{"id":10145,"date":"2006-02-11T22:17:42","date_gmt":"2006-02-12T03:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/02\/11\/10145.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:54:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:54:46","slug":"book-report-the-sea-of-trolls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/02\/11\/book-report-the-sea-of-trolls\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Sea of Trolls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, as you are aware, Gentle Reader, Your Humble Blogger is attempting to blog every single book read. This is, on occasion, disconcerting, when I discover that I haven’t blogged a book that I know<\/I> I’ve read. As for instance, when beginning to write a note for The Sea of Trolls<\/a>, and wanting to refer back to what I had said about Nancy Farmer’s really magnificent earlier book The House of the Scorpion<\/a>, and discovering that evidently I never read it. Which is wrong. I did read it. I’m fairly certain I read it in August or September of last year, but that could well be wrong. However, I’m really quite certain I didn’t read it before I began blogging my reading in January 2004. I got it from a library, for one thing, but which one and when ... I can’t remember. Sometimes, when I do this, I go back and write a whole note for it, but since I can’t really put my finger on when<\/I> I read it, I don’t want to do that, and besides, I am finding the whole thing terrible and surprisingly disorienting. It’s as if having not blogged it, I must not have really done it. Which is too bad, because it really is a marvelous book, and I suspect that I had intended to talk about (and in fact have a vague recollection of writing) about why such a book is a ‘young adult’ book at all, since it’s nice, chewy, juicy reading, every bit as good a book as many specfic novels I’ve read in the last few years, and I don’t see why it should be banned from the grown-up part of the library.\n

Anyway, this latest Nancy Farmer book, although still quite good, feels<\/I> a lot more juvenile, in the sense that I felt, whilst reading it, that it wasn’t really meant for me, that it wasn’t meant to challenge or scare or provoke me very much. I’m not sure I could say what it is that feels that way; it’s not (I think) the vocabulary, or the difference in the amount of death, disease and depression, or the scariness of the bad guys. Well, I suppose it is, in some way, the scariness of the bad guys; in this, there is a Bad Guy, she is a half-troll, a shape-shifter, and a rider of Nightmares. And although she was the Bad Guy, she wasn’t a bit scary; she was a buffoon baddie, not a serious threat to either kill or ensorcel Our Hero. But I don’t think that’s the difference, either, as I felt it long before we met or heard of her. Hm.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, as you are aware, Gentle Reader, Your Humble Blogger is attempting to blog every single book read. This is, on occasion, disconcerting, when I discover that I haven\u2019t blogged a book that I know I\u2019ve read. As for instance,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17685,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10145\/revisions\/17685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}