These Are The Books I Read I Read, These Are the Books I Read

[leahbobet]

(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
#53 -- Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
#54 -- Matthew Jarpe, Radio Freefall
Not-#55 -- Chaz Brenchley, Bridge of Dreams
Not-#55 -- Rudy Rucker, Postsingular
#55 -- Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
#56 -- Phil and Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius #1-4
#57 -- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower


Not-#58-But-We'll-Call-It-#58 -- Ken Macleod, The Execution Channel

Somehow this one got left out of the last batch, where it really should have been earlier than all those Not-#55 ones. We'll call it a late-reporting #58.

This book didn't quite come together for me. There are a lot of good ideas in here -- and the one that burns me is the US Government outfit for spreading misniformation over blogs and false websites, which is something I wrote a story around over a year ago, and dammit! but I guess you railroad when it's railroading time -- but I never quite felt them cohere, or narrow to a deliverable point. The US storylines, Mark Dark and Bob Cartwright and their little information war, informs the UK storyline, but when it's done informing that it slips quietly offstage, unresolved and somewhat unsatisfying. The UK storyline -- James Travis's spying and his children caught in the middle of it -- seems to be building to a thematic argument, it disintegrates into an improbable exchange, an improbable capture where the capturee is not killed despite being believed to be the worst kind of terrorist, and then putters off into a vaguely happy ending. Ohmigosh, I was wrong -- it wasn't nukes all along. Finally made a monkey out of me.

I have trouble with some of the characters. The primaries all act within the parameters set up, but like the ideas, some of the secondary characters have some very convenient alterations made to service the plot. The at least partial change of heart Maxine undergoes doesn't ring true to me, and I can't see why it'd happen except to get Roisin from Point A to Point B -- and James's information to the government. She's been in this business a long time. She knows what death and torture look like, ostensibly. Why does this one affect her?

In the long run, the thing I can't reconcile about The Execution Channel is precisely why it's here, and that boils down to that same muddiness that's in the structure and the characters and the follow-through on ideas leaking into the thematic argument. If the thematic argument is that letting governments run around doing whatever they want in the name of the War on Terror is BAD BAD BAD, the blasting into space at the end undermines that, having been done under the aegis of yet another controlling government. If the blasting into space at the end makes the thematic argument that the War On Terror makes us assume the worst about everyone and spook at even things that have nothing to do with us because the people involved aren't white? Well.

We already knew that.


#59 -- Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed

I got this for a dollar on a table at Readercon. It was pushed into my hand by matociquala, who I believe said "ooh, read this". On that recommendation I managed to power through 80 perfectly dull pages of what The Left Hand of Darkness and Ammonite do better...and hit the point where the book takes off.

You can tell pretty easily, if you've read the right books recently, that Golden Witchbreed is unabashed Le Guin fanfic with the serial numbers scraped off. You may be able to still see a serial number here and there. However, 80 pages is about the point where it stops glancing over its shoulder at the source, stops trying very hard to make sure it's following the dance steps to the beat that someone else set out, and finds its own voice and own point. After that, it just zips.

Not surprisingly, this coincides with when Christie stops being so much of an idiot and takes a look around her. And is about the time when you can start assimilating all the millions upon millions of italicized, made-up words that Gentle has sprinkled through, expecting you to learn on the fly without handholding. This book has a learning curve like nobody's business.

Like good Le Guin fanfic, it also defies expectations well. Or more accurately, deliberately sets up expectations so it can defy them and tilt you a little sideways with the surprise. The unsexed children both mature opposite to how you'd expect from their personalities, and opposite to how you'd expect if you're metagaming and figure "oh, gender balance" after the first one. The person you might expect as native lover stays a friend. The person you might expect as native lesbian lover (if you're me and have been reading Ammonite and therefore are interrogating this book as "I know you're from the eighties, but where are the space lesbians already?") stays a friend, and friendship is the strongest and most palpable relationship in this book, the most painful when it is betrayed.

