Terrier is about a girl, Beka Cooper, (whom old fans like me will know to be the ancestress of the Lioness books’ lovable Rogue George Cooper) who is in training to be a Dog, the Tortallan equivalent of police. She has a couple of magic tricks up her sleeve, like being able to listen to the spirits of the dead. But, as her mother was the victim of opportunistic and cruel crime, nothing serves her more than her hunger for justice. Okay, so, pretty standard fare so far. But holy crap, I have never got so much flak from my friends as when I was reading this book. Even my fantasy-reading friends were giving me crap for reading this. Most of their derision was aimed at the cover for being creepy and over-golden, which I have to agree it kind of is. They were also a bit scathing about the subject matter, which sounded cliched to them.

I’m a bit blind to the flaws of authors who have somehow managed to win my loyalty. I’m the same with some musicians. Even so, I have to say that while Terrier was engrossing reading, it had some minor problems. It was written in journal form. That’s a writerly conceit with merit, but the trick is balancing the getting-to-know-you value with the right amount of drama. Mostly the book reads fine, despite an extremely ambitious plot. But there are some saggy bits. And the character points can be overwrought, as in, ‘I get it! She’s shy! He’s a charismatic lady-killer! Okay, enough already!’

I’ll be damned a million times, though, if I can’t defend Tamora Pierce from lounge-room critics, because she was my first library-love. I received plenty of fines for her Song of the Lioness quartet books about Alanna, a magically gifted girl who pretended to be a boy for years because she wanted to be a knight. Come on! That is awesome-town stuff. I borrowed her books chronically until I could afford to buy them. And I read all her books that were set in Tortall (there are 15!). And that is because Pierce writes a fantastic female hero, and she just loves her readers as much as her characters, teaching them that it’s okay to be different or strong as long as you’re principled and compassionate. And she’s moral in the best possible way. I learned about the virtues of hard work and honour by reading Pierce’s books, but I also learned about evil, equality and the class system.

So even though Terrier isn’t my favourite example of Pierce’s strong-female issue-conscious fantasy, that’s still a genre I love, and the book features a range of fun, sympathetic characters, a good dose of danger, a purple-eyed cat and nobility everywhere you least expect it.

A by-the-bye — I’ve been reading a lot of YA and fantasy lately. But the last non-YA book I read was for my next book club meeting, and once I write up a book, it floats out of my head a little bit. So I’m hanging on to that one. Plus Terrier has to go back to the library. Wow, I cringe a little bit every time I write Terrier. I get so embarrassed about reading fantasy. Even more than I do about liking Selma Blair.

I heard about Kate Constable through Cheryl Klein’s fantastic blog. I love YA fantasy with young female protagonists, so I grabbed The Singer of All Songs and The Waterless Sea (not pictured) from the City Library (I should get paid for all the advertising I have been doing for them lately! Great library.) But, alas, they didn’t have the final book at any of the Melbourne Library branches (??) so I put in a request so I and others of my fantasy-devouring, cutting-down-on-book-buying (for good economic reasons) ilk can find out what happens at the end.

Like all my favourite fantasy books, there is a special esoteric magic at the heart of the Tremaris series. It’s the power of magical song, which goes for the most part (I think appropriately) unexplained. Calwyn is a priestess-to-be in Antaris, where the priestesses of ice-call live. When they sing, they can call up ice and snow. Meanwhile, there are lands outside the ice wall of Antaris that the girls are encouraged to fear. However, she finds a man one day, inside the walls of Antaris, where a man has never stepped. Constable brings the use of magic to life very nicely–the girls need to master their vocals to perform magic, and this information brings a relatable sense of hard work to the fantastical abilities of the chanters. The vocabulary of ‘chantment’ is also lovely, immediate and understated, a great example of a successful fantasy neologism.

I enjoyed both these books a lot, although I think the end of the first book lacked punch. Also, an incidental effect of the third person narrative which jumped around from character to character was that I couldn’t get into the characters at some points. I think that device has been tightened and used to greater dramatic effect in Constable’s subsequent Tremaris offering The Taste of Lightning (also a very good read, review later). Constable certainly weaves a sophisticated power-and-collaboration tale, and she has a fine touch for romantic tension. Beautiful characters and lots of action, if that’s your thing. It’s certainly mine.

