"Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on." Herman Melville in Moby Dick
Current book-selection rotation: B, M, J, A, K
Thursday, April 15, 2010
"Rebel" by Bernard Cornwell
Another book found thanks to NPR. Cornwell was on "Fresh Air" talking about his latest book (from another series), but this book came up in the conversation and sounded interesting. It is pretty long, but I've only heard good things about it!
I finished the first part and thought, since the book is so long, that I would post about each part as I complete it rather than waiting till the end. Especially since I have a tendency to forget what I wanted to write about within a hundred or so pages. :-)
So far I'm enjoying it, though I could do with a little less detail. For example, I really don't need to know EXACTLY what the new uniforms look like. I haven't found a female character that I've liked yet, but maybe she will come along later. I do enjoy the writing style and have a couple of passages to mention:
Since there are no chapter numbers- P. 25 of my volume: "Eliza had tripped lightly across the make-believe ice floes pursued by a pair of lethargic and dribbling dogs that mimght or might not have been bloodhounds." I had to snicker at the visual that produced. This passage also reminded me that I haven't ever read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and maybe should do that someday in the near future.
P. 71 "I know lawyers who'd like to have a rope, a tall tree, and Mister Delaney all attached to each other." Another snicker moment.
P. 106 "He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. 'It keeps the deer off the crop,' he explained." Okay, but it can't be good for the corn.
And finally on p.123 "Next morning Thomas Truslow gave his house and his land and his best leather belt to Rober Decker." Not his best leather belt! :-)
Vocabulary words I have learned: 1) octoroon: a person that has one black great-grandparent 2) plangent: loud or resonant, often a mournful sound 3) uxorious: submissive to one's wife (Randy?)
Uxorious is a fantastic "x" word I would love to use in Scrabble, if I could only remember how to spell it.
I'm finding the non-requisite details a bit overwhelming, seems to me like Cornwell wants to justify his research by throwing in some odd details that don't really matter, ganderpull comes to mind.
My very favorite quote is (from page 137 in my copy), "the face of an angel, body of a whore, and his bastard in her belly". Let's see, when can I use that in everyday speech? Such a wonderful description of a one night fricky frick.
There are several things I don't like about the layout of the book, at least my copy. I especially don't like that the map is at the beginning of Part 2 and NEVER USED. Instead is needed for Part 3, I think.... I don't like that astericks ***** denoting a change are at the very bottom of a page or at the very top of a page, why bother? And in my mind, there are places where ***** should be and they are not. The author and editor should have done a better job. It makes me think this was hurriedly assembled.
The character I like the most is Truslow, he's the only "true to character" character so far.
I have just begun the first few pages of Part 3 and my response is WTH?!?!?!? I'll save my Part 3 comments for later.
I finished last week, but have been so distracted by Sookie that my post is delayed.
Joy, I agree with you about the layout of the book. No chapter numbers either! That really irritates me. Also, my copy has very jagged page edges, and I had a hard time turning them as I was reading. A silly thing to complain about, maybe, but it kept popping my bubble. Also, I didn't even realize there was a map at Part 2. That would have been helpful had I noticed it whe I was in Part 3.
M, your quote about the lawyer, rope and tree was also on my list of favorites. Here are some more:
Pg 137, Starbuck (regarding Ridley) "..that goddamned son of a supercilious bitch Ridley?" He's come quite a long way from the preacher's son who was barely able to say "damn" when he was sawing planks in the pit! (Also, the entire following scene with Starbuck talking to the hungover Moxey and Ridley reminded me of Frank Burns talking to Hawkeye and Trapper John)
Pg 161, Truslow " 'What you know about horses, boy, I could write in the dust with one bladderful of weak piss.' "
Pg 212, James Starbuck "He had managed but two hours sleep and had woken to a sharp attack of flatulence that he acknowledged to be entirely his own." I've done that!! lol.
Pg 219, Colonel Lassan " '..the practice of war is much like making love to a woman -- an activity full of delights, but none of them predictable and the best of them capable of inflicting grievous injury on a man.' "
Pg 251, Washington Faulconer " 'Life's like jumping a bad fence on a good horse, the more responsibility you leave to the horse, the safer you'll be..' "
Overall I didn't care for the book (sorry, M). It was over detailed with regards to the bit characters and background and under detailed with regards to the main characters. Agonizing details led up to what I thought would be integral scenes (Starbuck's debauch with Pecker, Starbuck and Sally's night of lust, etc) -- only to have them skipped over! Secondly, the subject just wasn't my taste. Part 3 especially, was so gory I had a hard time reading it (i.e. the leg amputation and James' horse dying). However I will say that it wasn't as dry and lecture-like as I expected. The other thing that made it hard for me to enjoy was the simple fact that I already knew how the big final battle was going to end. I do prefer a little bit of mystery.
