Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Dragonlance Chronicles, Vol. 1) by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

From the favourer: "You asked for it...you can't unask for it...it's my favourite because it was the first fantasy book I read and introduced me to what is now my favourite genre. Apart from the classic fantasy elements in there, there was also a good mix of characters that had a bit of depth to them. Well, at least more depth than the typical fantasy character (case in point, Conan the Barbarian!)"

Firstly, I knew when I started this reading adventure that there'd be surprises. I expected surprises about the books people nominated, about others' reactions to the books people nominated, and about the books themselves. I'm extra-pleased when the favourer doesn't feel they have to nominate a dead-white-male-canonical-(possibly-boring-but-who-am-I-to-say)-classic as their favourite, but actually goes for the heart and nominates something they love.

Because - as I finally found the words for last night when I'd had too much wine and was having earnest discussions with Paul, my very tolerant husband - the point of my reading these books isn't to give a distanced, objective review of your favourite books. This would require some sort of complicated standardising procedure that my year 12 Maths Methods score just isn't up to. That would be HARD.

The point is for me to find out why these books are your favourites. I don't particularly care about the subject matter or standard of writing. (Length is an issue. But I'm working with myself intensively on that prejudice.) Basically, I want to read them, and to understand, quite simply, what makes you love them. That is EASY.

Secondly, I want to state that I'm not one of those people who say loftily, "Oh, I don't read fantasy" (a breed of folk closely related to those who say "Oh, I don't watch mainstream films.") I do read fantasy, but mostly Young Adult fantasy. And when I say 'mostly', I actually mean 'solely, apart from Terry Pratchett'.

Thirdly, I want to offer a word of advice to the lonely: if you read Dragonlance books on the train, you will make friends.

I made my first Dragonlance friend during Monday evening peak hour, standing up on the 6:08pm Hurstbridge train with only room to hold the book about 5cm from my nose. Good thing I'm short-sighted.

"They're making a movie of it, you know," said the man standing unavoidably a little-bit-too-close to me.

I looked up. (Well, I moved my eyes sideways.) "Are they?"

He nodded, and started to push towards the doors as the train slowed. "It looks crap so far," he called as he stepped of the train, "Stick to the books!"

My second Dragonlance friend was a man named Chen on the 7:38am to Flinders Street Station. Dragonlance book covers are instantly recognisable (in the same way that Discworld cover art can be spotted from at least 23 miles away), and Chen was reading War of the Twins, another in the series. We spotted each others' books at the same time.

"Going back to where it all began?" he asked.

"Actually, I've never read one before, [insert repetitive explanation about reading adventure here]" I said.

"Oh, it must be great to be reading it for the first time," said Chen wistfully. And conversation continues until Chen gets off at Fairfield.

See? Read Dragonlance, make friends.

Caveats and RSVP-aspirations over. On to the book.

Five friends meet in a tavern after many years apart. They're a motley bunch - Flint the dwarf, Tanis the half-elf, twin brothers (Caramon the boofy warrior and Raistlin creepy mage), and Sturm the knight. Yes, it's all very Lord of the Rings, but so is Harry Potter. They're joined accidentally by Tas the kender, a 4-foot-tall kleptomanaical species that knows no fear and is as such perpetually getting into trouble. Last time they met, it was under happier circumstances. There's bad stuff goin' down in the land. Hobgoblins are a new and menacing presence in the usually peaceful town of Solace, and there's rumours of war and monsters in other cities.

After a chance encounter with a healing blue crystal staff, a bunch of hobgoblins and a good old fashioned bar brawl, the five friends (plus the kender) find themselves fleeing the tavern with two strangers. One is the bearer of the magic staff, Goldmoon, the other her Plainsman guardian Riverwind. All of them are initially unsure of their direction and almost go their separate ways, but eventually embark on a journey to find out the purpose of the magic staff, and whether it can play a part in arresting the torrent of evil that is engulfing their home towns.

It's not so much the novelty of plot that entertains in this book as it basically goes: "fight a battle find the object go to the next place fight a battle find the next object go to the next place fight a battle etc." As the favourer notes, it's the characters that make the next battle worth reading for. Tanis the half-elf (whose half-breed status manifests in that unlike other elves, he can grow facial hair) is constantly torn between his human and elf instincts and loyalties. Caramon the warrior, who would otherwise be a big bland ball of muscle, is constantly hungry and gets amusingly nostalgic for meat when feasting among the vegetarian elves. Raistlin the mage, whose name just works so well, has sacrificed his physical wellbeing for his magical powers and sees everyone as dying by inches, all the time. Tas the kender is just lovely, a cross between the brownies of Willow and Nanny from Count Duckula. Sturm the knight is hilariously and touchingly loyal to his outdated knightly code, to the point where the others have to work him around to doing what will actually save his life rather than satisfy his honour:

"'Sturm!' Tanis said urgently. 'Come on! We've got to get out of here!'

'Run?' The knight appeared astonished. 'From this rabble?'

'Yes.' Tanis paused; the knight's code of honour forbade running from danger. He had to convince him. 'That man is a religious fanatic, Sturm. He'll probably burn us at the stake! And' - a sudden thought rescued him - 'there is a lady to protect.'