It really took me a long time to get into the Russians. I’m 24 now, and I’ve only read Crime and Punishment so far. Does Nabokov count? Well, I’ve read Lolita. But those are kind of the bare minimum, aren’t they? So I decided to get serious with Anton Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895. You know something is serious when it has a date range in the title. It means: whoa, this guy did good stuff in other years, too. I’ve already posted a review of Murder, one of the stories in the collection. The other stories offer plenty of insight into Chekhov’s life and interests. Chekhov was a doctor, and the story Ward No. 6 is set in a mental hospital; Chekhov loved gardening, hence The Black Monk’s protagonist Kovrin considers ‘A few Observations on Mr Z’s Remarks on Double-Trenching in New Gardens’ light reading.

What I really love about Chekhov’s stories arises from its genre, which I guess you could call Russian realism. Selecting a diverse range of characters to portray, Chekhov throws in observations spanning class and gender. From parsimony to prodigality, details and decisions are invoked to present a straightforward yet dramatic picture of 1800s Russia. The lightness of Chekhov’s touch belies the intrepidity with which he surveys the ingredients of the personal present, such as tricks of personality and situation entrapment.

Even more specifically than Russian realism, Chekhov is a master of the aesthetics of consequences. Stories like A Woman’s Kingdom, which details the life of Anna Akimovna, the heiress of a bustling industrial business, investigate the doubled-edged blessing and curse of belonging to the middle class. Anna’s business is heavily reliant on the poor treatment and management of its workers, a fact which both plagues and bores her. The institution of marriage is assiduously mined, too–The Two Volodyas has as its focus Sophia Lvovna who, married to one man, lusts after another. Sophia’s lack of self-restraint or understanding is her flaw, and though it is not fatal within the confines of the story, her leisurely floundering evokes pity and exhaustion.

Though Hemingway criticised Chekhov as an ‘amateur writer’, his stories are remarkable despite their deceptive simplicity. His slice-of-life style, which allows him to resist relying on resolution for meaning, sees him invest his characters with enough shovel, as it were, to dig their holes. And to immobilise without even taking out the rope, well that’s definitely something.

When Helen Garner was asked at the Melbourne Writers Festival (yes, I’m still milking it) about the books she loved, she said that the last books she had read with a kind of crazed greed were Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Those are absolutely three of my favourite books in the world. I read that series ensconced in bed, the diary cleared, and tea and biscuits within reach.

It’s not uncommon for writers to have hits and misses – I loved all of Tamora Pierce’s books but I couldn’t get through a single of one of her Circle of Magic books. So, on the same logic, I never sought out Pullman’s Sally Lockhart books (the first of which is The Ruby in the Smoke). Finding it in the City Library last week, then, was a wildly mixed blessing. But I needn’t have worried because the first page is an absolute ripper. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a good one.

The Ruby in the Smoke is set in London some time in the 1800s. Yes, I found this book in the YA section, but there are things in this book that would have the anti-Harry Potter brigade tutting for sure. Sally Lockhart is a very pretty 16-year old who carries a gun and doesn’t take to officious authority, but she also loves accounting and knows obscure things about photography. Plus she speaks Hindustani. If I had kids I’d much rather have them reading about her than the Olsen twins.

The titular smoke refers to opium, and during Sally’s search for her father, she discovers the wretchedness brought upon the Chinese and British people unfortunate enough to come under its spell. In Sally Lockhart, Pullman has given us a wondrously human heroine who is loyal, brave and capable, just like Lyra after her. Though there’s no comparison between this book and the His Dark Materials books in terms of scope (which deals with God and parallel universes, for crying out loud) The Ruby in the Smoke is certainly equal in compassion, excitement and intrigue.

I collect old Penguins, fitfully. I try to stick to ones that I will read because the bookshelves are just dripping. But when John, Lauren, Royce, Daisy and I went on a trip to the hills a little while ago I added these to my collection:

They are, in order of appearance, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros – The Chairs – The Lesson, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Brecht’s Parables for the Theatre, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. John was v surprised that I hadn’t read the latter.

The Ionesco has a superlative cubist cover: