leahbobet | Entries tagged with keeping book

(I promise I will be better about book reportage this year.)

#1 -- Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Reread, but I haven't read it since I was about thirteen, so I guess it counts again. When I pulled this out of the bookshelf at my parents' house over the holidays my mother expressed surprise that she let a teenager read Oscar Wilde. In fact, I think I was seven. *cough*

These are interesting; they're, in their way, extremely moral and somewhat didactic, but not in a way that offends me. And I think that's because all through, he's sneaking in little bits of commentary on class, on social justice, on the natures of people. Authority is not necessarily good in these stories, and while they're also explicitly Christian, they aren't so in a way that toes the party line. The bottom line seems to be: I'm not going to lie to you. If you do good things, really good things, you will probably get pissed on for it. And that's not an excuse to duck the human obligation of doing good things.

I like Oscar Wilde. He didn't lie to me.

#2 -- Ekaterina Sedia (

squirrel_monkey), Locomotive to Crimea (in draft)

No talky about crit books!

#3 -- Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories

Rudyard Kipling, on the other hand, is didactic and moral and smarmy. And racist. And considering he was completely contemporaneous with Oscar there, who didn't do those things, he has no excuses.

#4 -- Chris Coen (

clarentine), Kith and Kin (in draft)

Crit book!

#5 -- Nicholas Christopher, The Bestiary

I suspect this was pitched along the lines of The Da Vinci Code. That is not apparent when you look at its cover flaps, which made me a bit sad.

Two things I don't feel I ever need to read about again: the Accepted Text Version of the whole seventies drugs/Vietnam/Orientalism experience and the Frictionless American White Male.

The Vietnam thing is...okay. I understand Vietnam was a very sucky place to be forced to go at that point in time. However, there seems to be an accepted rote narrative of how one either was forced to go to Vietnam and fight the terrible war for The Man (or avoided it), and how everyone who wasn't off doing that divided their time between virtuous protest marches, ingesting every kind of drug they could lay hands on, screwing all the time, and realizing that yes, Asia and India existed. Perhaps even had religious traditions one could sort of paddle about in, like a kiddy pool free after purchase of a Buddha statue or decorative wall hanging involving Sanskrit writing. It is not apparent how one financed this lifestyle. Perhaps one had a trust fund, I dunno.

This is a narrative that is just as hit-the-posts, fill-your-bingo-card, rote as the Going Down to Faerie book, as your Generic European Quest Fantasy. It blurs by in a muddle of non-detail and a certain kind of smugness: wow, we protested the war and spent our time getting high and having sex instead. Weren't we progressive and smart! It's the smugness that puts me over the edge: guys, no you weren't. I suppose every generation must find its own awesome, but what you were up to is pretty outdated and backward now, the march of time being what it is and the next generation always finding better ways to be more progressive and liberal than thou (and it will happen to me too, while I'm all like "we fought for anti-racism and gay rights!" and the kids going "that is so last Tuesday, loser"), and nostalgic self-congratulation about how awesome you were thirty years ago isn't really going to change that.

But we digress. The bulk of the thing behind this objection is that rote narratives -- The Standard Vietnam Seventies Experience, the Standard Faerieland Experience, the Standard Abused Child Experience -- are meaningless. Unless you can invest them with personal meaning and detail, unless you can make them apply to a referent that does mean something interesting and concrete, they're really just plug-in conflict sets. They mean nothing anymore. They've been worked smooth. And so you can't expect them to mean anything to the reader. It's got just about the amount of investment, conflict, emotional arc, and excitement as reading about someone renewing their driver's license.

The second thing is a little quicker to explain: the Frictionless American White Male. You have this archetype character who travels all over, falls in love with women and gets his heart broken, has fraught interactions with father figures, goes to war, comes home, etc. It's basically a modern edition of the picaresque character. The problem is...the picaresque character was never really meant to be a character. If you look at stuff like Candide, which is not the earliest by far but one of the classic examples of the genre, the character is a vehicle for the satire; they are thrust into these situations relatively unaffected by the last because they're a narrative device, not a person.

However, if you are writing about a person who we're supposed to see as a person? You may wish to reconsider not having all these experiences even put a dent in them. The next time they fall in love should have roots in the last time they fell in love; the going to war and having trauma nightmares should last past the end of that particular chapter-episode, because really, trauma isn't a hobby you pick up and put down. Basically, the experiences need to motivate the character, and if he doesn't change, period, despite going through all these things? If he's the same person he was at the beginning? He is then Frictionless, and you have failed to make me give a variety of turds about him or feel he is in any way real.

So yeah. Those. I don't want to read those anymore.

*cough*

That got long.

Think I'll make some lunch now.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Andrew Bird -- Banking on a Myth

Okay, there is like nothing on my to read shelf. Nothing. I have one Sean Stewart I'm picking at and The Icarus Girl and Don Quixote and really that's it. Finito. Toast.

Clicking the books tag will inform you of what I like to read, just so we don't confuse "what I think everyone on god's green earth should like" with "what Leah specifically likes".

Someone pimp me some good books? 'Cause I need something to read before I chew off my own arm.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Tracy Chapman -- Heaven's Here on Earth

It's that time again. And since I am currently fluttering around waving my hands ineffectually at the sheer volume of stuff I have to get done in the next two days to put on New Year's, meet some deadlines, and save the universe on time -- and will not have time to pick up a new book before Thursday -- this is a good displacement activity. :p

(The 2008 Grand Metrics wait until the day of. Because me, I'm still writing.)

( This year in books )

I pretty much did not do book reports this year. School ate me, and then when it spat me out, job-hunting and my sister's wedding and new-jobbing ate me. I have spent an immense amount of time this year being eaten by something or other.

Things I went silly over and/or handsold while I was still regularly at the bookstore: the Dark Tower books, right up to the end; The Bone Key; Nick Sagan's Edenborn; The Dragons of Babel; all three Mike Carey books; The Physiognomy; Life As We Knew It; all, every single one, of the Sean Stewart books, but especially Nobody's Son, which somehow opened up the perfect little black box in which I keep my most treasured things and slipped in without letting anything out, and now it is welded to the most important bits of me and we will never part; and The Year of Numbers, which I may well book report later, because those of you who read non-genre fiction really ought to pick this up. I say this with the startlement and delight you get when you buy the book because you know the author and it turns out to be just impeccably crafted.

