On the bookish side, I completed three of my four planned reading challenges; the To Read List got no love at all. RIP VI was, as ever, the highlight of the year, and the Science Books Challenge was easily and happily completed. That leaves only the massive Mt. Stephenson Challenge, which I did accomplish, but with less-happy results than I expected. It turns out–and this honestly surprised me–that there is such a thing as Too Much Stephenson for me. And it’s right about 3600 pages in under 6 months. I got to the top and found I had nothing to say, except, “Yeah…don’t follow me up here.” Well, I mean, DO, if you’re interested, but pace yourself better than I did. I’m so tired of Stephenson I can’t even think about tackling his newest, Reamde, until I get a good half-year of light, short, fluffy reading between me and the expedition. This disappoints me more than I can say, but there it is.

Science Book Challenge 2011
1. The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum
2. Packing for Mars, Mary Roach
3. Two Sides of the Moon, Dave Scott & Alexei Leonov

Readers Imbibing Peril VI
1. Lying Dead, Aline Templeton
2. The Dark Room, Minette Walters
3. Horns, Joe Hill
4. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Scaling Mt. Stephenson
1. Cryptonomicon
2. Quicksilver
3. The Confusion
4. The System of the World

There are 14 women and 17 men on this year’s list of authors, with several earning multiple appearances. All together, I read 26 books by women and 19 by men. I don’t pay attention through the year to the male/female breakout, so it’s always interesting to me to see how the balance falls out at year end.

1. The Liar, Stephen Fry
2. An Old-Fashioned Girl, Louisa May Alcott
3. Behind a Mask: Or, a Woman’s Power, Louisa May Alcott
4. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Gordon S. Wood
5. Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, Mollie Panter-Downes
6. Eight Cousins, Louisa May Alcott
7. Rose in Bloom, Louisa May Alcott
8. The Darkness & the Deep, Aline Templeton
9. Minnie’s Room, Mollie Panter-Downes
10. The Face of a Stranger, Anne Perry
11. That Was The Millennium That Was, John Scalzi
12. My Man Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse
13. A Dangerous Mourning, Anne Perry
14. Defend and Betray, Anne Perry
15. A Sudden, Fearful Death, Anne Perry
16. Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, Christopher Moore
17. The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson
18. How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer
19. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
20. The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum
21. Spook Country, William Gibson
22. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
23. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
24. Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
25. The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, Mary S. Lovell
26. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
27. Wigs on the Green, Nancy Mitford
28. Wait for Me!: Memoirs, Deborah Mitford
29. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
30. Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
31. The Confusion, Neal Stephenson
32. American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson
33. Lying Dead, Aline Templeton
34. The Man in the Queue, Josephine Tey
35. Packing for Mars, Mary Roach
36. The Dark Room, Minette Walters
37. Horns, Joe Hill
38. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
39. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
40. The Lady of the Shroud, Bram Stoker
41. The System of the World, Neal Stephenson
42. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
43. Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
44. Two Sides of the Moon, Dave Scott & Alexei Leonov
45. Luther: The Calling, Neil Cross

Looking forward to 2012: YIKES, with the challenges already! I’ll do RIP VII, of course–I’m already picking up books and thinking, “Hmm…this would be good to put in the RIP pile.” But that’s the only challenge I’m committing to in 2012. I’m going to let my id guide my reading for a while–going strictly by interest and desire, seeking nothing but pleasure.

Having dropped most of my usual reading structure for the year, I feel I’ve got room to try something new, so I’ve signed on with the Geek Girls Book Club. That might sound contrary to what I just said about no commitments, but looking at their past selections, they’re likely to pick things I enjoy, and I’m only going to read the ones I really want to. I’ve already finished the January selection, Ready Player One. I hope that’s not bad book club etiquette, but I gave it a “quick peek” and ended up finishing it in three days–it was a fun, unchallenging rollercoaster read, just the sort of thing I need right now. I read it with gleeful greed.

Happy reading in 2012!

The Man in the Queue, Josephine Tey–A man is stabbed to death waiting in line to attend the final night of a long-running theatrical performance. Inspector Alan Grant has almost nothing to go on, except the odd religious artifact used to commit the murder and a few eye witnesses, none of whom admit to seeing much of anything. Gray does perform a few brilliant deductions, but the leads he turns up take him nowhere, and the case is only solved when the murderer’s guilty conscience prompts a confession to save an innocent person from the noose. It felt like a cop-out, and really disappointed me, given how much I’d enjoyed my previous encounter with Tey (The Daughter of Time).

