I recently had the use of my sister’s car for almost a month.  During that time, I didn’t rely on the MTA for my transportation needs, and I was reminded again just how inadequate Baltimore’s public transportation system is.

I like the idea of public transportation.  It’s a more efficient method of travel, in terms of energy expended and pollution generated per person.  I like the idea of settling back to read a book while someone else drives me to my destination.  I even like walking from place to place, provided it’s not too far.  (“Too far” varies depending on my level of interest, but generally runs between 10 and 30 minutes of walking.)

In an ideal city, public transportation would be a useful way to travel around, smoothly moving you from place to place without inconveniencing you as you traveled.  The city would have a subway or elevated train system with several lines that connected disparate portions of the city.  Traveling within the city would generally be as simple as walking a few blocks to a subway stop, changing trains once or, at most, twice, and walking a few more blocks to your destination.  Buses would fill in what gaps were left, as well as servicing the outlying areas that didn’t have a subway extension or light rail nearby.  Naturally, those trains and buses would have reasonable schedules that provided frequent and timely service while the organization running things would keep signs and scheduled up to date and inform riders of any problems with the service.

I don’t live in that city.  I live in Baltimore.  Baltimore has one subway that allows people to travel between Johns Hopkins, Lexington Market, and Owings Mills.  It has one set of Light Rail tracks (on which it tries to run three different lines) that will take you anywhere you want, as long as it’s BWI, Linthicum, Howard Street, Timonium, or Hunt Valley.  Most of the city is only accessible by bus, and those buses are frequently off-schedule.  In some cases, such as the #8 route, the schedule serves only to give a rough idea of the travel time between two points; the buses are so erratic that the schedule cannot be relied upon to indicate when one will arrive.

The city is also bad at communicating with its riders.  Light Rail passengers are occasionally forced to wait through several scheduled train arrivals for a vehicle, with no feedback from the MTA on what the problem was or when service would resume, despite the presence of public-address systems at every stop.  (Not to mention the mailing list, where the timely and useful messages from the MARC division arrive in stark contrast to the mute silence from the Light Rail devision.)  Bus routes get diverted without any effort to update the signs and schedules along the affected portion of the route.  I’ve waited and I’ve seen others wait at stops that declare buses from such-and-such route will be by at so-and-so time, only to be disappointed, enraged, and disheartened when bus after bus fails to show.

I used to declare that when I got a new car I’d eschew its use for day-to-day purposes and continue to rely on public transportation, giving me time to relax and read while allowing me to spend less money per month (a monthly bus pass costs less than a month’s worth of gas for me).  Much as that would be a good and ecologically sound idea in an ideal city, it’s one that’s far too annoying in a city as inconvenient as Baltimore.

I occasionally venture beyond my fiction readings into the realm of non-fiction, and I’m pretty sure it counts even if the book is itself about reading.  I saw The Child That Books Built mentioned in a post on Neil Gaiman’s blog and it sounded interesting enough, so I bought it the next time I was in a bookstore.

I found the book to be a rather mixed bag.  There were parts that I, like Gaiman, found eerily similar to my own experiences—the way reading can blot out all that transpires in the surrounding world, the discovery of SF, reading The Hobbit, reading the Narnia books.  (Though in my case, the Narnia series were the first “real” books I read with The Hobbit following shortly thereafter.)  There were other parts that didn’t necessarily resonate with my experiences but which I nevertheless found interesting—the discussion of lingual development in children, for instance.  Some things were just there as autobiographical but didn’t have echoes in my life—much of Spufford’s childhood reading differed from mine, being separated by both distance and time, while there were books that interested him but not me, such as the Little House on the Prairie series.  Possibly related to those were the parts where I felt that the book rambled without any clear purpose or result—the discussion of the primeval forest, or the exploration of small-town America.

Overall, I found it interesting but not really compelling.  Yet another book tucked into the category of, “Huh?  Oh, yeah, I’ve read that.”

There are so many different Discworld novels that it becomes difficult to write separately about each one, due to the similarities among them.  I don’t mean that in a bad way; the books are certainly distinct from each other, too.  It’s just that the things that keep me coming back to the series—the characters, the storytelling, the humor—are present in all of the books.

Nevertheless, Jingo tells its own story.  In this book, Pratchett has set his satirical sights on war, with the assistance of Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch.  As usual with a City Watch book, there’s a crime to be dealt with (two crimes, if you count the war itself), specifically an assassination attempt.  Chasing these crimes leads Vimes and his men out of Ankh-Morpork, past the newly-risen island of Leshp (gotta have something to fight over, after all), and into the wilds of Klatch, which is certainly not based on the Middle East.  :)

The Time of the Dark opens with a woman dreaming of events taking place in another world.  By the second page this book, published in 1982, has already described something as “cyclopean”.  I, having read that description, was busy being depressed about the story, fearing that Hambly was aspiring to some Lovecraft-styled tale.  (This would be a problem because most such imitations are bad ones.)  Fortunately (so to speak), it’s merely a run-of-the-mill fantasy story from the early ’80s.

The book does carry a fairly obvious Lovecraft influence, mostly in the descriptions of ancient architecture and of the Dark, a not-terribly-nice race which is encountered early in the book.  There was one particular description of some ancient ruins where I was enjoying some nice echoes of Lovecraft’s style until she actually used the adjective “Lovecraftian”.  Oh, well.

So the descriptive writing wasn’t too bad.  The plot was, unfortunately, pretty standard stuff.  People (a man and a woman) are transported from this world into another one where magic is possible and some great danger threatens.  These two become instrumental in saving people from the danger.  I was somewhat pleased to note that it wasn’t completely textbook—the two did not fall in love with each other.  On the other hand, the woman, a medieval scholar, discovers an innate talent for sword-based combat, while the man, a sometimes-biker and itinerant artist, finds that he can work magic and falls mutually in love with the widowed queen.

This is the first book in a series.  I want enough to know what will happen that I’d read the next books, but if they’re similar to this one, I’ll probably be sighing at the clichéd fantasy conventions as I come to them.

Another element of the teeming horde that comprises Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld novels, The Truth would probably be grouped with the subset featuring Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch.  That’s not entirely accurate, because the story really revolves around William de Worde’s newspaper, but the Watch is involved to a large degree.

I’m not entirely sure what to think about this book.  The whole thing is very Pratchett, with plenty of sections that left me literally laughing out loud (sometimes to the concern of those around me).  On the other hand, there were parts that I didn’t feel really worked, such as Mr. Tulip’s manner of cursing (“Too —ing right”).  I’d say that, on the whole, the book’s satirical bent tended to interfere with the storytelling.  It was good in pieces, but not necessarily in large chunks.  Still, it’s quite funny.  Go ahead and give it a read.