There was actually quite a lot of reading in there I was happy with in general, despite me feeling like this was a year where I couldn't find a damn book to read for my life (I am, again, Not The Target Audience for at least this fall's batch of new releases). You'll note there's a lot of backlist in there and a chunk of out-of-genre stuff. I went exploring; what can I say?

My to read shelf is still horrifically light. Hopefully by the time I finish the Bujolds and double back for Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns and Co. (I read series in gulps. I do not wait a year for a new volume, I just wait for them all), they will have made me some books I want to read again.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: none

November 26, 2008 Progress Notes:

"Sugar"

Words today: 600.
Words total: 2950.
Reason for stopping: It's 12:30 and I should be bedwards.

Books in progress: Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep; Robert Graves, The Long Week-end.
The glamour: Dayjobbery and more dayjobbery and a trip to Canadian Tire after work to get some pots for my little plants at work. I should have been at a tenants' association meeting too, but I just wasn't up to it.

I admit to picking up my Graves book out of both excitement for having it (true fact: I unwrapped it from the Amazon box in the middle of a very fancy Yorkville men's clothing store while waiting for my dad to finish getting his coat fitted, during the great Family Coat-Buying Extravaganza of Saturday [because both my parents needed coats too, so we made a day with brunch out of it], because I could not wait until I got home) and a certain fatigue with the Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep is a cool book full of fabulous concepts and good writing, but it's about one group of people going to rescue another. Very slowly. I have reached a bit of an "are we there yet?" point with it.

We are not there yet. I'm putting it down for a bit until I stop being tempted to skip ahead to There.

Luckily, the Robert Graves book is both perfectly what I needed in terms of research (read: already giving me ideas) and, while treating the subject matter appropriately, occasionally wittily hilarious. I will be keeping my eye out for other sources, but. I think this one is going to get leaned on hard.

Current Mood: mm.
Current Music: Placebo -- Running Up That Hill

...both spawned by the never-ending parade of posts about how terrible Twilight is.*

1) So two major YA series hit big in the last ten years: Twilight and Harry Potter. In the early part of each series, you saw what can be charitably called low production values in terms of craft, plots that revolved around blatant wish-fulfillment, and wholesale rips of the tropes of already established subgenres. Potter is the poster child for mainstream acceptance. Twilight is excoriated regularly in newspapers, the internets, and local bookstores in reenactments of the Five Minutes' Hate.

What's the difference? What causes that?

I have my own theory, but I want to hear yours.

2) Where do people get the idea that exposing a child to a worldview or idea at all means the child will automatically agree with, adopt, and adhere to that worldview or idea?

Really, peoples. You met kids?

*Haven't read it, not gonna, no opinion on the matter.

Current Mood: puzzled
Current Music: Nick Cave -- Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

In which I don't like anything! Rar!

#60 -- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
#61 -- Robertson Davies, Leaven of Malice
#62 -- Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties

I have realized that, barring What's Bred in the Bone, the basic formula for a Robertson Davies novel is thus: a woman is unmarried. Clearly this Cannot Be. So a bunch of guys will sue for her hand, make asses of themselves in the process, and eventually an arbitrary decision will be reached which leaves all the humiliated bachelors still single and wary of the whole spousal thing, but the woman safely married off.

It really bothers people in a Robertson Davies novel when girls are single. Like, a lot.

Also, he'll talk about how backwards and sad and uncultural Canadians are in a chastising tone that implies we ought to go do better.

Here's the thing, though: reading this is like looking down a very long tube into an era that I'm not sure ever existed. They're set in say, the seventies or eighties, but really they're set around 1930, which appears to be when Davies came of age. What with all the hijinks and fussing and implied backtalk about how backwards these people are, it's really...it's not them. It's him. The only thing I can picture when reading these books is how he must have sat writing them, wondering how his world and country were slipping behind this way, but it wasn't the world and country, it was his. The people he talked to. His circle of acquaintance.

Because he got old.

And then I am inexpressibly sad.

#63 -- Ekaterina Sedia, Alchemy of Stone

I liked this. Enough. I wanted to love it -- and by all rights I should have, with the mixture of industrial-revolution-style setting and the thematic implications of having your protagonist be an emancipated automaton, still beholden to the creator who holds her winding key. And the revolution. And the culture war. Really, there's a lot going on in here, and I should have really really enjoyed it.

I didn't. All the ingredients are there, but they didn't really coalesce into cake for me: while the setting is based on a fascinating set of ideas, it's peculiarly ungrounded. The details aren't there in the prose to anchor it, make it real and vibrant and sensory. Likewise with Mattie and her rendering: the book seems torn between making her emotional life near-human -- she feels fear and pain and anxiety and affection (maybe) and so on -- and distancing the reader from her as an emotionally accessible protagonist. There's an argument to be made for her as an automaton and thus emotionally distant, but the effect isn't there: it's more the feeling of attention not having been paid than a genuine effort at creating someone inaccessible and alien.

Plotwise, a great deal is set up, but the payoff at the end isn't quite large enough to sustain that. Mattie achieves her purported goal (which becomes pretty much structurally immaterial not far into the book, which left me a little off-balance), and doesn't quite achieve her eventual one. And then it pretty much just stops.

There's this odd point about twenty pages from the end where the book seems to just give up, lose steam, and skip large swathes of time, skim higher over events and summarize rather than going in deep for impact. That was probably my largest issue: all the avenues that are constructed and then never explored, or skimmed over, or dismissed with a cursory explanation. This isn't quite line of direction issues, but something like that on a plotting scale. I'm not sure this book knew where it was going at first, or it was going a certain way and then ended on another road, and the beginning didn't get wrenched back true. The overall sense was of a fizzle, and then I was sad.

I did read it to the end though: the writing's nice, and the ideas, even if they're executed sometimes halfwise and move together imperfectly, are interesting ones. I'll pick up the next from this author, and see.