The Lady of the Shroud, Bram Stoker– A bold, adventurous young Englishman inherits a stupendous fortune from his uncle, on the condition that he reside for a year in the uncle’s seaside castle in a half-wild Balkan state. Shortly after taking up residence, young Rupert is visited by a local legend, the Lady of the Shroud. This pallidly lovely creature of flashing eyes and nocturnal habits is occasionally spotted tooling around the shore in her seagoing coffin, frightening sailors and fascinating Rupert. He believes that she is a legendary creature, a vampire–he even tracks her to her tomb and discovers her lying dead in her stone vault. But all is not as it seems with the enchanting lady, and Rupert is about to follow his heart into a very different adventure than he’s expecting. This one was a surprise–deft and droll in places, delightfully melodramatic in others. It gave me hope that Dracula, whenever I get to it, will be a more pleasant read than I’ve been led to expect. It is an adventure story–a proper rip-snorter, at that–dolled up in Gothic trappings. Rupert is an impossibly wonderful man, paired with an impossibly wonderful heroine–they were pretty delightful to watch, even if they did tip over into flat-out silliness now and then.

The Moonstone, Wilkie Colins–A legendary diamond called The Moonstone, rumored to have been looted from a temple in India, is willed by a long-estranged uncle to Rachel Verinder on her 18th birthday. The gem is said to be cursed, and the people around Rachel doubt the old man’s intentions in leaving it to her: did he mean to make peace with his family, or make trouble for them? Whatever his intent, it’s trouble they get: the gem is stolen the very night of the party, and suspicions fall on all in the house. The investigation will lead to a suicide, an estrangement of lovers, and other misfortunes. The greatest detective in the country will fail to solve the case, though he will turn up quite a lot of other secrets along the way. A year on, a Verinder cousin who wishes to regain Rachel’s love (mysteriously lost along with the gem, almost as if she blames him for its disappearance!) reopens the case and at last solves the mystery of The Moonstone.

Here’s the thing about this one: this is one of those mysteries where people who hold a piece of the puzzle refuse to tell what they know–either to protect another person’s reputation, or because honor compels them to remain silent, or because they’ve been duped into co-conspiring, or because they coincidentally fell into a coma right after the party and have only just now woken up to spill the beans. I’m pretty unforgiving of plots that turn on this sort of cheap, clichéd device–even if they’re the very first book to use it. As The Moonstone is generally considered the first detective novel in English, perhaps Collins did originate it. But even if it was a shiny new cliché (at time of writing) it still rankles. On the plus side, I found Collins a deft hand at caricature–in the section where Miss Clack narrates, I think I marked funny passages on nearly half the pages. Although I liked Betteredge, the first narrator, well enough, I was very close to giving up on the story; Miss Clack arrived just in time to keep me reading. So, while Collins did not turn out to be this year’s Shirley Jackson, I enjoyed his writing enough to give The Woman in White a try–maybe for RIP VII?

Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it.
~The Prophecy of John Uskglass, the Raven King

Once upon a time, there was magic in England; the roads to Faerie stood open and a human-born, fairy-raised King ruled the northern half of the country. But that time is long past; centuries ago, the Raven King withdrew from his English lands, and the magic began to decline. The Golden Age passed into the Silver and thence into history. The modern heirs of the Aureate magicians are scholars of magic only, studying and debating the feats of the greats who preceded them, but never attempting to repeat them. That is, until a Mr. Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey, Yorkshire, issues a challenge: he will demonstrate that he is an actual, practicing magician, if upon said demonstration the Learned Society of York Magicians will agree to give up all further study of magic and claim to the title. That is, he will prove to the scholars that English magic has not died out, at the cost of preventing them from ever attempting it themselves. Mr. Norrell is a man on a complicated mission; he wants to re-establish English magic, and be the only magician in England.

This goes largely to plan–the Yorkshire magicians aren’t the only branch Norrell has stunted by one means or another–and Mr. Norrell’s reputation grows. He uses his money to acquire every magic book he can track down, the better to keep the knowledge to himself; he uses his growing influence to sweep London clean of the charlatans and hedge-wizards who prey on the populace and tarnish the noble profession of magician. The worst of these, Vinculus, refuses to go quietly, and declaims a prophecy upon Mr. Norrell:

Two magicians shall appear in England.
The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;
The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;
The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;
The second shall see his dearest possession in his enemy’s hand.
The first shall pass his life alone; he shall be his own gaoler;
The second shall tread lonely roads, the storm above his head, seeking a dark tower upon a high hillside.

Two magicians in England is not at all in accordance with Mr. Norrell’s plan! Yet, when the prophesied second magician appears, Norrell surprises himself by agreeing to take the young man on as an apprentice. Thus is formed the partnership of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and for a time, it prospers; Strange proves an avid and gifted pupil. The two offer themselves to the service of England–Napoleon is making trouble on the Continent again, and poor old King George has gone off on one of his mad turns. Mayhap there is something a talented pair of patriotic mages can do to assist their nation on both counts?