I really liked Pecker and Truslow. I thought they were the best written characters, and also the voice of sanity through the book. I kind of expected James and Nate to meet up on the battlefield, did you? I think the series continues, right? If so I would expect the congressman's wife who showed up at the end to play a role. She had spunk.
I wish Faulconer had found out Ridley was cheating him, and I don't buy Sally's miraculous recovery from being betrayed, kidnapped, beaten and raped for a month. "She shrugged and turned toward the window. 'I guess I needed breaking too.' " (pg 175) REALLY?
I've finished Part II and am about halfway through Part III, so expect to finish today. Overall I still like it, though I have been skipping over the gory passages. Additionally, I don't like the female characters at all, which is disappointing. But I like most of the writing, with exception of the many unnecessary details.
I have also found a couple of previously unknown words, but didn't think to mark them. I spent about 2 minutes trying to figure out how you would even pronounce the one word!
My copy has the same layout issues and I, like A, especially abhor the lack of chapter numbers. I would also have appreciated a table of contents so that I could reference the map more easily.
The angel/whore quote was also one of my favorites. Other additional quotes from Part II:
"Sitz-bad please, my dear Nate. It works better in German, all cures do." Some things are just better in a foreign language. For example, escargo and angst.
In reference to an elephant- "Unnecessarily large, gray, curiously wrinkled and with burdensome droppings." This made me think of the passage in Gulliver's Travels where they had to move his "burdensome droppings" in wheelbarrows. That, and I just love poop references. :-)
Finally, I was absolutely dismayed with the ganderpulls. What a barbaric holiday game. Ugh.
Okay, all done. Part III was certainly a lot of war, wasn't it? It goes pretty quickly if you skip over all the gory sections. Braveheart does too. :-)
In one way I'm glad that he includes the gruesome commentary of war because it shows it more like it actually was and less the sterile troop movements and casualty numbers you read about in history books. However, with that said, I don't necessarily want to read about it, especially not when bad things happen to the horses.
J, I'm wondering about your WTH comment for Chapter 3?
Washington Falconer certainly turned out to be an ass, didn't he? At the end I came out very much on the side of Truslow and Pecker. I would like to like Adam, but he seems very weak with his father around. I think he should have told Falconer about Starbuck saving his life much sooner, not that it seems to have made any difference.
I also take issue with Sally's miraculous recovery and wonder if she will reappear in the series (I am going to finish out the series, I think. I already have the next book "Copperhead" here.) I also wonder if there will be more fallout about Ridley. I can't see Falconer letting that go, especially the way Pecker and Truslow bullied him into it in the end.
I really hope Adam steps up in the next books, too. Also, I definitely expect a confrontation between James and Nate, and Nate and his father. I would like to meet his sister Martha. SHe seems like the only female character worth anything so far.
Anyway, so I am ready to move on. While I liked this book, it is not one of my favorites.
"Why doesn't war take the illiterates first?" by Pecker, and
"'Behold a miracle,' the doctor announced and poured a trickle of chloroform onto the unconscious man's testicles. The man seemed to go into instant spasm, but then opened his eyes, bellowed with pain and tried to sit up. 'Frozen balls,' the doctor said happily, 'known in the profession as the Lazarus effect'." In the midst of reading about war, this really made me laugh.
And I KNEW Angie, that you would pick out the flatulence part, crazy me or what?
My WTH about Part 3 was about Starbuck going "back" to daddy and how Falconer had arranged this 6 weeks ago, like he just knew he would be at Manassas at that time and his brother James would be there to meet him, you've got to be kidding?!!!!
Part 3 was long and drawn out and only the truly battle-minded personna could really enjoy it. Otherwise, yuck. Especially horses dying.
Other vocab: pusillanimously - cowardly, timidly threnody - a funeral song
And other quotes, pg 209 "fools usually need repetition to understand even the simplest of ideas". I'm thinking I'll make that into a poster to hang up in my classroom and see how many students understand it, of course I'd have to read it to them 7, 8, or 100 times!
THere were too many things in this book that just didn't make sense to me. When Adam is saying good by to Nate, he says "I'll guard your traps and send them home". When were traps ever discussed? And the marching across flat pasture, and in the next paragraph described as "sylvan". It lost credibility.