#64 -- Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle

If I was a less-nice person, I would chain Sean Stewart to a word processor a la Misery and make him write books for me forever. But we talked about that already.

And this is the thing with a Sean Stewart novel: they're all horribly broken. They're all broken in completely different ways. He manages to introduce a completely different terrible flaw into every book.

And it doesn't matter.

It's something about the voice, the way he sees and renders people that strikes utterly true. And something about the preoccupation with protagonists who are really, no kidding, genuine selfish fuckups. And have that brought to their attention as a way in which to grow.

(Although I will say so far that my bar none favourite Stewart character is Shielder's Mark from Nobody's Son. Because oh, he's hurting so bad under that chip on his shoulder, and the pain makes you forgive him.)

This is what all the other books I read this month were lacking. That utter, concrete sense that what happens here is true. And I need that to invest completely in a book: if you don't believe it's true how can I? and so forth. I need that to give myself into a book's hands.

Every book this man writes is true.

(I only have two left. I have to hoard them against emergency.)

Not-#65 -- Jeffrey Ford, The Shadow Year

And in a sense, this too is true, but I put this one down tonight mostly because of a disjunct of expectations.

I loved to bits Ford's Physiognomy and Memoranda, mostly because of the sheer unflinching disturbingness of them -- particularly the first. It's like reading China Mieville without the reliance on pus as a grossout device: when Ford wants to disturb you he goes for something genuinely disturbing. And I don't squick easy, let me tell you. I have the greatest respect for any book that can get to me in a way that's this smart.

However, The Shadow Year is more along the lines of one of those children-of-Dandelion Wine soft-edged fuzzed-up quasi-memoir novels about suburban childhood in the 1960s. And I am just not in the mood for that book right now. I also partially feel that once you've read that book once, you aren't going to miss much in the rest of the subgenre -- they're by nature a little self-limiting -- but that could be my own prejudices at work.

I think part of why I wandered is also the structure: it's episodic, with short chapter-stories building up into a general narrative. For me, this really diffuses tension, and I just can't get off the ground.

So that one's put down. And those are my September books more or less, and now I need to find something else to read before bed.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: none

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

(I'm willing to make a bit of comment on anything up there if anyone's curious. Just haven't had time to be book-reporting good and proper this year.)

#47 -- Patricia Briggs -- Iron Kissed

I was skittish on this one because of

buymeaclue's post on it back in January, but in looking for some candy books to break up the (lovely but dense) diet of John Crowley and Robertson Davies and Iain Banks I'm on currently, I came back around to this series. And it was solid enough, if embracing all those quirks of Paranormal Fantasy that somehow, in a very short while, because accepted canon: werewolves work like so. Vampires like so. The appropriate relationship between werewolves and people is thus. I have things to say about that, but I also have a way to say and explore them in fiction, and since I am a writer and not really a book reviewer I will save that for where I live.

What I do want to talk about is what happens to Mercy at the end, and the reactions around it: both fictional and those in the readership that were discussed on LJ last winter.

(Poor Patricia Briggs. All her reviews about one thing. I picture her sitting at her keyboard with her Google Alerts on, tearing her hair, going "but dammit, what about the prose!")

I sort of walked into this book with armor. I knew that a secondary character rapes Mercy, and I remembered there was squickiness around it -- I didn't go to refresh myself on the reviews until afterwards. So I was kind of looking out for it, a little more emotionally divorced from the proceedings; either way, this was not going to hit me like a hurricane. So my reaction was never going to be as strong as Hannah's (which is going to be our exemplar reaction for today, sorry Hannah). The things that bothered her weren't the things that bothered me. Well. Not precisely.

I can see the rape happening. In terms of character arc, it was about time for Mercy to either get a kick right in the eyeball or begin the long slow road to invulnerable Suedom. I can only halfway see Tim doing it, because when you are insecure about your social skills, betrayal is much worse than initial dismissal: you're always half-sure someone's playing you anyway, and when it's true, that's all your worst fears come to the surface -- you react hard. So I will tentatively buy that, even though I don't buy his effective nice-geek cover and the sudden revelation of/transmutation into a dude who already had a few murders under his belt. That profile doesn't scan by me. In general, though, I felt that whole characterization a bit sloppy, in that if you'd done that a bit neater it would have really tied into this thing you have going on here way. The hose works, but we could've had five times the water pressure out of that baby.

The other thing I believe the emotional logic of is Adam's initial reaction to it. I'm not sure it's necessarily a sign of domineering possessiveness. Because frankly, if I didn't have these cursed omnivore's teeth I would also rip the faces off people who hurt the ones I love. I do it with my words already. I half-jokingly call it my Mama Bear urge. The emphasis is on bear.

The note struck totally wrong, however, was Adam's reaction to her after he's been shit-talked about withdrawing.

Mercy, throughout, has had a tug-of-war going about agency and control: her agency versus the idea the werewolves in her life have about how one expresses love and care to women. After this three-book issue is brought to a head -- with the rape, which is the ultimate blow to agency and control -- and she's reeling, Adam's pep talk is basically "you've come looking for my help twice now, so you acknowledge we have an interdependence, so you're mine and I will come fetch you if you try to go."

And according to the narrative, she takes it as you have a place here.

There is, in a sort of fucked-up way, that emotional content in there. I will not let you amputate your life and lose things you don't have to lose for the shame of something that wasn't your fault. Except, that's not what he says. He says:

"Ben says you might run. If you do, I will find you and bring you back. Every time you run, Mercy. I won't force you, but... I won't leave or let you leave either. If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to. No more excuses, Mercy. You are mine, and I am keeping you."
My independent nature, which would doubtless reassert itself soon, would be outraged by this possessive, arrogant, and medieval concept. But... (265)

What he said is not what the narrative appears to hear. And that reassertion...it doesn't happen.

Fatal breach of three books' worth of characterization ahoy.