Before long, however, the essential personality differences between the reclusive bibliomane and his worldly student set them at odds. At the heart of their disagreement lies the greatest magician England ever knew, John Uskglass, the Raven King. Norrell wants to remove all trace of Uskglass from the record, to scour any taint of fairy magic from the profession; Strange argues that John Uskglass is the very foundation of English magic: erase the former, and you obliterate the latter. Strange strikes out on his own, and the former partners become bitter rivals, proceeding from irreconcilable differences to open warfare–and all England begins to take sides.

And that, my friends, is barely an outline of all that occurs in this weighty tome. There are also enchanted maidens, a wicked fairy causing endless trouble for innocent people, and a lowly-yet-noble servant bound for a great destiny; there is warfare both mundane and magical; there are books and battles, mighty works and foul deeds; there is romance, intrigue, betrayal, and undying loyalty.

When presented with thesis (book-learned, orderly, miserly Mr. Norrell) and antithesis (instinctive, experimental and generous Mr. Strange), I will automatically start looking for synthesis. I don’t like dipolar arrangements; I am always looking for the middle path, a third side to bring things into balance. Thus, from early on, I was watching for the Raven King. I didn’t know if he would return in the form of the historical John Uskglass, or if he would be embodied by the “nameless slave” destined to become a king. For that matter, maybe he was an amalgam of Strange and Norrell together, or one of the many other magicians we met in the course of things–for, despite Mr. Norrell’s best (worst!) efforts, there are many more than just two magicians in England, and their numbers and powers are only growing. I won’t tell you if I got anywhere near the truth of thing, but will say that John Uskglass’s hand in matters does, indeed, become clear.

I read a review that said this book could have been called “Sense and Sensibility”, if that title weren’t already taken, and it’s a good point. A lot of what the book is ‘about’ is the tension between rationality and irrationality, the dynamics of their interaction, and the dangers inherent in tending too far in either direction. There is a clean and tidy approach to magic, and a messy, dangerous approach–which is not to say there are two kinds of magic. That’s the heart of the argument between the titular pair–whether magic can be sorted into bins marked “acceptable” and “unacceptable”; whether you can separate the sublime from repellant. The book has a clear opinion on the matter, but that doesn’t stop all interested parties from dividing up into Strangeite and Norrellite camps and settling in for a nice, long argument about it.

The greatest strength of JS&MN is the lovely, intricate detail of the world Clarke created. She does a wonderful job evoking a Georgian England that never was, and yet feels as if it might have been. The footnotes are much commented-on in reviews, and I’m firmly in the “loved them!” camp–they cite a whole library of nonexistant scholarly works and a large, completely imaginary body of folklore and history. They are frequent and lengthy and rather digressive, when not wholly irrelevant. But they contribute much to the reality of the storyworld. If you’re of the bookish bent yourself (and you’d almost have to be, to even pick this book up), you will find much to fuel your candle-lit, leather-bound, oak-panneled library fantasies. Even the ultimate fate of Strange and Norrell, far from a happy fairy-tale ending, won’t seem too terrible to a reader with even the slightest touch of bibliomania.

If I could change one thing about the book, I would give a female character–any female character–something more to do than be a hostage of and/or accessory to the men around her. I had hopes for Mrs. Brandy, but her delightful romantic pursuit of Stephen Black was cut short (BAD FAIRY!) and never resumed. Lady Pole came nearest to self-actualization; she certainly had ambitions and acted on them at one fateful moment, but still, all she was and did was due to her position as a pawn of the men. I was pleased by the revelation of Flora Greysteel’s role in matters, but again, she was only completing a task assigned her by a man, for his own interests, not hers. You could say that was the reality of female life in the 19th century…and I would point out that MAGIC WORKS in this version of history–is it so much harder to envision one self-directed female than to imagine that fairies exist?

If I could change two things about the book, the second would be to front-and-center Stephen Black. All the way through, he struck me as the true hero of the tale, and I kept feeling the urge to peer over Norrell and around Strange to get a better look at his story. He was the most interesting, and most worthy, character in the whole book.

If I could change three things about the book, I would somehow write myself into its pages. You mustn’t take my criticisms as a rejection of the book itself. No, indeed! If there were a way to open a road into Clarke’s magical, bookish England, I would pack my valise and set out today. The interplay of the gracious and the grotesque, the sheer crystalline beauty and bloody muddle of it, is irresistible. Without a doubt, I will revisit this book, to spend what time I can, in the only manner I may, in the enchanting world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

And then I thought, no. Let’s not give up on 2011; let’s cram as much awesome as possible into the last three months and try to rescue this thing! Do you remember the ’1968′ episode of From the Earth to the Moon, where they focus on all the political and social turmoil of the year, the assassinations, the riots, and then Apollo 8 goes up and transmits the first-ever picture of Earthrise? And NASA gets a telegram from a woman that just says, “You saved 1968.” That’s what I want to do, on a personal scale. I want something so wonderful and thrilling that it balances out all the misery and gives us something to really celebrate in 2011. Let’s make a dream come true. This dream:

Yes, it’s a game–board, tokens, dice. And it’s a work of art, and a labor of love, and one man’s most cherished dream. I have known the designer, Corvus Elrod, for twenty years, and have gamed with him off and on for most of that span. He’s been working up to Bhaloidam that whole time, taking the ore of his gaming knowledge and refining it, burning off the unnecessary elements and extracting pure, shining metal. This he wrought into a light, elegant system for gaming–a set of elements that combine into character attributes, an expression of a character’s ability to impact the world and vice versa, and a mechanism for determining outcomes. Simple, really–just the tools for designing characters, taking their measure in the world, and counting their successes and failures.