'The lady, of course.' Sturm stood up at once and walked over to the woman. 'Madam, your servant.'"

I think character for me is the appeal of series fantasy. In many books I read (of various genres), when I reach the end of the book, I just don't want to let the characters go. In fantasy, I don't have to. I also think this sort of fantasy evokes a kind of longing, the same kind I feel when I watch Doctor Who or read the Narnia books. If you love Doctor Who, you've already had this thought: 'If David Tennant asked me to step into the Tardis, I would go.' If you love the Narnia books, you've already had this thought: 'If any wardrobe keeps going, I'm going to see where it goes.' That's the longing. You want to go. You're basically ready to go. At any time. So when in this book you read -

"Tanis and the dwarf both turned and looked down into the quiet valley. Lights began to wink on, making the homes in the trees visible among the vallenwood. The night air was still and calm and sweet, tinged with the smell of wood smoke and from the home fires. Now and again they could hear the faint sound of a mother calling her children to dinner."

- you think 'Wow what a cliche' and 'How lovely I wish I was there.'

It's a longing here for a romantic rustic fantasy setting that is conveniently absolved of the problems that come with lack of sanitisation, infection, feudal politics and general discomfort.

It's also a longing for a sort of heroism which is basically impossible, where there's just good and evil. It can take a while to get there and you can't always tell which is which at the time, but you know it's going to be clearly one or the other eventually.

It's a nostalgia for something you've never actually experienced. But I guess that's what nostalgia is - a longing for something that never really happened that way in the first place.

And in the case of The Dragons of Autumn Twilight, it's also pretty funny and exciting. I actually missed my train station one morning. I'm not exaggerating for effect here, I actually went through Melbourne Central to Flinders Street. If you know my general standards of organisation, you'll know I don't miss my train station.

But you know how I was talking about surprises? TRACY HICKMAN IS A MAN. Paul, who like the favourer also loved this book as a teenager, has had his world turned topsy-turvy since I've told him this. But Margaret Weis is still a woman, so he's going to be okay.

Huck is found by another Bookcrosser!

My book release for Huckleberry Finn has been caught! Hurrah!

It's finder says: "Caught the book while returning a library book at the RWL. Perfect timing, as I needed another fix anyway, and I've always been tempted by huck finn and friends... I think I might try and leave it where a nice Apollo Bay person can give it a go..."

Releasing your favourites

I love Bookcrossing. It's everything books should be - liberated, random, dog-eared and shared. If you love a book, let it go.

You register your book on Bookcrossing, put it in a public place, someone finds it, registers their find on the site and once they've read it they release it into the wild again. It's very exciting when your books get found, or better yet, you find a book! I've been a bit slack with it of late, so this reading list gives me a whole new way to release books into the wild (affordability permitting - don't think I'll be buying a copy of The Cook's Companion to set free). In the event of me having to do much reviewing all of a sudden (5 books down, 4 to go...so much junior-fiction-zaniness I'm starting to twitch - and not in a bird-watching way), in the interim I'm releasing a good ol' Wordsworth Cheapo Classics copy of Huckleberry Finn into the wild tomorrow morning, outside my belovedbelovedbeloved Rowden White Library. Hopefully a finder will register their free book!

Catch this book

Bit more of a brief detour...

Nine children's novels have appeared in my letterbox today to review for ABR...so slightly more of the brief detour. When it rains...

Brief detour...

I've just been commissioned to review two novels, and to interview John Boyne (of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas fame) for an article - so a brief detour from reading your favourites is necessary!

Ah, when reading books gets in the way of reading books.

Must do things am being paid for first...back soon.

Where is Maisie's Panda? by Lucy Cousins & Happy Baby Words by Roger Priddy

From the favourer's father: "...truly a tour de force of the lift-up-flap genre."

Where is Maisie's Panda?

Where is Maisie's panda? This question has plagued the 0-3 year old demographic since time began.

Is it in the laundry?
Nope.

Is it in the toilet?
Nope.

Is it a lens-grinder in Omsk?
Nope.

This book is definitely a classic in the lift-the-slightly-torn-flap style. It's a rollercoaster ride of suspense, disappointment and ultimate panda-related redemption. The splayed-finger hand flapping exhibited by it's 8-month-old favourer only proves the extent of the impact of this seminal text.

For if we are truly honest with ourselves, at some point in our lives do we not all lose our panda?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the favourer's mother: "His criteria appears to be that the narrative must stand up to endless repetition."

Happy Baby Words

So many words. So many happy babies. The favourer fancies the baby girl with the soft brown eyes and the wispy curls. Personally I was quite partial to the fuzzy pink hat.

And the mind games! An orange orange? When nouns and verbs collide!

The babies are happy. The words are happy. And the cover is pleasingly squishy. It's a win-win situation.

Bedtime for the favourer, and for me. Night night, Possum.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

From the favourer: "In truth, I don't remember the story all that well...all I knew at 12 was that I wanted that raft for my own, but alas, all I had was a skateboard..."

I don't think I'd read any Mark Twain since I was about 14 (at which point I committed to memory once and for all that it was "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain and not "Mark Twain" by Tom Sawyer). I'd forgotten about the effect his writing has on your non-reading moments. When you're not physically reading it, you think about the book so much - it's as if you're missing out on something, somehow when you're not reading they must be having adventures without you.

Huck is my kind of boy. When informed by his aunt that one of the central tenets of Christianity is the 'do as you would be done by' thing, Tom interprets it as: "I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself." He ponders this notion; "I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time," but concludes; "I couldn't see no advantage about it - except for the other people".

When we meet him, Huck is in the process of being "sivilized" by his adoptive aunt, and he's beginning to get used to the washing and the lack of cussing. But at this point his drunken, violent father, who everyone had thought (and hoped) was dead, shows up in town and steals Huck away to a log cabin in the woods. He locks Huck up alone for days at a time, then comes home toasted, yells at the demons that his DTs produce, and beats Huck mercilessly. One particularly bad night, his (significantly uncapitalised) "pap" thinks Huck is the Angel of Death and tries to stab him to death. Huck sits up all night with a rifle pointed at his unconscious father, ready to shoot him if he should wake and try to finish the job. Always the master of understatement, Twain usually has Huck respond to his regular beatings with such lines as "I was used to being where I was, and I liked it, all but the cowhide part." So when Twain has Huck say, very simply, "I was scared", the weight of these stark words is enormous.

After this sleepless night (of which his father remembers nothing), Huck fakes his own death with the help of a pig carcass and escapes to the river, teaming up with the runaway slave Jim.

And the adventures begin.

As you might have gathered, they're not quite adventures in the light-hearted Famous Five style - there's rotting bodies in half-submerged brothels, execution plots, unwanted unshakeable passengers, drownings, family feud shoot-outs where young boys pay the ultimate price, and the ever-present threat of Jim being caught and sold, or lynched. Even the initially humorous story depicting a group of men's fear of a "haunted barrel" (it floats in the same place in the river, despite the swift current) suddenly changes tone when the barrel is cut open and the dead baby inside is revealed. All of this is laid out for us in Huck's matter-of-fact colloquial voice.

Despite being way more violent than I expected (and it's understated violence that has the most effect on me), it's also a very funny book as well. It's a laid-back, laconic type of humour that I really enjoy - the encounter where Huck lies to a doctor in order to get help with Tom Sawyer's gunshot wound is a prime example:

"The Doctor was an old man; a very nice, kind-looking old man, when I got him up. I told him me and my brother was over on Spanish Island hunting, yesterday afternoon, and camped on a piece of raft we found, and about midnight he must a kicked his gun in his dreams, for it went off and shot him in the leg, and we wanted him to go over there and fix it and not say nothing about it, nor let anybody know, because we wanted to come home this evening, and surprise the folks.
'Who is your folks?' he says.
'The Phelpses, down yonder.'
'Oh,' he says. And after a minute, he says: 'How'd you say he got shot?'
'He had a dream,' I says, 'and it shot him.'
'Singular dream,' he says."

Heh heh. Singular dream.

To be honest, I think a lot of the satirical matter that this book is famous for may have gone over my head - some of it slid so close to farce that it just annoyed me. Some others parts are so in line with modern-day cynicism that they just seem to be more statements of fact (one character observes the further away from their doorstep a 'good cause' is, the more money 'good people' will donate).

The nature of racism that is examined in the book seemed less shocking to me than it is probably supposed to be (given that the book is still banned today in some schools). The casual ugliness of the attitudes towards slavery that Twain depicts get so tangled up with the high farce descriptions of events that they seem more trivialising than satirising or derisive. The only times where I didn't feel this were in the descriptions of Huck's inner struggles with Jim's runaway status. Huck 'knows' that to do right by God and go to heaven he must turn Jim in - after all, he is 'stolen property'. Several times he is on the brink of betraying Jim, but he can never quite manage to obey what he thinks is his 'conscience'. Finally, in an amazingly mature act of courage (considering that he really does believe he is committing a mortal sin), he gives in to his natural humanistic instincts and commits fully to his friendship with Jim. He reasons that if he's going to Hell anyway, he may as well not do it by halves.

You've probably heard this book lauded as a masterpiece of tonal consistency and it's warranted - the voices of the characters never hit a wrong note, and while humour comes naturally to a colloquial tone, I was most impressed by Twain's ability to create a highly evocative descriptive scenario without any faltering of the character's voice. It's such a hard thing to achieve - I'm useless at it myself. Take the description of a thunderstorm, as told to us by Huck:

"It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest - fst! it was as bright as glory and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know."

How's that for a very long yet somehow not over-long sentence? The best bit is where the lightning strikes, I went "Yeah" on the train. No wonder Twain's writing follows you around like the morning after a particularly vivid dream.

It's the rare kind of book where I can't help thinking that any 'flaws' I find are probably flaws in me, rather than the book.

And the shadow of Huck's father finding him that hangs over the whole adventure? Well, let me just advise you not to peek at the last page until you get there (and yes, for once I didn't either).