I did like Truslow and Pecker (wish there had been more of him in the beginning, he's a school teacher and then shows up on the battlefield and YES I GET IT, the bullets are too high!). I did not like Nate Starbuck, he just went too bad too fast, a preacher's son runs away to become a lying drinking cigar-smoking lustful murdurer. I'm really just interested in how things turned out for Sally.
I've FINALLY finished reading "Copperhead", the next book in the Starbuck chronicles. There are two other books in the series, but I won't be reading them.
If possible, this book had even more fighting and gruesome deaths then the last and even had torture, oh joy. I skipped over most those parts and still took a long time to read the book because there just didn't seem to be a lot of plot otherwise. The main storyline, besides the battle of Ball's Bluff, is that Adam becomes a traitor to the south and starts sending letters detailing southern troop movements and strengths to James, Nate's brother, who is fighting for the North. When this is discovered by the South, they assume that Nate is the spy (this is where the torture comes in). Finally, having not gotten him to confess (because he's innocent), they send him to his brother with a bogus "spy" letter. He gets found out in the North, and escapes back to the South where he blackmails Adam to get his father to allow him back into the Falconer Legion (he'd been kicked out by Falconer at the beginning of the book).
So, what happened to our favorite characters? Nate stays the same throughout the book basically. He doesn't want to betray Adam as a spy, but that doesn't stop him from blackmailing him. Although it may seem that Adam has developed a backbone- he hasn't. He is whiny and deceitful through most of the book. Truslow and Pecker are not in this book much since it is set away from the Falconer Legion for most of it. Sally shows up quite a bit, she is now the caretaker of the whorehouse and runs a "seance" parlor out the back. She has become quite successful and wealthy. Nate, at one point, asks her to marry him and she, wisely, says no. Meanwhile, Adam had gotten engaged to a nice Christian girl from a pious family. She has a bit of fire (I really liked this character) and becomes friends with Sally, without telling her parents or Adam. Finally, at the end, she and Adam break up. Adam is too much of a weakling for her, and she is too strongwilled for him. She and Nate have hit it off and the end makes you think maybe they will get together in the next book. I can live with not knowing. Oh, and Washington Falconer remains just as much an ass in this book as he was in the last.
And with that, I am done with the Starbuck Chronicles.
9 comments:
I finished the first part and thought, since the book is so long, that I would post about each part as I complete it rather than waiting till the end. Especially since I have a tendency to forget what I wanted to write about within a hundred or so pages. :-)
So far I'm enjoying it, though I could do with a little less detail. For example, I really don't need to know EXACTLY what the new uniforms look like. I haven't found a female character that I've liked yet, but maybe she will come along later. I do enjoy the writing style and have a couple of passages to mention:
Since there are no chapter numbers-
P. 25 of my volume: "Eliza had tripped lightly across the make-believe ice floes pursued by a pair of lethargic and dribbling dogs that mimght or might not have been bloodhounds." I had to snicker at the visual that produced. This passage also reminded me that I haven't ever read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and maybe should do that someday in the near future.
P. 71 "I know lawyers who'd like to have a rope, a tall tree, and Mister Delaney all attached to each other." Another snicker moment.
P. 106 "He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. 'It keeps the deer off the crop,' he explained." Okay, but it can't be good for the corn.
And finally on p.123 "Next morning Thomas Truslow gave his house and his land and his best leather belt to Rober Decker." Not his best leather belt! :-)
I have finished Part 1 and Part 2.
Vocabulary words I have learned:
1) octoroon: a person that has one black great-grandparent
2) plangent: loud or resonant, often a mournful sound
3) uxorious: submissive to one's wife (Randy?)
Uxorious is a fantastic "x" word I would love to use in Scrabble, if I could only remember how to spell it.
I'm finding the non-requisite details a bit overwhelming, seems to me like Cornwell wants to justify his research by throwing in some odd details that don't really matter, ganderpull comes to mind.
My very favorite quote is (from page 137 in my copy), "the face of an angel, body of a whore, and his bastard in her belly". Let's see, when can I use that in everyday speech? Such a wonderful description of a one night fricky frick.
There are several things I don't like about the layout of the book, at least my copy. I especially don't like that the map is at the beginning of Part 2 and NEVER USED. Instead is needed for Part 3, I think.... I don't like that astericks ***** denoting a change are at the very bottom of a page or at the very top of a page, why bother? And in my mind, there are places where ***** should be and they are not. The author and editor should have done a better job. It makes me think this was hurriedly assembled.
