and impeccable eye for character. What I remember isn't how Telemakos and his new sister Athena end up traveling to Himyar to live with the ruler, Abreha. What I remember is how the book is about the aftermath of The Sunbird, from Telemakos' own attempts to deal with the trauma, to how his mother and father and aunt and grandfather deal, to how the events of The Sunbird affect national politics.

I think reading any reviews will spoil you for what happens in the first chapter (much like the first chapter of Queen of Attolia). But I will just say that I love how the aftermath of the first chapter intertwines with the aftermath of The Sunbird, and I absolutely adore Telemakos' new sister Athena and the bond between the two.

Anyway, I am dying to get my hands on the next book, and happy to see that Wein seems to be writing a third Telemakos book (if you count Mark of Solomon as the second). I adore Telemakos and his world and while The Winter Prince is amazing and intense, I also love the slightly gentler but still harsh and real web of relationships in the Telemakos books, particularly Telemakos' family.

I cannot rec these enough! Read them if you want a good story with political intrigue, or a good story with a clever protagonist, or a good story with deep and complex relationships, or a good story set in sixth-century Africa. Actually, just go read them!

Links:
- coffeeandink's review