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Books, books, books.
(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)
So far this year...
#1 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
#2 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
#3 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
Not-#4 -- Neil Gaiman Anansi Boys
#4 -- John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
#5 -- Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Takes A Holiday
#6 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds
#7 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Threshold
#8 -- Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
#9 -- James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand
#10 -- Minister Faust, From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain
#11-17 Ru Emerson, Night-Threads 1-6
#18 -- Louse Cooper, Avatar
#19 -- Meredith Ann Pierce, The Darkangel
#20 -- Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
#21 -- Richard Peck, Remembering The Good Times
#22 -- Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
#23 -- Nick Mamatas, Under My Roof
#24 -- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not For Burning
#25 -- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
#26 -- Eliot Fintushel, Breakfast With the Ones You Love
#27 -- Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms
#28 -- Justine Larbalestier, Magic Lessons
#29 -- Holly Black, Tithe
#30 -- Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites
#31 -- Holly Black, Ironside
#32 -- Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place
#33 -- Nicola Griffith, Stay
#34 -- John Scalzi, Old Man's War
#35 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Low Red Moon
#36 -- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
#37 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt
#38 -- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
#39 -- Art Spiegelman, Maus I
#40 -- Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum
#41 -- Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
#42 -- Liz Williams, Snake Agent
#43 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Legacy
#44 -- Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water
#45 -- Melissa Marr, Wicked Lovely
#46 -- Sarah Monette, The Mirador
#47 -- Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves
#48 -- Cherie Priest, Not Flesh Nor Feathers
#49 -- Jo Walton, Ha'Penny
#50 -- Charles Stross, The Merchants' War
#51 -- Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, The Shadow Speaker
#52 -- Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys
Not-#53 -- Tim Powers, Expiration Date
I put this down about 85 pages in, for a...slightly undefinable mix of reasons. Let's see if I can take a shot at them. I had trouble feeling sorry or sympathetic for Kootie, who has basically started the plot going due to being petulant and silly. Yes, he is a child, and his parents haven't exactly given him the most transparent reasons for the oddities of his upbringing, but breaking stuff in a fit of pique is...well, tantrums are a major personality turnoff for me. Add the equally mysterious nature of the menace, the five or more PoV characters in said 85 pages, and a distinct lack of narrative motion, and it feels not like something large is being set up with a solid core of I know what I'm doing here beneath all the obfuscation, but that...nobody quite knows what we're doing there. So everyone travels a lot, in search of the plot.
And then people felt sorry for themselves whilst wandering about L.A., and I put it down to do something else and couldn't quite pick it back up.
Okay, there we go. Left unfinished on account of aimless angst.
#53 -- Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
This was an interesting book by itself, and is even more interesting read in the context of The Left Hand of Darkness and Golden Witchbreed, which I'm reading now. As three novels pretty much about the same thing -- a diplomatic envoy inserted into the culture of an alien planet, with masters who can't be trusted, resulting in drastic consequences to said envoy's worldview -- they compare really interestingly, and in ways that highlight each writer's strengths.
Griffith's strengths? She can write. The prose style here isn't as terse as The Blue Place or Stay, but Marghe is a very different person. Still, this book moves. It doesn't give out much unnecessary information, keeps the information it's giving necessary, and knows the art of the telling detail. While it drags somewhat in the middle (Marghe's captivity with the Echraidhe), those telling details and the kind of solidity the Powers lacked kept me reading.
I think what makes this book work is that the focus isn't on the newness or shininess of the various cultural groups Marghe spends time with: it isn't a setting book. It's an emotional arc book, about Marghe and Hannah both coming to grips with their situation, breaking, and then healing. The point is the characters. So even if I'm having trouble extracting much in terms of thematic argument beyond "shut your mouth and open your ears when you're in someone else's living room", this was a really satisfying read.
#54 -- Matthew Jarpe, Radio Freefall
Radio Freefall was a wicked lot of fun. And can I say how happy it makes me to read a book that's meant to be light reading which does not involve:
You get the picture. *g*
Instead, it has rock bands, geek hackers whose current employers are just as shady as the last one, AIs you have to explain to your girlfriend, evil billionaires who do moustache-twirl with evil, but amusingly, space habitats that are reasonably well thought-out, women who are actually strong women and don't need to wear a leather catsuit to prove it, and a bluesman archetype. The bluesman archetype threw me a little: until I figured it out I was expecting a different structure, but once that clicked what I'd been thinking of as structural problems worked themselves out.
Jarpe writes really engaging characters and a future that, if not totally plausible, really isn't meant to be? It's an adventure plot, more or less, with flawed heroes and the amount of grinning popcorn-quality that entails. And it hasn't stuck to my head in the slightest, which is why I'm calling it light reading, but it's very enjoyable, entertaining light reading. This book does its job. So yes, recommended.