The character I like the most is Truslow, he's the only "true to character" character so far.
I have just begun the first few pages of Part 3 and my response is WTH?!?!?!? I'll save my Part 3 comments for later.
I finished last week, but have been so distracted by Sookie that my post is delayed.
Joy, I agree with you about the layout of the book. No chapter numbers either! That really irritates me. Also, my copy has very jagged page edges, and I had a hard time turning them as I was reading. A silly thing to complain about, maybe, but it kept popping my bubble. Also, I didn't even realize there was a map at Part 2. That would have been helpful had I noticed it whe I was in Part 3.
M, your quote about the lawyer, rope and tree was also on my list of favorites. Here are some more:
Pg 137, Starbuck (regarding Ridley)
"..that goddamned son of a supercilious bitch Ridley?"
He's come quite a long way from the preacher's son who was barely able to say "damn" when he was sawing planks in the pit!
(Also, the entire following scene with Starbuck talking to the hungover Moxey and Ridley reminded me of Frank Burns talking to Hawkeye and Trapper John)
Pg 161, Truslow
" 'What you know about horses, boy, I could write in the dust with one bladderful of weak piss.' "
Pg 212, James Starbuck
"He had managed but two hours sleep and had woken to a sharp attack of flatulence that he acknowledged to be entirely his own."
I've done that!! lol.
Pg 219, Colonel Lassan
" '..the practice of war is much like making love to a woman -- an activity full of delights, but none of them predictable and the best of them capable of inflicting grievous injury on a man.' "
Pg 251, Washington Faulconer
" 'Life's like jumping a bad fence on a good horse, the more responsibility you leave to the horse, the safer you'll be..' "
Overall I didn't care for the book (sorry, M). It was over detailed with regards to the bit characters and background and under detailed with regards to the main characters. Agonizing details led up to what I thought would be integral scenes (Starbuck's debauch with Pecker, Starbuck and Sally's night of lust, etc) -- only to have them skipped over! Secondly, the subject just wasn't my taste. Part 3 especially, was so gory I had a hard time reading it (i.e. the leg amputation and James' horse dying). However I will say that it wasn't as dry and lecture-like as I expected. The other thing that made it hard for me to enjoy was the simple fact that I already knew how the big final battle was going to end. I do prefer a little bit of mystery.
I really liked Pecker and Truslow. I thought they were the best written characters, and also the voice of sanity through the book. I kind of expected James and Nate to meet up on the battlefield, did you? I think the series continues, right? If so I would expect the congressman's wife who showed up at the end to play a role. She had spunk.
I wish Faulconer had found out Ridley was cheating him, and I don't buy Sally's miraculous recovery from being betrayed, kidnapped, beaten and raped for a month. "She shrugged and turned toward the window. 'I guess I needed breaking too.' " (pg 175) REALLY?
I've finished Part II and am about halfway through Part III, so expect to finish today. Overall I still like it, though I have been skipping over the gory passages. Additionally, I don't like the female characters at all, which is disappointing. But I like most of the writing, with exception of the many unnecessary details.
I have also found a couple of previously unknown words, but didn't think to mark them. I spent about 2 minutes trying to figure out how you would even pronounce the one word!
My copy has the same layout issues and I, like A, especially abhor the lack of chapter numbers. I would also have appreciated a table of contents so that I could reference the map more easily.
The angel/whore quote was also one of my favorites. Other additional quotes from Part II:
"Sitz-bad please, my dear Nate. It works better in German, all cures do." Some things are just better in a foreign language. For example, escargo and angst.
In reference to an elephant- "Unnecessarily large, gray, curiously wrinkled and with burdensome droppings." This made me think of the passage in Gulliver's Travels where they had to move his "burdensome droppings" in wheelbarrows. That, and I just love poop references. :-)
Finally, I was absolutely dismayed with the ganderpulls. What a barbaric holiday game. Ugh.
Okay, all done. Part III was certainly a lot of war, wasn't it? It goes pretty quickly if you skip over all the gory sections. Braveheart does too. :-)
In one way I'm glad that he includes the gruesome commentary of war because it shows it more like it actually was and less the sterile troop movements and casualty numbers you read about in history books. However, with that said, I don't necessarily want to read about it, especially not when bad things happen to the horses.
J, I'm wondering about your WTH comment for Chapter 3?