I did have a structural problem mid-book, in the seeming repetition of a whole section of structure in order to get Christie on the road again. Christie is imprisoned and has to break out of jail with a few others -- Haltern and "the barbarian woman", who MY GOD why do they travel with her for weeks and not ask her name? The first thing you always ask when you're doing the language barrier thing is to tap your chest and recite your name, then ask for theirs -- and makes a nearly fatal trek across the countryside to safety, being hunted and on the run. And then okay, we're there, everything's more or less fine even if the trial goes to shit. Then she's framed for a crime she didn't commit again, goes on the road with few provisions running away to safety again, and...it sort of feels like we've cycled back in the book, like there were two possible outcomes to that scenario and Gentle wants to use them both? It was a weird, weird loop to be in. It stuck out of the structure like a tumour.

Overall, a lot of the ideas in here were really, really neat and thoughtfully presented, the culture well-built (of course a culture with a sort of racial memory would be conservative), the characters believable, the whole world well-realized. By the end of the book, I'd forgotten we were wanting to write a book just like that other one. Gentle makes the whole diplomatic space discovery trope her own. A satisfying read.


#60 -- Connie Willis, Uncharted Territory

Another tricky book centred on upsetting expectations, although much shorter, and again, partially about expectations of gender. In one sense this is one of Willis's trademark comedies of errors -- a variety of situations get in the way of a couple realizing or expressing their affection for each other. However, how it's done here is tricky, tricky stuff: one of the parties is a first-person narrator referred to only by their last name, who talks like one of the guys, thinks like one of the guys by and large, and is not referred to by a pronoun until the game's ready to give up. The romantic element thus blindsides me, the reader, by playing on those assumptions of men and women and what men and women do. Uncharted Territory, among other things, wants you to think about gender: about what behavioural tics you put in the male or the female box, about how we just unthinkingly classify someone.

This shows up in a lot of places: in their assistant Evelyn, who is in fact a male Evelyn, and not an effeminate male Evelyn but a rather male male Evelyn. In the caricature-stereotypes of Findriddy and Carson played out in the soap opera based on them, and how they compare to the real-life versions, how they slot into gender roles more solidly (short skirts, women in peril, gruff and heroic men) than the real thing. In the contrasting of Findriddy and C.J., who is a needy girly girl if ever there was one -- or at least, on the surface. In Bult's gender-ambiguity, in the assumption that Bult is male. In the constant discussion of mating practices between species and who does the approaching and how the practices differ. In the falsification of Findriddy and Carson's intentions on the survey and their attitude to the fines -- their escape from their roles. And of course, in the pronoun trick.

It's a very clever trick.

Unlike most of the clever tricks in fiction, it doesn't spend time pointing at itself and being smug about how clever it is, and therefore I did not throw it across the room, because the trick wasn't on me.

So because the trick isn't being used to chastise or make fun of the reader, it works. It makes you think about why we assume male is the normative, why unless a character's name, attitudes, or clothing are differentiated from the standard male (Carson), they're not a female. It also works because the trick is paired with a plot that could run indepenedently of it: I think you really could probably read this book just on the surface text, going "oh, how did I miss that?" when Fin is outed, and have a good story without all this stuff. However, if you dig and find all this tangled discussion about roles and how we make them and how we break them you get a really thoughtful book, one that accomplishes more in 150 pages than most do in thousands.


#61 -- Christopher Barzak, One For Sorrow

This is a difficult book to quantify.

One For Sorrow has the emotional intensity of Susan Palwick's Flying in Place or Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but a different emotional structure. While all three share that rendering of rural, broken-down America as...either a magical place or a fever-dream that sucks at you slowly, Sebold and Palwick take you through a process of grieving, start to finish. Violent shock to anger to hurt to hope. Barzak, however, is talking about despair. And despair is, at least to me, a much more difficult emotional journey to make, because grieving has a shape -- it moves, it changes, we know it's going to end. Despair is flat, and there's no light in sight. I'm not sure if it was interaction with my own buttons and squids, but this was a hard book to read.

At the same time, though, beautiful. I have never heard love or infatuation or sex described as sunflowers opening, and it made me break out grinning and put tears in my eyes. There are moments of absolute, unrivalled beauty in this book like the sun coming up, and they punctuate Adam's confusion and despair, break it up, give you reasons to keep going and not give up hope.