Not-#55 -- Chaz Brenchley, Bridge of Dreams
Another setting book. Bridge of Dreams is set in two different, both Persian-style cities connected by the aforementioned bridge, which is maintained by the sacrifice of small children who dream it into existence. In the conquering city we follow Jendre, who is the daughter of a social-climbing general who, instead of going to the bridge as she expected, is married off to the Sultan with his thousands of wives. In the conquered city we follow Issel, an orphan boy who is dragged away from his waterselling job to train in the water-magic which is his city's heritage. Yes, he's very strong in it.
And I say it like that because...while the prose here is delicious and the world interesting, everything sort of moves as expected. Poor boy on the run? Of course he's one of the strongest talents in water-magic they've ever seen. Pretty girl meets cute boy who saves her from attack on the way to a wedding parade, and then the other wives say "well we all have boys on the side, he doesn't mind"? Well, of course they're going to have a hot affair. And of course they're going to get caught. All the channels this book follows are...well-carved. It's sort of like putting puzzle pieces together, except the pieces are really big and it's patently obvious what goes with what because you've done this puzzle before.
So I made it about halfway through here, and then flipped to the end to see if what I was pretty damn sure would happen actually did happen. And it did. And while there's a second book which could complicate matters, this isn't living on the page for me enough to actually go read the second half of this one or the second book. I've danced this dance before, and it's all form and no spark.
Not-#55 -- Rudy Rucker, Postsingular
This is an advance copy, based off some short stories that were in Asimov's last year. I got about three-four chapters in before putting it down in vague disgust. What was a playful tone in Mathematicians in Love is, with thinner material, a lot more...snide and mocking? It's like he's telling a joke, but it's at people's expense now, and it's not funny and kind of infuriating to watch. This one's not going to be for me.
#55 -- Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
I'm still somewhat tangled in my head over this one. Either it went whooshing over my head and never looked back, or there was a whole lot that was set up and just left dangling in favour of...I don't know what.
I really liked the richness of the world, how it's disjunct and unapologetic about that, follows its own logic to the end including the linking of true names. I love the dragon. I love Jane's climb from factory slave to high school student to university alchemist and the time-stopped mall and the truly weird faeries. But I'm left wondering what the point was: a couple stories were set up here and I'm not sure any of them were followed up on. I'm not sure what the Goddess and Jane were discussing at the end. I'm not sure why she got to go back, and why that's the happy ending even though the emphasis was off her visits to her mother throughout.
(The end-end is perfect. That last line is totally perfect.)
Can anyone seriously explain this one to me?
#56 -- Phil and Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius #1-4
Whee, steampunk! Girl Genius is fun, sets up a lot of juicy conflict in each volume while resolving the older ones swiftly -- important, so you don't get the endless complication upon complication but feel like older problems have genuinely led to newer. Agatha is a really easy character to glom onto and feel for: her frustrations and just the plain Oh Shit factor of being dumped into a destiny are genuine, and the relationship with Gilgamesh doesn't feel forced. I love how the backstory is revealed bit by bit, and left shrouded in Brothers-Grimm-style speculation, so the parallel discovery works really strongly.
A few reservations: I have a lot of trouble with the art here. It's very crowded, and my eye does not know where to go a lot of the time in a panel or between panels. Also, Foglio has been making the same off-colour jokes for a very long time. The underwear thing is faintly winceworthy. It is perhaps time to get some new jokes.
I will likely read the rest of this.
#57 -- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
I don't know why I didn't read this earlier. It's fabulous. It's not always subtle, but it's fabulous.
Maybe it's the internet chant of Butler-Delaney-Hopkinson-etc., but I was expecting a lot more in terms of racial issues from this book. And it's not, really: it's a tromp across the landscape after the apocalypse, as one seems to do. I can't quite put my finger on what makes this so gripping: I think it's that the tromping and the loss that makes it necessary isn't glamourized. There's a real conquering the frontier lone wolf look we're mighty and special! aesthetic that goes into this kind of book a lot of the time, which trivializes the death and pain and suffering going on that makes the place apocalyptic. Parable doesn't do that: the pain is the point, as illustrated by having a few characters who are empaths. And empathy is a drug induced defect. Take that, McCaffrey. *g*
So I think it's perhaps the emotional honesty of the book's grief. All these people are hurting, and their banding together against the world is that of hurt people bleeding, a pack, not looking over one's shoulder at the Great Destiny they're filling in like it's paint-by-number. That gives it a certain realism, as do the constant acts of violence and looting, the presence of small children and old people and poor people, the need to ration out supplies and keep the fires low. Real grief, real danger, and therefore when they finally get to break the ground on Earthseed...real hope.
I'm going to pick up the next one when we get it back in at work.
So far this year...