Washington Falconer certainly turned out to be an ass, didn't he? At the end I came out very much on the side of Truslow and Pecker. I would like to like Adam, but he seems very weak with his father around. I think he should have told Falconer about Starbuck saving his life much sooner, not that it seems to have made any difference.
I also take issue with Sally's miraculous recovery and wonder if she will reappear in the series (I am going to finish out the series, I think. I already have the next book "Copperhead" here.) I also wonder if there will be more fallout about Ridley. I can't see Falconer letting that go, especially the way Pecker and Truslow bullied him into it in the end.
I really hope Adam steps up in the next books, too. Also, I definitely expect a confrontation between James and Nate, and Nate and his father. I would like to meet his sister Martha. SHe seems like the only female character worth anything so far.
Anyway, so I am ready to move on. While I liked this book, it is not one of my favorites.
I forgot my last two quotes!
"Why doesn't war take the illiterates first?" by Pecker, and
"'Behold a miracle,' the doctor announced and poured a trickle of chloroform onto the unconscious man's testicles. The man seemed to go into instant spasm, but then opened his eyes, bellowed with pain and tried to sit up. 'Frozen balls,' the doctor said happily, 'known in the profession as the Lazarus effect'." In the midst of reading about war, this really made me laugh.
Just finished.
And I KNEW Angie, that you would pick out the flatulence part, crazy me or what?
My WTH about Part 3 was about Starbuck going "back" to daddy and how Falconer had arranged this 6 weeks ago, like he just knew he would be at Manassas at that time and his brother James would be there to meet him, you've got to be kidding?!!!!
Part 3 was long and drawn out and only the truly battle-minded personna could really enjoy it. Otherwise, yuck. Especially horses dying.
Other vocab:
pusillanimously - cowardly, timidly
threnody - a funeral song
And other quotes, pg 209 "fools usually need repetition to understand even the simplest of ideas". I'm thinking I'll make that into a poster to hang up in my classroom and see how many students understand it, of course I'd have to read it to them 7, 8, or 100 times!
THere were too many things in this book that just didn't make sense to me. When Adam is saying good by to Nate, he says "I'll guard your traps and send them home". When were traps ever discussed?
And the marching across flat pasture, and in the next paragraph described as "sylvan". It lost credibility.
I did like Truslow and Pecker (wish there had been more of him in the beginning, he's a school teacher and then shows up on the battlefield and YES I GET IT, the bullets are too high!). I did not like Nate Starbuck, he just went too bad too fast, a preacher's son runs away to become a lying drinking cigar-smoking lustful murdurer. I'm really just interested in how things turned out for Sally.
ANd yes Falconer is an ass.
I've FINALLY finished reading "Copperhead", the next book in the Starbuck chronicles. There are two other books in the series, but I won't be reading them.
If possible, this book had even more fighting and gruesome deaths then the last and even had torture, oh joy. I skipped over most those parts and still took a long time to read the book because there just didn't seem to be a lot of plot otherwise. The main storyline, besides the battle of Ball's Bluff, is that Adam becomes a traitor to the south and starts sending letters detailing southern troop movements and strengths to James, Nate's brother, who is fighting for the North. When this is discovered by the South, they assume that Nate is the spy (this is where the torture comes in). Finally, having not gotten him to confess (because he's innocent), they send him to his brother with a bogus "spy" letter. He gets found out in the North, and escapes back to the South where he blackmails Adam to get his father to allow him back into the Falconer Legion (he'd been kicked out by Falconer at the beginning of the book).
So, what happened to our favorite characters? Nate stays the same throughout the book basically. He doesn't want to betray Adam as a spy, but that doesn't stop him from blackmailing him. Although it may seem that Adam has developed a backbone- he hasn't. He is whiny and deceitful through most of the book. Truslow and Pecker are not in this book much since it is set away from the Falconer Legion for most of it. Sally shows up quite a bit, she is now the caretaker of the whorehouse and runs a "seance" parlor out the back. She has become quite successful and wealthy. Nate, at one point, asks her to marry him and she, wisely, says no. Meanwhile, Adam had gotten engaged to a nice Christian girl from a pious family. She has a bit of fire (I really liked this character) and becomes friends with Sally, without telling her parents or Adam. Finally, at the end, she and Adam break up. Adam is too much of a weakling for her, and she is too strongwilled for him. She and Nate have hit it off and the end makes you think maybe they will get together in the next book. I can live with not knowing. Oh, and Washington Falconer remains just as much an ass in this book as he was in the last.
And with that, I am done with the Starbuck Chronicles.
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