The neurosis of abandonment she's fighting right then -- the rationale under which Adam's purported emotional content works -- is widely acknowledged by that narrative to be an implanted one. We see it implanted by the force of ~~deus ex machina~~ magic, in real time, on the page. If her personality is not going to reassert, this calls for a fundamental and permanent change in her personality. If it does, later, this calls for one raging, furious, break-ties-and-drive Mercy once she gets her actual personality back in place. God knows if someone said that to me in a vulnerable place, in a place where my freedom of movement and choice had been restricted so severely? If someone said that to me while I was eating myself up with guilt over the idea that my inability to fight someone off me meant that I had somehow wanted it: "If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to"? I would go halfway across the world from that speaker and never come back.

So Briggs creates herself a serious choice: Mercy must change, or the consequences must also rebound and basically take a wrecking ball to Mercy and Adam's relationship.

But the choice doesn't get made.

What we get is neither: a sort of shadow-country wherein she tells herself to buck up and interacts with people approaching normal very quickly, notably acts with confidence very quickly in confrontations both verbal and physical. She's attacked a bit later by someone who tried to kill her, and she doesn't flashback. She reacts like Old-Mercy.

And that, gentle readers, is what makes me disappointed in a book.

You want to punch me? Throw the damn punch. And if the punch breaks your thumb, take your lumps. Hit me and make it count. Ducking the choices you yourself set up is authorial cowardice. And I do not read for cowardice.

Write brave, folks. Write brave or just don't go there.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Johnny Hollow -- Nova Heart

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )
#27 -- China Mieville, Un Lun Dun
#28 -- Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

These two will be getting their own private essay. Which I may actually try to sell somewhere. They're an interesting experience to read back to back. So, stay tuned.

#29 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Silk

As with the rest of Kiernan's books, ridiculously pretty and creepy and yum. The overarching thematic statement: don't stick your dick in crazy. Yeah, really, that's it. However, this is sage advice and does not notably detract from the narrative.

I tend to feel like I don't really have the narrative protocols in place for horror/dark fantasy/whatever people call their books when they are looking to creep you out. Bad things happen -- so? Everybody dies -- so? What more? I am starting to feel like there has to be a payoff to this kind of book that isn't just "well, you survived". This is not me asking for ponies and sunshine and flowers, but something must be gained, I think. Even a small victory -- a move beyond the status quo.

#30 -- Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars

The parts of this that were roller derby (and ship logistics and politics and such) I loved to bits. Logistics geek loves logistics. The parts that were boyfriend...I just couldn't believe. I don't feel like the love interest really did much to merit the degree of affection he got and what the protagonist was risking to be with him. She just kind of did it because...the narrative said he was the love interest. The narrative also had a vested interest in placing them deliberately into more and more improbable situations in order to foster that love interest.

I think I kind of wished this was a book about Jodenny Scott going in and cleaning up Underway Supply with the toughness of her brain and fighting evil and whatnot and...no boyfriend. I think it might have worked with no boyfriend just fine.

Yes, it's not my book. I know. :p

I will hope for more roller derby goodness in #2.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: NIN -- Ghosts IV

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

#26 -- Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel

About an hour ago, I asked

matociquala, who loved this book, if we could chat about it when I got those last fifty pages tucked away, because I wasn't sure what he was about here and my hope was wearing thin. This book wanders. It's a picaresque, episodic and without any strong through-line, except unlike, say, Candide it doesn't have a strong unifying thematic argument to hold it together in that absence. Or so I was thinking before I sat down for the last fifty pages.

The thesis comes in the last fifty pages. It comes in the last five. And the art of this book, the thing that has me on-the-floor impressed right now, is that it was carefully and delicately set up all along, with the left hand while you were watching the right, so when Swanwick flicks that domino it comes down with a BOOM.

I think I burst into tears. Good tears. Boom.

I wanna learn how to do that.

I may write a short essay on this one later, something rife with spoilerdragons. But for now I don't really want to spoil this one. Go and read. Then we talk about it.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Chris Cornell -- Original Fire

GOOD!

"Kryptonian International Remembrance Day", which is the poem I wrote after the Virginia Tech shootings, is live in the second issue of Oddlands Magazine. I normally wouldn't give the context for a poem like that, but it's pretty obvious.

Also, "Furnace Room Lullaby" is scheduled for the May 2nd issue of Pseudopod. 'Ware!

MEH!

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( Books! We read them! )
Not-#19 -- Joel Shepherd, Crossover

I got maybe a chapter into this last night and put it aside as a qualified Not For Me. Not because there was something therein that offended me, or made me sad, or was abominably terrible or mean, but...it's just slushy.

In 35 or so pages it manages to hit most of the major bases of stuck-in-slushpile writing, including a mirror scene, coyness with information, rampant word rep (the tic word is "attractive", up to four times in two sentences at one point), loose and scaffoldy writing, 25 pages worth of exposition and wandering around a setting not quite sure what to do (aka: stalling for time) before the plot even thinks about happening, two sex scenes, and that thing peculiar to male writers of female characters who are supposed to be highly sexual where...the character views herself as sexual but in a way a third-party male person would do it. I think this falls under a not-fully-developed ability to maintain and empathize with character PoV. However, it sort of comes across as the author wanting to do his character, but the words being fed through the character's brain and mouth.

That is creepy as shit, let me tell you.

Writers are hereby invited by me to stop it.

So...yes. Not-#19. It's just made of too much slush.

BLEH!

The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be--

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: And You Will Know Us By Our Trail of Dead -- Wasted State of Mind

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

#17 -- Nick Sagan, Edenborn

I loved this. I finally loved a book this year.

This is not to say that I have disliked that list of books up there. I liked several of them, two enough to write favourable shelf reviews for at work. However, it's been a while since I've read a book that I love and jump up and down about and make little fluttery motions with my hands. I have taken to reading backlist in search of a book to love; this year's SF offerings so far have been rather thin. And I now have a book I love for 2008. I wish there was an award in the field that was We Were Silly And Didn't Read This When It Came Out, But It Rocks, so I could pin it on this book.

Edenborn is exceedingly well-constructed science fiction. There is thought in the post-apocalyptic, post-epidemic worldbuilding, which combines the ruined splendour of being the last people in the world -- getting to do whatever you want -- with the inherent terribleness of that condition; there is thought in the characters and their emotional makeup, in their motivations and how they clash or don't with each other; there is thought in the plotting and the weight of the structure. It is not carrying agendas or pushing agendas. It eats your head.