There are, as always, some first-novel issues. I found the turn that made home a safe place again at the end frankly unbelieveable (we're back to "it was Earth all along" and monkeys being made of people), a twist that wasn't in any way telegraphed in anyone's behaviour at all if that secret was being kept. And that twist doesn't satisfy me, because even though yes, Adam is a kid, the coming-of-age story requires that one stand on one's own two feet to a degree, and the changing of Adam's world has come about in the final stage not because of his actions, but because of another's. He could have sat there and waited at home and not gone through the things he'd gone through, and that change would still have come. This robs it of a certain power for me; as if the story had painted itself into so small a corner that judicious retconning was required to pull the ending out alive. I think there is a way to do that one, and it was done in Verdigris Deep, but it doesn't work for me here.

The last note, however, is just about perfect (and made me cry again like sunflowers).

Overall...yeah. Difficult to quantify. This book is hard on a body, and I'm still thinking it over. I may update this in days to come.


#62 -- Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

Book of a Thousand Days seems to follow that slow change of variables rule that makes well-received fiction: go strange, but not too strange. The setting is the faux-Mongolian steps, complete with yaks, the milk of yaks, a whole magical and social culture that's utterly different from your Generic European Fairytale, and yurts. I sorta love yurts. However, it's a very basic plot: the inversion of the same plot Hale uses in The Goose Girl. In her first book, princess masquerades as poor servant to save city and get the prince. In this one, poor servant masquerades as princess to do the same.

It's not a theft, though: Hale takes great pains to establish the positive morality of what Dashti is doing. Her Lady Saren, locked in a tower for seven years for refusing to marry a flat-out evil neighbouring lord, spends the book in varying states of brokenness: depression, anxiety, near-constant fear. By privileging personal loyalty -- Dashti's when Saren begs her to speak to the almost-lover she wanted to marry instead -- over the general moral injunctions against lying and then confronting the deceptions head-on, Hale lets Dashti stay noble. The other balance is Dashti's frequent reference to her mother and upbringing in nomadic poverty as something she misses, as a loving and desired one, to balance out the questionableness of what is basically social climbing.

This is a pretty easy read: Dashti has a sweet but shrewd narrative voice, the diary format breaks it down into manageable chunks, and the details of the world and the singing-magic are interesting but fairytale-familiar enough to be soothing. It's not particularly going to break down any borders in the world (well, aside from being a book entirely staffed by people of Mongolion descent), but a satisfying and well-executed bedtime read.


#63 -- Susan Palwick, Shelter

Shelter is a complicated portrait of a family, biological and chosen, and how all their resources and demons fail to create a world in which their young child will be safe. Centred around Meredith, daughter of one of the richest men in the world, it follows her from the life-threatening illness that kills her father (and translates him into the world's first ghost-AI) through her final inability to save her adopted son, damaged from the same illness, from another, more controlled exposure: one designed to wipe the brain clean and rehabilitate dangerous offenders. Intertwined are issues around AI, what money can and can't buy you, the danger and need to remain emotionally open to the world, what we owe to other living creatures, human and otherwise, religion, and where and what home is. It's a discussion on the word shelter on multiple levels and with a complete conclusion, although a discussion that sometimes wanders and tangents as Meredith and her counterpart, Roberta -- the other child survivor of CV but an orphan in the foster system instead of a rich teenager -- examine their own lives. Palwick's writing a prism through which that one ray of light can be viewed multiple times, context by context, a treatise on that one concept.

Weirdly, I don't have a lot to say about this. It makes its argument pretty completely, and I can buy the conclusion: that shelter is your family, both the parts you're born into and the ones you choose. And by using that word instead of "home" or any other synonym, Palwick implies that your family is a basic need: food and shelter, right? I don't have much to quibble with here, although I don't have much to rave about either. Point made. The story's affecting, and there are some moments that rang an absolute truth to me, for example Roberta's realization of the abusive nature of one of her relationships and the reasons she has to stay and fight it out anyway. But I don't feel strongly about this either way. I'm not sorry I read it and would recommend it, but neither will I push it at people who come around looking for something to read.


Or perhaps I've been writing this for an hour and am out of steam, so I think I'll save the next two until next post and get some lunch.