There aren’t character classes, because you can play whatever character your story requires–in my own forays in Bhaloidam, I’ve been a little girl and a grandma; I’ve been human, snake-demon, and space lizard. Once, I was a post-Rapture religious zealot and assassin in 17th-century Japan, although she didn’t last long. (Bad dice.) There aren’t books of spells or classes of weapons or iron rations, although you can have those things, if they work for your story. What Corvus has done with Bhaloidam is not to design a world for you to go adventuring in; he’s given you the keys to the world-building machine. He’s not interested in having people run through a story he’s plotted; he wants to help them plot their own stories. Everyone at the table is an author in Bhaloidam; everyone works together to tell the best story possible. If you’ve played a lot of RPGs, it will be an adjustment for you to go from the adversarial GM-vs.-players model to the cooperative storytelling of Bhaloidam, and it’s a thrill, let me tell you. Once you catch on that you can do anything you can imagine, that you’re not picking from a list of actions, your imagination catches fire, and great things happen.

Gamers, authors, actors–Bhaloidam offers you valuable tools for your trades. But you don’t have to want to play Bhaloidam to back the project. You just have to want something awesome in the world, something designed to elicit cooperation, imagination, and fun. You just have to want to redress the horrible imbalance of the year, by turning a huge dream into reality. You just have to want to spread some happiness in a very deserving quarter.

Let’s do it. Let’s save 2011.

I added Horns to my RIP list on a whim–my friend/girl-crush Tansy recommended it just as I was drawing up my list, and her description was intriguing. I don’t read a lot of straight horror, but I like the way Tansy’s wicked mind runs; if she found the book funny and worthwhile, I suspected that I would as well. It was a happy bit of chance, because it’s unlikely I would have picked up the book on my own, and I really enjoyed it–so much so that I’ll definitely be reading Hill’s earlier novel, Heart-Shaped Box, too. I may even work it in before this year’s RIP is over.

Ig Perrish is a nice, normal guy, still reeling a year after the death of his beloved. He’s basically dropped out of his life, and can’t see much point in making an effort to resume it. Merrin is dead, and he might as well be, too. A dead Ig would certainly suit most of the townsfolk and–as his powers inform him–most of his family, too. Only his brother Terry is truly on Ig’s side, mostly because Terry knows for a fact Iggy wasn’t anywhere near the scene of the crime–because Terry was. Oh yes, these powers tell Ig terrible things, things he’d truly prefer not to know. But knowing the truth, he can’t help but do something about it. Luckily, those horns are more than just infernal sodium pentathol: Ig’s got a nice range of new powers. He’s a devil on mission of justice.

The middle section of the book takes a lengthy flashback, so we get a chance to know Ig and Merrin in happy times–along with person who will eventually murder her. The book plants lots of little mysteries–what was the code Merrin flashed to Iggy when they first met? What happened to the lovers during that lost afternoon in the Treehouse of the Mind (which: LOVED that!)? What exactly (and literally) is the killer’s damage? And, most frettingly, what did Iggy do that turned him into a vengeance demon? All the questions get satisfactory answers, eventually. I did worry for a while that we were going to hear all about Ig and the killer, and leave Merrin to be the impossibly-perfect, dead dreamgirl, but Hill finds a way for Merrin to tell her side of the story, too. He earned a great deal of goodwill from me for that.

The final section of the book, of course, is the confrontation with the murderer–a series of confrontations, as it turns out. Ig’s not up against your everyday deranged sex killer, and he’s not going to get by with just waving his horns at the perp and eliciting a confession. Nope, Ig’s going to have to be as smart, and fast, and ruthless as he can be–and even then, he might not come out on top. You’ve never had as much sympathy for the devil as this book evokes, I promise you.

Horns was a swift read–I gulped the first half in an afternoon, and finished the rest over three lunchtimes. It was funny, and horrifying, and touching, then funny/horrifying/touching all at once, and ultimately, deeply satisfying. A perfect RIP read!

But if Jinx isn’t the killer, then there’s someone out there murdering her loved ones and trying like hell to kill her, too. Jinx has to push through the fear that’s making her blank out the missing time. She has to find the courage to open the door to the dark room in her mind, and learn the truth in time to save herself.