#1 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
#2 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
#3 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
Not-#4 -- Neil Gaiman Anansi Boys
#4 -- John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
#5 -- Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Takes A Holiday
#6 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds
#7 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Threshold
#8 -- Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
#9 -- James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand
#10 -- Minister Faust, From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain
#11-17 Ru Emerson, Night-Threads 1-6
#18 -- Louse Cooper, Avatar
#19 -- Meredith Ann Pierce, The Darkangel
#20 -- Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
#21 -- Richard Peck, Remembering The Good Times
#22 -- Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
#23 -- Nick Mamatas, Under My Roof
#24 -- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not For Burning
#25 -- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
#26 -- Eliot Fintushel, Breakfast With the Ones You Love
#27 -- Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms
#28 -- Justine Larbalestier, Magic Lessons
#29 -- Holly Black, Tithe
#30 -- Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites
#31 -- Holly Black, Ironside
#32 -- Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place
#33 -- Nicola Griffith, Stay
#34 -- John Scalzi, Old Man's War
#35 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Low Red Moon
#36 -- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
#37 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt
#38 -- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
#39 -- Art Spiegelman, Maus I
#40 -- Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum
#41 -- Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
#42 -- Liz Williams, Snake Agent
#43 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Legacy
#44 -- Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water
#45 -- Melissa Marr, Wicked Lovely
#46 -- Sarah Monette, The Mirador
#47 -- Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves
#48 -- Cherie Priest, Not Flesh Nor Feathers
#49 -- Jo Walton, Ha'Penny
#50 -- Charles Stross, The Merchants' War
#51 -- Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, The Shadow Speaker
#52 -- Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys
Not-#53 -- Tim Powers, Expiration Date
I put this down about 85 pages in, for a...slightly undefinable mix of reasons. Let's see if I can take a shot at them. I had trouble feeling sorry or sympathetic for Kootie, who has basically started the plot going due to being petulant and silly. Yes, he is a child, and his parents haven't exactly given him the most transparent reasons for the oddities of his upbringing, but breaking stuff in a fit of pique is...well, tantrums are a major personality turnoff for me. Add the equally mysterious nature of the menace, the five or more PoV characters in said 85 pages, and a distinct lack of narrative motion, and it feels not like something large is being set up with a solid core of I know what I'm doing here beneath all the obfuscation, but that...nobody quite knows what we're doing there. So everyone travels a lot, in search of the plot.
And then people felt sorry for themselves whilst wandering about L.A., and I put it down to do something else and couldn't quite pick it back up.
Okay, there we go. Left unfinished on account of aimless angst.
#53 -- Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
This was an interesting book by itself, and is even more interesting read in the context of The Left Hand of Darkness and Golden Witchbreed, which I'm reading now. As three novels pretty much about the same thing -- a diplomatic envoy inserted into the culture of an alien planet, with masters who can't be trusted, resulting in drastic consequences to said envoy's worldview -- they compare really interestingly, and in ways that highlight each writer's strengths.
Griffith's strengths? She can write. The prose style here isn't as terse as The Blue Place or Stay, but Marghe is a very different person. Still, this book moves. It doesn't give out much unnecessary information, keeps the information it's giving necessary, and knows the art of the telling detail. While it drags somewhat in the middle (Marghe's captivity with the Echraidhe), those telling details and the kind of solidity the Powers lacked kept me reading.
I think what makes this book work is that the focus isn't on the newness or shininess of the various cultural groups Marghe spends time with: it isn't a setting book. It's an emotional arc book, about Marghe and Hannah both coming to grips with their situation, breaking, and then healing. The point is the characters. So even if I'm having trouble extracting much in terms of thematic argument beyond "shut your mouth and open your ears when you're in someone else's living room", this was a really satisfying read.
#54 -- Matthew Jarpe, Radio Freefall
Radio Freefall was a wicked lot of fun. And can I say how happy it makes me to read a book that's meant to be light reading which does not involve:
- Werewolves
- Vampires
- Werewolf and vampire sex
- Love triangles
- Angst about sex
- Bad undead perms
- Women who the narrative says are tough and in control but keep tripping over their five-inch heels
- Mary Sues
- Cheese
- Angst
You get the picture. *g*
Instead, it has rock bands, geek hackers whose current employers are just as shady as the last one, AIs you have to explain to your girlfriend, evil billionaires who do moustache-twirl with evil, but amusingly, space habitats that are reasonably well thought-out, women who are actually strong women and don't need to wear a leather catsuit to prove it, and a bluesman archetype. The bluesman archetype threw me a little: until I figured it out I was expecting a different structure, but once that clicked what I'd been thinking of as structural problems worked themselves out.
Jarpe writes really engaging characters and a future that, if not totally plausible, really isn't meant to be? It's an adventure plot, more or less, with flawed heroes and the amount of grinning popcorn-quality that entails. And it hasn't stuck to my head in the slightest, which is why I'm calling it light reading, but it's very enjoyable, entertaining light reading. This book does its job. So yes, recommended.