By and large this is a book about isolation, and what isolation -- be it physical, emotional, or social -- will do to a person. There are some portrayals of the paranoid and narcissistic patterns of thought people get into when they're excluded that made me flinch with the truth of them. And that discussion of isolation is reflected through several characters and perspectives, and tied into a discussion of parenting: what is good parenting, what is bad, and how we impress a fear of our own mistakes upon our children and maybe cripple them in our overcompensation. It is in some ways, a very dark book. Bad things happen to good people.

But the thing is? It's not unkind. There is a lot of SF that does bad things to its characters and all the while is watching you for your reaction to that, watching you for your flinch. I can't really verbalize that approach well aside from "scoring points off the reader", no matter if those points are scored in service to something. Your relationship to a narrative changes when it is actively out to get you. I class China Mieville's stuff here; the end of Perdido Street Station is specifically designed to put a fist-mark in the reader's gut. I respect him for taking that choice, but it creates a distance between that book and me.

Edenborn is not portraying the way its characters are hurt -- and get hurt -- to make you flinch. It is quite deeply understanding of all these people, of why they act and think the way they do. They're mirrors of each other, pieces of each other dealing with the same fundamental problems of isolation in different ways and with varying levels of self-awareness. They are all immensely sympathetic at the end, with one possible exception. And those motivations, the pressure of that isolation, is true. And sometimes hard to read: you see this world through the eyes of four or five of its inhabitants, and they each read events differently according to their damage. Like the real world, the Real Story is flawed and fuzzy, and open to interpretation. It depends on who you believe.

And the prose is sharp, and human, and humorous in its ways, and the voices so very well done, and the emotional arcs and balance just right, and just really, you guys should go read Idlewild which I also loved and then read this next.

So...buy these books.

I rarely give marching orders. The last time I did was for Air, I think, and I have a partial marching order for Bad Monkeys, but only a partial because it's really not for everyone. I am delivering orders here because these two books -- I'm going to read the third ASAP -- are a breath of fresh air even inside the little ghetto of Hard SF that composes the books I like best. They made me happy and blew little holes in the top of my head like nothing has since Accelerando. And if these don't do well and consequently I don't get more books from Nick Sagan? I will be extremely cross and bite people.

And that is my book report. Doom Has Spoken.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: none

I have a terrible suspicion that I have turned into Clementine Kruczynski. I'm not sure whether to be disturbed or deeply satisfied about that.

(I want to make snow angels on a frozen river.)

Anyways, here's ( This year in books )

I think I only did reports for maybe a quarter of them. Overall, a lot of backlist this year: authors and seminal books that I haven't read and finally had a chance to get to. There wasn't a lot there for me in the frontlist this year, not in terms of quantity; 2006 appeared to be the year when all publishers decided their target reader was me, and I could just be recovering from that immense happy spoiled feeling.

Things I loved? Territory. Bad Monkeys. Both halves of The Orphan's Tales. The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Radio Freefall. I really enjoyed a lot of the rest -- for example, the Kitty books have become my literary equivalent of a nice heating pad after a hard day -- but those are the ones I went silly over and started forcing down people's throats at work.

Now I'm going to go curl up with #103 -- Elizabeth Bear, Dust and an order of sushi, and chip away at my pile some more.

Sometimes, life? It is good.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Barenaked Ladies -- Call and Answer

The time when I write my last exam for the semester and then have a month to read books I want to read.

So...what ought I to have read this year? What's really, really good*?

*It will help if you know what I read for.

Also:

I come to praise

matociquala, because she gave me a James Barber chili recipe, as she loves me and wants me to be happy. It's really good chili. Even better, it calls for mint, so I was able to prune down the monster I call a mint plant** and put some of it into the chili. There is nothing like the smell of chopped fresh-off-the-plant mint. Mrrr.

I come to praise Claude Lalumiere, because I queried him about a Tesseracts sub last week and within ten minutes he called me on the phone, long distance, to let me know his reply got lost and what it had said in it. That, my friends, is editorial commitment.

I come to praise

seabream, who gifted me with something immensely appropriate (and funny!) out of the clear blue. Thank you. :)

And I come to praise the Merrill Collection, which -- aside from being a fantastic repository of knowledge about everything our genre's about -- puts on a great Cream Tea.

Anyone you have to praise this week?

**The prunings will continue until morale improves.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Ani Difranco -- Napoleon

I'm reading Light right now (yes, I'm four years behind the rest of the world). One second I was curled up on my bed with the book and the next I'm napping, and I know I'm napping because it's the most lucid quantum nap I've ever had.

--red sashes. Tied around the waist. And dancing in front of my window like a mirror, where I could dance better than I can in the actual body, feel every muscle in my legs moving. Mixing a drink that involved...ginger ale, two halves of a strawberry, something clear, and a slice of chopped ginger root in a large, clear mug. And disjuncts, and false wakeups. Trying to open my eyes and finding them stuck halfway, out-of-focus sideways images like broken camcorders, and stumbling through the apartment by feel. And a blurry, eyesight-failing thought of "maybe I shouldn't have taken their drink instead" and then another, sliding down the chair in the coffee bar on the seventh floor of a hotel that I dreamed this morning exists in New York City, that I guess this is what happens to all the robots eventually. A false wakeup in my bed, with my hand curled under my mouth and me drooling a little on it (cold), and the balcony door blew open in a gust of wind and there was that mug of ginger something on my desk, waiting.

And then awake. I had to test it a few times, to make sure we'd actually found the proper reality and were sticking with it.

I'm sure I was missing stuff in the middle there too.

So...does this happen often when reading M. John Harrison?

Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: none

Okay, maybe due to this article

cmpriest linked a few days back and society's stubborn determination to eradicate the threat of female body hair, I have got to thinking about...the Belgariad.