Under no circumstances should you pick up a Minette Walters novel unless you have serious time to read. Don’t do as I did and think, “I should have a book in at the library in a couple of days, but what shall I do in the meantime? Oh, here’s a 500-page Minette Walters book. I can just read the first few chapters and then set it aside when the library book gets in.” No, you cannot. What you will do is leave your library book languishing on the hold shelf for a week while you subsume yourself in the mystery at hand. Don’t trifle with Minette Walters–she is that good.

In The Dark Room, we meet three families–the jilted bride’s, the groom’s, and the eloping bride’s–and must find our murderer amongst them. The trouble is, it’s all too easy to imagine any of them battering three human beings to death–they are terrible, twisted people. They’re greedy, vicious, selfish, and sexually…I don’t even know the word for it. Not perverted, exactly. More damaged and thwarted and…aberrant. As I read the book, compiling my guesses about who was guilty of what, I found myself thinking, “OK, if he didn’t do it, something bad should still happen to him,” and “If she’s not arrested for the murders, they better get her for something else.”

You might think it would be unpleasant to spend 500 pages with such people, but trust me, it’s mesmerizing. Walters has a way of making you emotionally invest in her stories. It’s partly a rubbernecking response, a literary version of gawking at the fools and monsters of reality TV, and it’s partly a desire to see justice done for all the crimes we’re forced to witness. That’s the comforting thing about a Minette Walters book–she doesn’t overlook the petty social infractions when she’s dealing out just desserts. Indeed, I think she’s as interested in punishing the gossips, the misers, and the cheats as she is in catching murderers. And that resonates, because in our daily lives, we suffer much more from the former than the latter.

No-one is innocent in a Minette Walters novel, but some are more innocent than others. Some deserve protection and sympathy, despite their shortcomings, and some deserve scorn and retribution. Some crimes require judicial proceedings, and some crimes carry their own punishment within them. Walters sees to all of them–and sometimes, she lets one person’s infraction be the punishment for another’s crime. The ending makes it quite clear who the killer is, but leaves a tantalizing question about the killer’s fate–so while we solve the mystery, we also got a delicious frisson of did-s/he or didn’t-s/he? And that makes it all the more satisfying.

DI Marjory Fleming and her team are suffering the doldrums of summer; even the petty criminals appear to be off holiday-making and causing trouble for some other squad. The discovery of the body in the forest brings them swiftly to attention–and soon they have arson, another murder, and an attempted murder to keep them hopping. The investigation will take Fleming and her sergeant to Manchester, England, but the killer is much closer to home than that. The killer, as Marjory learns almost too late, is within striking distance of her own team.

Aline Templeton got me again! I settled on one of her craftily-planted red herrings (who did turn out to be lying about a crucial detail that cracked the case open) and thought I’d solved the case well before my fictional clanswoman. Not so! This time, not only is the killer right in front of us for the whole book, Templeton plants a major clue early on–one that she successfully disguises as innocent fun, irrelevant to the case. I was gobsmacked by the revelation of the killer–and I love a mystery novel that can do that to me!

This was a gripping read from the very first pages–Templeton is skilled at communicating personality in just a few lines, so even the tertiary characters feel like living people seething with motives for a range of crimes. She spends nearly half the book setting up the second victim for murder, giving lots of people perfectly believable cause to want him dead. I stayed up well past my bedtime the night I finished the book, because once it started rolling toward conclusion, there was just no putting it down until the whole thing was resolved.

Series like these succeed on the strength of their main characters, and whether we invest in them as we get to know more about their lives from book to book. DI Fleming and her family are easy to relate to as they go through the kinds of stuff a lot of families experience–a parent whose dementia has progressed past the point the family can handle on their own; teen and tween issues with their children; communication challenges within the marriage. Marjory and Bill are still rebuilding their relationship after the events of the first book, and have reached a good place–which is endangered by actions on both their parts in this book. The daughter has largely recovered from the crisis of the second book, but continues to be a difficult teenager. The son is certainly going to have his own starring turn in an upcoming book–you can just feel him reaching the age when starts to test boundaries and tries to distance himself from the family unit.

Professionally, ‘Big Marge’ faces a test of her authority, as malcontents in the squad room challenge her leadership and nearly wreck the case. She also has to deal with the condescending attitude of her opposite number in the Manchester police–but here, Templeton nicely subverts the expected country vs. city clash, and this helps the characters involved seem like real people instead of cardboard cut-outs.

I will be very excited to revisit Kirkluce and the Fleming family–and to test my wits against Templeton’s plotting skills again–but not for a while. Only six DI Fleming books have been published so far, and the day I don’t have another one to look forward to will be bleak indeed. I can’t trust myself not to wolf the books down all in one go, so I’ve decided I’m going to wait until I just plain can’t stand it any more before I order the next book–and don’t think it doesn’t hurt me to hold out. Templeton left plenty of threads dangling at the end of Lying Dead, including the health status of one of the best supporting characters, and the feeling of life in Kirkluce moving on without is difficult to ignore. It’s hard to refrain from dropping in on characters who’ve begun to feel like friends, but I trust that the longer the separation lasts, the sweeter the reunion will be.