Not-#55 -- Chaz Brenchley, Bridge of Dreams
Another setting book. Bridge of Dreams is set in two different, both Persian-style cities connected by the aforementioned bridge, which is maintained by the sacrifice of small children who dream it into existence. In the conquering city we follow Jendre, who is the daughter of a social-climbing general who, instead of going to the bridge as she expected, is married off to the Sultan with his thousands of wives. In the conquered city we follow Issel, an orphan boy who is dragged away from his waterselling job to train in the water-magic which is his city's heritage. Yes, he's very strong in it.
And I say it like that because...while the prose here is delicious and the world interesting, everything sort of moves as expected. Poor boy on the run? Of course he's one of the strongest talents in water-magic they've ever seen. Pretty girl meets cute boy who saves her from attack on the way to a wedding parade, and then the other wives say "well we all have boys on the side, he doesn't mind"? Well, of course they're going to have a hot affair. And of course they're going to get caught. All the channels this book follows are...well-carved. It's sort of like putting puzzle pieces together, except the pieces are really big and it's patently obvious what goes with what because you've done this puzzle before.
So I made it about halfway through here, and then flipped to the end to see if what I was pretty damn sure would happen actually did happen. And it did. And while there's a second book which could complicate matters, this isn't living on the page for me enough to actually go read the second half of this one or the second book. I've danced this dance before, and it's all form and no spark.
Not-#55 -- Rudy Rucker, Postsingular
This is an advance copy, based off some short stories that were in Asimov's last year. I got about three-four chapters in before putting it down in vague disgust. What was a playful tone in Mathematicians in Love is, with thinner material, a lot more...snide and mocking? It's like he's telling a joke, but it's at people's expense now, and it's not funny and kind of infuriating to watch. This one's not going to be for me.
#55 -- Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
I'm still somewhat tangled in my head over this one. Either it went whooshing over my head and never looked back, or there was a whole lot that was set up and just left dangling in favour of...I don't know what.
I really liked the richness of the world, how it's disjunct and unapologetic about that, follows its own logic to the end including the linking of true names. I love the dragon. I love Jane's climb from factory slave to high school student to university alchemist and the time-stopped mall and the truly weird faeries. But I'm left wondering what the point was: a couple stories were set up here and I'm not sure any of them were followed up on. I'm not sure what the Goddess and Jane were discussing at the end. I'm not sure why she got to go back, and why that's the happy ending even though the emphasis was off her visits to her mother throughout.
(The end-end is perfect. That last line is totally perfect.)
Can anyone seriously explain this one to me?
#56 -- Phil and Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius #1-4
Whee, steampunk! Girl Genius is fun, sets up a lot of juicy conflict in each volume while resolving the older ones swiftly -- important, so you don't get the endless complication upon complication but feel like older problems have genuinely led to newer. Agatha is a really easy character to glom onto and feel for: her frustrations and just the plain Oh Shit factor of being dumped into a destiny are genuine, and the relationship with Gilgamesh doesn't feel forced. I love how the backstory is revealed bit by bit, and left shrouded in Brothers-Grimm-style speculation, so the parallel discovery works really strongly.
A few reservations: I have a lot of trouble with the art here. It's very crowded, and my eye does not know where to go a lot of the time in a panel or between panels. Also, Foglio has been making the same off-colour jokes for a very long time. The underwear thing is faintly winceworthy. It is perhaps time to get some new jokes.
I will likely read the rest of this.
#57 -- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
I don't know why I didn't read this earlier. It's fabulous. It's not always subtle, but it's fabulous.
Maybe it's the internet chant of Butler-Delaney-Hopkinson-etc., but I was expecting a lot more in terms of racial issues from this book. And it's not, really: it's a tromp across the landscape after the apocalypse, as one seems to do. I can't quite put my finger on what makes this so gripping: I think it's that the tromping and the loss that makes it necessary isn't glamourized. There's a real conquering the frontier lone wolf look we're mighty and special! aesthetic that goes into this kind of book a lot of the time, which trivializes the death and pain and suffering going on that makes the place apocalyptic. Parable doesn't do that: the pain is the point, as illustrated by having a few characters who are empaths. And empathy is a drug induced defect. Take that, McCaffrey. *g*
So I think it's perhaps the emotional honesty of the book's grief. All these people are hurting, and their banding together against the world is that of hurt people bleeding, a pack, not looking over one's shoulder at the Great Destiny they're filling in like it's paint-by-number. That gives it a certain realism, as do the constant acts of violence and looting, the presence of small children and old people and poor people, the need to ration out supplies and keep the fires low. Real grief, real danger, and therefore when they finally get to break the ground on Earthseed...real hope.
I'm going to pick up the next one when we get it back in at work.