Queen of Sorcery, pg.293:

Salmissra reached out with a lingeringly slow hand and brushed her cold fingertips across his face and chest. Her pale eyes seemed to burn, and her lips parted slightly. Garion's eyes fixed themselves on her pale arm. There was no trace of hair on that white skin.
"Smooth," he said vaguely, struggling to focus on that peculiarity.
"Of course, my Belgarion," she murmured. "Serpents are hairless, and I am the queen of the serpents."
Slowly, puzzled, he raised his eyes to the lustrous black tresses tumbling down across one of her white shoulders.
"Only this," she said, touching the curls with a sensuous kind of vanity.
"How?" he asked.
"It's a secret." She laughed. "Someday perhaps I'll show you. Would you like that?"
"I suppose so."
"Tell me, Belgarion," she said, "do you think I'm beautiful?"

Okay, obviously we have a few things going on here. There's the Evil Sexual Woman Temptress deal, the Evil Woman Who Disguises Her Actual Age (sixty) To Cheat Young Virile Men of Their Sperm deal, some Eastern Orientalist exoticization with all the eunuchs, some dangers of the demasculinizing properties of Evil Wimmins.

But...why the emphasis on the hair?

None of the other women in the series, the virtuous ones, are commented on as having body hair.

I don't recall Ce'Nedra's satisfactory wax job (or lack thereof) being commented on as they frolicked in their forest pool or had another stamping screaming fight that's supposed to pass for courtship. I assume Polgara, being an immortal sorceress, can cast Electrolysis on herself whenever she feels like it and is exempt from the data pool. The Seeress of Kell is blind, and therefore a person with a disability, and therefore not a sexual being and also exempt from the pool.

There's commenting on the bad that waxing does, but no alternate comment on the good an' virtuous women having body hair. They're seemingly at this invisible default where it just doesn't exist, or goes away by magic.

Does anyone else find this emphasis creepy and fucked up?

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: none

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

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.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: none

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

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.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Muse -- Take a Bow

...aka, this week's reading.

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

#48 -- Cherie Priest, Not Flesh Nor Feathers

I liked this...hm. Better than the Wings to the Kingdom, not as much as Four and Twenty Blackbirds. I can still zip through Priest's books in an evening each: the prose is really smooth and accessible and doesn't poke at you or obstruct. The vividness of scene, of grounding that really made Four and Twenty Blackbirds is back; I feel more like Eden is tied into her world again. She has stakes and belongs there, which was something I was missing with Wings,those ties to home and family.

There are a few holdovers that kicked me out some, like Eden's apparent ability to gather a Scooby Gang (tm) of new characters to replace ones that left in Wings that she was supposedly always friends with, but didn't show up in previous crises (yes, I know this is unfair, it's hard to introduce new characters, but it does feel like a guest spot). There are plotting issues: I figured out what the river zombies wanted light-years before Eden got there, and I felt as if some of the ending was achieved by deus ex and withholding of information from the reader.

But again, it's the scene. It's this alive place, Priest's Chattanooga, and once the shit starts to hit the fan and people lose their homes, emotionally fall apart, cope with natural disaster, it really hits its stride. This is a hurricane book. It's a book about unstoppable, unappeasable forces coming to take away your plans and what you do, and how you cope with that, because what you have to say about it doesn't mean much. The core of this book is honest.

My life is not changed, I am not permanently impacted, but I am satisfied. Good read.

#49 -- Jo Walton, Ha'Penny

This I'm not sure how I feel about, and it's partially that I don't know how to...weigh the intertwining storylines that look like they'll be a staple of this series. Farthing was definitely a book about Lucy Kahn. Ha'Penny seems to be more about Carmichael, the continuing character, yet the stronger voice again, the one that commands your attention, is a transitory character, Viola Lark. I am having structural confusion here, and that was a problem as I kept stopping to figure out how and why I am to be weighting this story.

Here I am less satisfied. Carmichael is -- sort of -- dealing with the consequences of his blackmail at the end of the last book. But that's sort of: for a book that's talking about persecution, about being forced to compromise your ethics lest you be ruined, I'm sort of not feeling the sting. Yes, his lover Jack complains about not being able to go out, to dance, to hold hands in public, but it hits more like any cop's wife who's tired of the late hours and the middle-aged taking-for-granted. There's not enough in the narrative to illustrate to my gut how this is different.

The structural problem comes back near the end, when...I really was not sure what to make of Viola's final actions. There are blatant parallelisms with Hamlet, yes, and they're not subtle, but I'm not sure if I'm meant to be reading her final quoting of Hamlet as something that ties the whole book together. The book is not tied-together for me. I'm not sure what those words signify about a change in belief, in environment, in how we are to evaluate the character. And then the book stops.

So either something has gone way over my head here or I'm looking for a point that doesn't exist; this may be one of those cases where the author is making a point that is a point to a whole bunch of people, but because of my preset assumptions and worldview it's as huge as saying the sky's blue (this happens sometimes). But either way, I'm just...not sure what was being said to me, and why it was important.

#50 -- Charles Stross -- The Merchants' War

Tangled, tangled, and getting more complex by the day. This series seems to delight in being...well, as Byzantine as possible, and Clever to boot. However, if something doesn't resolve soon instead of just complicating yet more -- even a small thing, some emotional resolution and moving to the next problem -- I may well put it down. While the Family Trade books have all been engaging, there's too much short-term movement and not enough long-term for me here, not for four books into a series.

#51 -- Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, The Shadow Speaker

Again, setting! The setting here was deadly cool: a near(ish)-future Nigeria with both advanced technology and magic that came into the world as a result of technological mishaps. While written toward a younger age level than I thought (I was expecting teen, it feels more like age 10-11) the characterization very well done and felt...realisitc for a kid growing up in the environment Ejii has experienced.

What spikes this for me as a coming-of-age (and coming-into-power/responsibility) story was...there is a point where things get a little deus ex machina. Okay, a lot. And while the words Ejii speaks that are supposed to denote how she's changed and what she can accomplish now, in the pivotal scene, are her own, her being there and a lot of her shaping is due to external forces. The shadows she speaks to, the plants, other things tell her where to go to defend her values. She makes the initial choices herself, but after a point she's just sort of swept along, and I felt a bit let down about that, especially given how much attention is given by adults to how she hangs back behind her male friends, doesn't put herself forward or make decisions, how that's pointed to as a thing that needs changing. She speaks, but she doesn't choose.