I’ve cleared the decks of all other bookish obligations, so I’m once again aiming for Peril the First: read four books of any length that fit into RIP’s generous categories:

Mystery
Suspense
Thriller
Dark Fantasy
Gothic
Horror
Supernatural

My shortlist (hah!) of targets includes:

1. Lying Dead, Aline Templeton
2. The Dark Room, Minette Walters
3. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
4. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
5. Horns, Joe Hill
6. Luther: The Calling, Neil Cross
7. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
8. The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox
9. The Small Hand, Susan Hill

To be honest, I’ve already finished Lying Dead (an excellent read!) and will have a review of it up shortly. Now I’m deep into The Dark Room, and am relishing the familiar psychological torment and obsession Walters’ books inspire. I have high hopes that Wilkie Collins will be this year’s Shirley Jackson–the classic author whom I finally get around to reading, and thereby discover treasures.

Several items are on the list based on reviews they got during last year’s RIP–one of the best things about the challenge is discovering new authors to enjoy. I’m still following many bloggers whom I added to my feeds on the strength of their RIP reviews, and they’ve been enriching my reading experience all year.

I’m sure I’ll undertake one or two films for the Peril on the Screen challenge–once the days get short and the nights chilly, I crave horror movies. I will not repeat last year’s film-a-week experiment, however–I’m only just now feeling ready to face Vincent Price again, after wallowing in his films for the entire run of RIP V. Too much of a good thing, indeed!

“When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

“Papa says I am confused sometimes.”

“As are we all,” said Eliza. “For confusion is a kind of bewitchment–a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.”

We’ve come to a resting point in our effort to scale Mt. Stephenson: Camp Confusion. Here, we obtain respite from the hard climb Quicksilver imposed on us; we are rewarded with pirate battles, alchemical intrigues, and some proper romance at last. We will shelter in place at Camp Confusion for a couple of months, as I take time away from the expedition to fulfill my RIP obligations. Then, in November, it’s on to the summit, where we shall thrill to discover The System of the World!

Fittingly, this novel is a con-fusion of two books: “Bonanza”, which relays Jack’s adventures with his pirate crew, and “The Juncto”, which follows Eliza’s quest. The two interplay nicely, as events in one storyline impact and influence the characters of the other, back and forth. NOTE: Beyond this point lie spoilers galore for both Quicksilver and The Confusion–there’s just no way to get into the meat of the story without telling you some pretty big stuff!

The book opens with Jack Shaftoe coming out of a great confusion of his own: he has been lost in syphilitic dementia, a galley slave for an indeterminate length of time. A nearly-fatal fever does him the favor of burning out the last of the syphilis in him; he returns to his right mind to find himself embroiled in a plot to win freedom and riches for himself and nine of his fellow slaves. With backing from a mysterious investor, they plan to steal a fortune in silver from a Spanish Viceroy’s ship. If they succeed, they’ll earn a share of the wealth and papers setting them free from bondage. Only one problem: their patron, the Duc d’Arcachon, is none other than the evil man who abducted Eliza and her mother into slavery all those years ago. Jack learned his identity in Quicksilver, but events conspired to prevent him taking action or informing Eliza of his discovery. Now restored to sanity, he agrees to the plan, hoping to find a way to achieve justice for (and perhaps forgiveness from) Eliza along the way. The plan succeeds only too well–rather than silver, the renegade crew relieves the Viceroy of a cargo of gold. This causes several problems, the biggest of which is the fact that the haul is believed to be the fabled “Solomonic gold,” reputed to have magical properties. Where Spain might pursue stolen silver until the pirates escaped from Spanish territory, the alchemy-obsessed cabal who own the golden treasure will pursue them to the ends of the Earth to retrieve it.

Eliza has also entangled herself with the wicked Duc d’Arcachon, but not yet learned his true identity. You’ll recall that Quicksilver ended with her giving birth to a child who might be considered miraculous? The d’Arcachons are an ancient and noble family who suffer a noble curse: too much inbreeding has led to Hapsburgian facial deformities in the line. The d’Arcachons crave nothing more than a woman who can ‘breed true’, i.e., give them a non-deformed heir. Eliza’s pregnancy occurred just after she was seduced by Etienne d’Arcachon, the Duke’s scion; when she bears a healthy, well-formed son, the d’Arcachons believe they have found their miracle woman. They immediately begin scheming toward a marriage between Eliza and Etienne. This first child, unfortunately, is illegitimate and cannot be acknowledged by the noble house–nor by his mother, nor his true father: Bonaventure Rossignol. Rossignol (“Bon-Bon” to the smitten Eliza), Court Cryptographer to Louis XIV, was originally put on Eliza’s trail to discover whether she had turned double-agent for William of Orange. Rossignol cracked all of Eliza’s codes, including her needlework journal, and found himself intrigued by the brilliant woman behind the sophisticated ciphers. He began protecting her, passing along sanitized versions of her decoded letters to the Court; eventually, he arranged to meet her, and passions flared. Thus it transpires that Rossignol’s son is passed off for a wondrously healthy d’Arcachon bastard.

Bon-Bon has not deciphered Eliza’s closest-held secret, though: her vow to kill the man who enslaved her. She is well entangled with the d’Arcachon family–about to marry Etienne, in fact–when she learns his father is the man she has resolved to murder. To her credit, she lets no sentiment, no consideration of power or desire for wealth, distract her from her mission. She will risk the position she has worked years to obtain and the safety of her child; she is prepared to relinquish her freedom, and perhaps her life, to take her vengeance. On the night of her engagement party, she has the weapon in hand, prepared to confront her enemy–but a late dispatch from Cairo will change everything for her. Jack Shaftoe, for all his perversity, has one hell of a way of apologizing to a lady.

Eliza’s triumph is marred by one thing only: the loss of her first child, the one she cannot acknowledge as her own, but whom she loves immensely, nonetheless. He goes by the name Jean-Jacques, and the accepted story is that he’s a war orphan Eliza took pity on and adopted. Everyone knows their true relationship, but believes him to be an illegitimate d’Arcachon, so they comply with the fiction. When the Solomonic gold is stolen by the notorious L’Emmerdeur and his crew, one seething cabal member tries to leverage Eliza’s connection to Jack to get it back. Lothar von Hackelhaber steals Jean-Jacques away one night, intending to hold him for ransom to pressure Eliza into retrieving the gold. This plot goes awry in a surprising way, which is the reason that Eliza, a French and English duchess, is represented in Cryptonomicon by the German mathematician Rudy von Hackelhaber, a brilliant cryptographer–well, he would be, descending as he does from Eliza and Bon-Bon.

Daniel Waterhouse has a smaller role to play in this book. He spends some quality time with Gottfried Leibniz, tutor to Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Daniel makes a fateful promise to the teenaged Princess: “I should be honored to receive a letter from your highness at any time…if I may be of service to your highness in any way whatsoever. And I promise your highness that I shall respond–cheerfully and without a moment’s hesitation.” Decades later, Caroline, now Princess of Wales, will hold the aged Dr. Waterhouse to this promise, setting the Baroque Cycle in motion.

Daniel has formed the desire to get away from the political and personal distractions of London and retire to a simpler life in America. He dreams of founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, dedicated to building a Logic Mill, a mechanical device that will perform computations of great complexity. Old friend Roger Comstock, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, offers to pay Daniel’s way and set him up with a sinecure in Massachusetts, in exchange for one teensy favor: he wants Daniel to lure Isaac Newton back from the wilds of alchemical research and convince him to take charge of the Royal Mint. If England is to be a serious player in international commerce, she must get serious about her coinage, and the King’s advisors have identified the brilliant, difficult, possibly mad Newton as the man to create a solid currency for the realm. In the thirty or so years since they roomed together at Cambridge, great misunderstandings have grown up between the two, but Roger correctly calculates that if anyone can bring Isaac into the royal fold, it’s Daniel.

Events fuse and con-fuse until Jack Shaftoe lands in the hands of his old enemy ‘Leroy’: Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV of France. Louis is prepared to forgive Jack all insults and injuries to himself, to his nobility, and to France, on two conditions: he must never again see la Duchesse d’Arcachon as long as he lives, and he must employ his pirating skills to one end: destroying the currency England is working so hard to establish. Le Roi promises that as England’s fortunes falter, those of Eliza and her children will prosper; the unspoken threat is that the reverse is equally true.

Sir Isac Newton, immoveable object, prepare to meet Jack Shaftoe, irresistible force!

Despite my fondness for these books, I rarely recommend them to anyone else, because they’re dense and little fun for anyone not interested in the themes they explore. Sometimes, they’re not even fun for readers who are interested: our expedition lost a member this month, partly because the book just wasn’t keeping him engaged. It’s unfortunate, because Corvus was the one who inspired us to meet old-fashioned book-club style, which was good nostalgic fun while it lasted. But, since that leaves just me climbing the mountain (Ken has already summited), I can be flexible with my timeline. I’m now planning to take a break between the second and third books, so I can fully participate in this year’s Readers Imbibing Peril. I’m excited to have the full two months free to devote to my very favorite challenge.

I think the thing to do is to discuss each of the component novels that make up Quicksilver in turn. And if I didn’t make it clear enough in the opening paragraph: Here Be Spoilers. (Maybe. Probably just little ones, though.)