So, not sure how I feel about this either. Deadly cool world, full of awesome ideas and things that SF needs more of by god (like a cast full of people who are either Muslims or aliens. or sandstorms. or talking camels.) but maybe for much younger readers than I thought.

#52 -- Matt Ruff -- Bad Monkeys

This is just wild. Outrageous, silly, gleeful, and all with a straight face; keeps you constantly reevaluating two narrators for unreliability in a way that shapes the story differently after every chapter; plays off several things that are dear to my heart, such as how the hell you effectively Fight Evil in the world now, today. And it totally crumbles like a stale cookie in the last five pages. But I don't care. I ignore the last five pages, which are Not An Ending, just a twist, and fail to bring the giant sparkling fabulous plane of the rest of the book down to any sort of runway.

Because the journey? Is wild.

I'm still unpacking this a little, so I might revisit. But go read.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Tori Amos -- A Sorta Fairytale

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

By request...

#26 -- Eliot Fintushel, Breakfast With the Ones You Love

Okay, first thing: I'm not sure why I picked this up to read. I've read some of Fintushel's short fiction, which was well-executed but tended to piss me off about halfway through the story, and the cover looks like high-end POD rather than Bantam. Yes, that should be not of consequence in my reading choices; it is sometimes (it's of consequence in the reading public's choices too, and don't fool yourself that it isn't). I suspect I might have been seeking a trainwreck, which I did a few times in books I picked up last month, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was all that slapfight in the air. Goes to the brain, that stuff. Bad for you.

So I picked this up possibly looking for a trainwreck, and my pleasure in it might be linked to not finding one.

Breakfast With the Ones You Love is a Slipstream novel. Yeah, ignore all that crap about people's middle-class twentysomething artist angst and the cracks between genres that shows up in Slipstream slushpiles across the land. That's not Slipstream, that's what genre readers think mainstream literature looks like*. This is Slipstream: off-the-wall, humourous/serious, drawing its magic from unconventional sources without making a big deal of how innovative it is. This is the thing I point at when I utter that label.

And so, I enjoyed it.

Breakfast avoids a bunch of first-novel traps while falling prey to a few more. It doesn't overexplain either bit of magic, and both are quite inventive: Jack and the minyan's Kabbalist theology or Lea's emotionally-linked ability to play with people's bodies. They just work, but are acknowledged as unusual: one of the other pitfalls I think too much Slipstream fiction suffers from is a little too much Marquez-style pokerface. Is it still magic if it's unacknowledged as wondrous?

Lea's voice itself is also wonderfully, vibrantly alive: sixteen, less tough than she thinks she is, and a little bit crazy. The passages where she's practically planning the wedding with Jack, more and more as time goes on, are hilarious and sorta painfully touching at the same time, because you know when you were sixteen you did this, spun whole futures with someone on the tilt of a head, and it's fond if slightly embarrassing to recall. You don't mind so much that she's an unreliable narrator, because she's genuine, and spins a good yarn, and has lovely metaphors that don't spring out of the text yelling LOOK AT ME I WAS A DARLING DU JOUR but fit right in and flow.

The atmosphere, the city that's implied to be New York but never quite named, the rompy yet serious feel of the whole thing all work very, very well. What works less well for me are the, well, tidiness of the ending (one) and the way the title image is used (two).

The end is very neat and tidy. All strings wrapped up, nothing left to say, nothing that seeds forward and implies that these people will live on to fight another day (I'm not talking setting up a sequel, more...extending the life of the characters beyond the life of the story, which I think is important to enforcing the feeling that these people are real). No mess, no fuss. Considering the engagement the rest of the book has with Real Life (tm), I don't buy it. I wanted there to be some fallout, someone to have a hard feeling, something to act as...well, a reminder that we are not returned to status quo in the world, even if the characters have changed.

Second: the title image, the breakfast, when presented in the text is actually heartbreaking. It's the context that makes it so, one of those pure-light moments of innocence before everything goes to shit. It's that and the line about rewarding people when they behave badly, so they don't stay unhappy and misbehave more that really have the emotional centre of the whole thing**, a bittersweet twist that crunches up the corners of your eyes. So being presented with that button, that tunnel direct into my black reader's heart, one should use it lightly. Touch it once in a while, gently, and evoke that idea on the edges. Don't push it too many times or it starts to go numb. Fintushel pushes it a few too many times, which made me sad, because it's a gorgeous image and gorgeous emotional centre, and doesn't deserve to be worn out.

So. First novel issues, but the general inventiveness of this book makes it worth reading.

Actually, that's a good place to leave this on. There's a line between being inventive, being out-there and unconventional and doing so while looking over your shoulder to see who's watching and noting how inventive you are. One is confident and genuine; the other is a mask for the public. And I think for Slipstream as a whole (and novels in particular) to work, it has to be your own natural, unadulterated weird, from the gut. I read that label as being about the absurd, the wonderful, the magic for good or ill in everyday life, and you can't put that on.

So, recommended. This book is not performance art. It's real.

*Like English students, they are wrong. That is what the surface of mainstream literature is about.***

**I'd quote, but I don't have the book with me at the mo'.

***And why do we call it mainstream lit when it makes up maybe 4% of the market share annually? Really, if anything's "mainstream", it's Romance.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: rain outside

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)

( So far this year... )

(I will review any of the above here on request, but with a 30-book backlog, I don't think I'm doing them all just to say what I want about this one.)

#30 -- Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites

I am going to be unfair here. Deeply, drastically unfair, and it's doubly unfair because I mostly enjoyed this book. It's a quick little read (little meant literally: it's quite short) that I burned through in one evening before bed and didn't want to put down. It has some interesting worldbuilding used to best advantage, which a lot of people don't do with their worldbuilding, so bravo. It's fast-paced without being contrived, and has interesting characters, and is overall a strong showing for a first novel. I'll be recommending it at work to people who liked the Carrie Vaughn Kitty books and as a shining example of You Too Can Write Urban Paranormal Fantasy Without Bad Sex In! (I hate that).