In the first novel, also called “Quicksilver”, we meet Daniel Waterhouse, eminent scholar of the Royal Society and founder of the American branch of the Waterhouse family tree, which in the time of Cryptonomicon blossoms with Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse. Daniel is summoned back to England after 25 years of happy, self-imposed colonial exile by Caroline, Princess of Wales, soon to be Queen of England. She needs Daniel to resolve a vicious dispute between two of her pet natural philosophers, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. They’ve been feuding for years over their rival systems of calculus, and the future queen wants the matter settled, so her court may be peacefully graced by both eminences grises.

As Daniel’s ship sails for England (after battling its way past Blackbeard’s fleet in Boston Harbor–yay, pirates!), he reminisces over his youthful association with Isaac Newton and his own path to becoming a natural philosopher. The son of an infamous Dissident preacher, Daniel’s childhood was steeped in religion and politics; as a child, he witnessed the execution of Charles I and as a young man, his own father’s death literally at the hands of the restored monarchy. Little wonder he sought refuge in the fledgling discipline of science! Daniel’s reverie covers the plague years, the Great Fire, the founding of the Royal Society, the reigns of several Kings and one Lord Protector; there are Stygian dealings and moments of sublimity. Daniel’s time is heavily pregnant with our own modern world, science and commerce wrestling in the womb for right of precedence.

In Book 2, “The King of the Vagabonds”, we meet Bob and Jack Shaftoe, vagrant children in London (interesting that this family of mudlarks will become salvage operators and treasure hunters in a few centuries.) Forced to live by their prodigious wits, the brothers manage to rise above their origins–Bob as a soldier and Jack as a trickster/con man/thief/charmer/wanderer–in short, a vagabond. Nay, the very king of all vagabonds: driven by an impulse to naughtiness he calls the “Imp of the Perverse”, Jack commits such entertaining outrages that he becomes a folk hero known as L’Emmerdeur (something like the Scarlet Pimpernel crossed with Zorro, but in it more for his own profit and amusement than for the succor of the downtrodden.) Gleefully looting an Ottoman camp after the 1683 siege of Vienna, Jack frees a beautiful English(-ish) woman who had been enslaved in a harem: this is Eliza, and she has brains to match her beauty, as Jack swiftly learns. Eliza is actually from Qwlghm, an island off the coast of Scotland, which features in Cryptonomicon as an Allied outpost and the homeland of Mary Waterhouse, née cCmndhd, Lawrence’s wife. (SPOILER: though you might suspect so, the cCmndhd clan are not descended from Eliza, though we may consider them her spiritual heirs. But she is also represented in Cryptonomicon by a blood relative, although who that is will not become clear until a later book.)

Jack and Eliza agree to make their way in the world together. The deal works out rather better for Eliza, as by the end of the novel, she is wealthy and well-connected, a successful stockbroker, a countess in France and a secret duchess in the Netherlands, thanks to her role as a spy in both courts. William of Orange is about to make his move on the English throne, and if it succeeds, Eliza will come into her Anglo-Dutch title. Even when caught in the machinations of kings, Eliza is working the system for her own ends. She’s committed to ending slavery (in general) and the life of the man who enslaved her (in particular). A misguided business venture puts Jack afoul of Eliza’s quest, and their partnership is broken–which is really bad for Jack, as he himself will soon be enslaved by Barbary pirates.

The two story lines are brought together in Book 3, “Odalisque”, as Daniel Waterhouse makes the acquaintance of Eliza in Amsterdam. He is smitten, and she has uses for his connections in the Royal Society. Much of this novel is told in epistolary form, as we read Eliza’s letters to various people–and the coded messages embedded in them. Eliza uses a cipher she knows the Dutch have broken to correspond with her French spymaster–serving to keep William of Orange informed, per her double-agent status, and the French dis-informed. She uses a much better code to send real news to her friend, Gottfried Leibniz, and a curious system of needlework to keep an encrypted journal. Unfortunately for Eliza, there is one man gifted enough to break even her crewel-work code, and he just happens to be King Louis’ court cryptographer, Bonaventure Rossignol. He’s about to complicate Eliza’s life even more thoroughly than the warring kings have.

The book ends on a shriek for both our heroes: Eliza is kidnapped by enemies while in the throes of labor with a mysterious and potentially miraculous child; as Daniel prepares to sail for America, his friends throw him the worst going-away party imaginable.

The thread running through all these books is money: the creation, pursuit, movement, and uses thereof. Spanish pieces-of-eight are the currency of all the world, except in a few odd pockets–England, for example, makes do with its debased, clipped coinage. A market town in Lyon has a strange, ledger-based system in which no-one ever receives actual cash; it’s essentially a barter economy with a theoretical overlay of money. The tides and currents of cash flow are a problem which will increasingly attract the attention of the great minds of the age.

Now, on to the rollicking pirate adventures and devious court intrigues of Camp Confusion!