The reason I am going to be unfair is because it has finally tipped me off as to...well, why I have a problem with Urban Paranormal Fantasy (aside from the bad sex), and thus I am going to use it to illustrate that problem I have with a whole subgenre. Unfair, see? That problem starts with the Everyone Loves Protagonist effect (even when they don't!), leads into how girls and boys are generally treated in Paranormals, and ends up with responsibility.

In Magic Bites, everyone does seem to want Kate. She has an attractive, rich, nice plot point in Dr. Crest, who pursues her sexually for most of the book. She has Curran, who fights with her all the time but kisses her near the end, who tells her his name even though that's Not Done. She has all sorts of men she's getting special treatment from, and my first reaction was OH MY GOD ENOUGH WITH THE ROMANTIC POWERS OF MARY SUE, especially since she spends about every spare second saying "well I might not be pretty but grr at least I'm tough and those 110 -pound girls couldn't kick ass so there humph", which let me tell you gets irritating when the whole book's throwing itself at you, dear. Until I stopped, realized something, and did a Girl Headcount on the book.

Kate's really the only major character who's female. There's Maxine, who's a receptionist and has two scenes or so. There's Anna, her guardian's ex-wife, who likewise has about two mother-figure scenes from afar. There's four girls who are missing and thus cannon fodder (one ends up with her head staked to Kate's lawn). There's Jennifer, who's a werewolf and again, appears for a scene or two to fill function. There's Olanthe, who goes I AM A VAMPIIRE-- and then gets offed in short order (one scene). And there's a smattering of girlfriends, arm candy, and nameless cannon fodder in and around the place. Why's Kate the person we're having a story told about? Because she's the girl who isn't doing a girl job. Gender is really, really fixed in paranormal urban fantasies. One or the other, and there are fixed attributes for being a boy and being a girl.

Kate isn't being A Girl.

Kate's world is quite literally a man's world. No wonder they all want her; every straight paranormal boy in Atlanta's probably hard up due to the scarcity of girls. And...really, this is pretty characteristic of this genre. Women are rare. When they are there, it's as support characters, enemies, or...well, they're not the protagonist. And she's simultaneously a superwoman and not really a woman at all.

Why's she not really a woman? Well, the paranormal, unless you're a witch, is a boy's world full of boys. It's about strength and killing and toughness and how many swords you have and so forth, especially in werewolf books. The protagonist in this subgenre is a woman, but she's tougher than the boys, has more swords, maybe not stronger because we all know about those weak girl arms but knows how to use what she's got, etc. And it makes her even tougher because she's the one woman playing in their sandbox. So she mouths off to them, and we think ooh, tough, and she kills people, and we think ooh, tough, because nobody slaps her down.

She gets away with being a better boy than the boys. Why? Because she's a girl.

Oh yes. Our protagonist is still A Girl. We can tell because of those breasts and hips she keeps denying she has, while every guy in a five-mile radius wants to either screw or parent her depending on their age bracket. And boys are not supposed to hit girls, so the honourable boys in our stories can't deal with her like she's a boy: thus she gets a reputation for toughness and effectiveness, just because the boys won't hit her unless they're The Villain. She's a loner -- remember, not many other girls here, and boys are generally not for friends, they're Other -- so she can't be socially influenced into falling into line. And she has swords and stuff, so they can't treat her like a girl. Our Protagonist gets her reputation, her successes, her...centrality by gender-transgressing but not in a world where you are either A Boy or A Girl. Her peers just don't know how to deal with her. She doesn't fit into their world, and nobody else would think to be both a Boy and a Girl. So she ends up Out-Boying the boys, Out-Girling the girls, and if she's accomplishing more than every other character in the world, she must be...

What? Let's hear it?

Special.

So here's the new theory. The fantasy here isn't about being a capable woman, or a tough one, or anything like that. The fantasy is about Out-Boying the Boys and Out-Girling the Girls and most importantly, getting away with it. Because if you act according to both gender roles, nobody can hold you to account. Nobody can say "you're not acting right" because you're acting right for a boy but you're still retaining the "privileges" of being a girl in this kind of rigid gender role world: you can get sad and faint once you've killed the bad guy. You can accept the protection of the army of boys because there's sexual threat involved and that's what girls do. You can be weak when you want to be loved. You can mouth off, get people killed, screw up your local werewolf hierarchy, and whatnot, because why would you know better? You're a girl. You're a girl, so if you're tough the boys should respect and love you when you fuck up bad. You're getting the privileges of both gender roles and the negatives of neither.

And if nobody can ever hold you to account, you essentially never take a consequence.

The fantasy here, folks, is lack of responsibility for one's actions.

So why did Magic Bites make me think of all this, so I can be unfair to it? Well, it's about responsibility on one level. Kate says a few times she doesn't want to be responsible for others; when she is, she does blow it. The end is someone telling her that this feeling in her gut is being responsible for others and accountable in terms of her actions. She is supposedly reintegrated into society.

But y'know? She's not. Not really. And I don't feel that feeling in her gut.

She didn't learn responsibility, because she didn't take consequences.

So...I liked this book. It was a good read. But I'm not sure how much of this subgenre I'll be able to take in. Because it's someone's world -- I suspect it's the world of the people who used to read period piece romance and admit it or not admit it -- but it's not mine. In my world, there are consequences. Always.

My Mary Sues, my fantasy-projection characters, they are not these. Because I've been the one girl in a group of boys, in a boy-world, and y'know what? Being tough, being mouthy, using your tits as a weapon while denying that they're there?

It doesn't get you respect.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: The Shins -- Sleeping Lessons

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Fiction and Other White Lies

November 2016

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Drowning Nor Waving

This girl's life among the electrical lights

Entries tagged with keeping book

Books So Far

I need books.

The 2008 Books

And the work I'm supposed to be doing.

Two Questions...

Quick September Book Reports

Less a Book Report than some extremely spoileriffic musings...

Two Short Book Reports

Dude.

Two Good, One Meh, One Bleh

I finally read a book I want to Book Report.

The 2007 Books

Getting on that time again...

Mike Harrison Brainwashing

Brazilian or Nyissan, Ma'am?

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

Books, books, books.

Real Short Book Reports

Book Report: Breakfast With the Ones You Love

Book Report: Magic Bites