Booklog Catch-Up
Jan. 16th, 2015 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseWhile typing part of this, I rewatched the DS9 episode where Eddington taunts Sisko with Les Miserables. It's the wrong book for the metaphor the story was trying to write: Valjean doesn't lead revolutions. Sorry, Eddington; your heart is in the right place, but you're looking for another Hugo protagonist, I think.
My reading log is so behind it starts with last year's WSFA small press nominee voting bundle. The contents were:
"Trap-weed", Gemma Files (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
"The Traditional", Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed 5/13)
"Bits", Naomi Kritzer, (Clarkesworld 10/13)
"Set Your Face Towards the Darkness", David McDonald (Tales of Australia: Great Southern Land)
"Acts of Chivalry", Sean McMullen, (Tales of Australia: Great Southern Land)
"Morning Star", DK Mok (One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries)
"Like a Bat Out of Hell", Jonathan Shipley (After Death)
"Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma", Alex Shvartsman (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show 4/13)
Out of the park favorite: "Bits", Kritzer. Good writing! It got in, it got out, it treated sex toys and marital relations with humor. Also, Rule 34!
Race to the bottom: "Acts of Chivalry", "The Traditional", "Set Your Face Towards the Darkness". "Acts of Chivalry" had tropes I am bored with (werewolves) embedded in really uninspired prose. There was nothing new in the story, and nothing old done well. "Traditional" is apocalyptic shippiness in the dread second person present tense, with an anti-kink. The technical chops on display are pretty good: I skipped to the end instead of throwing it across the room. "Set Your Face" is epistolary explorer fic, with vampires and werewolves. I am a very hard sell on epistolary fic. No, harder than that.
Middle of the pack: "Trap-Weed" was selkies I didn't instantly dislike; "Like a Bat" was entertaining; "Morning Star" has spaceships (+1!) but blows up the Earth (-1). I really want to like it, but... shaky characterization in a "three people in a locked spaceship" story? Meh. "Explaining Cthulu to Grandma" was cute, but otherwise didn't stick with me.
Readers, feel my shame. I reread Mercedes Lackey.
The Valdemar novels just don't age well. The Tarma and Kethry novels hold up best - because for Tarma and Kethry, emo tends to be trumped by righteous sword-swinging fury - and not surprisingly that's where I started! It's sad that, even though the '90s saw this amazing explosion of brick-sized fantasy epics with swords and magic and all that, there's very little I can point to and say,"if you liked this pair of women action heroines from the '80s, this scratches that same itch." Whether this reflects a shift from short form stories where familiar characters glued together short story series - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric of Melnibone, etc - to the long epics where the characters become vehicles for the plot (Wheel of Time, I am looking at you) is a great question! Or maybe I am missing out because honestly, there came a point when I got bored with fishing for a fat novel by touch and coming up with Fat Albert (Molecular Biology of the Cell, Albert et al, 1500 pages) by accident*.
*Okay, I exaggerate. But I'm pretty sure The Fires of Heaven rivals some intro science textbooks in heft.
Where Lackey's word count started growing, my interest dropped. Tarma and Kethry? Bring it. Talia? I could write essays on the plotting, worldbuilding, subgenre development, and entertainment value of the Queen's Own trilogy. This time around, I skipped right to my favorite part, Talia and Kris snowed in during Arrow's Flight - for all the moustache-twirling bad guys, the blizzard and digging-out is the only thing in the entire Valdemar universe that creeped me out on purpose - and sort of skimmed on to By the Sword. BtS would be a much better novel without the surprise lifebonds and Choosing by reincarnated mages, complete with ridiculously heavy-handed hints with respect to reincarnation. There's just too many neatly-wrapped happy-ish endings.
I did not venture into Mage Winds / Mage Storms territory (much), instead making a hard swerve into the Vanyel trilogy. It seems I still have many feelings about the (possibly unintentional) structure of foreshadowing and capital-D Destiny, while being less and less invested in the actual story. Teenagers are not all that good at life decisions, who knew? Teenagers with superpowers are not that good at life decisions with superpowers, not shocking! Unless you are a Herald, apparently.
One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love (ed. Rebecca Walker) (2009): Essays on family. A mixed bag, which killed some bus time.
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Dan Fagin) (2013): Nonfiction. A recounting of the history of a chemical plant in a New Jersey town, and of the legal wrangling that arose during the plant's decline. Long, heavily end-noted, very well written. There was enough science I can look up the technical aspects for more details, and the science that was in the book was clearly described for a lay audience. The legal aspects also seemed well done to me, evoking the tedium and inanity of major legal actions, and the ambiguous closure - or lack of closure - associated with the final settlements.
Also, I will never look at tap water the same way. Highly recommended.
ETA, 2015: SAN trimer results complete, ambiguous. The study is discussed in Fagin's book in some detail.
For reasons, I reread broad swathes of Kage Baker's Company novels (1997 - 2007): In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Children of the Company, The Machine's Child, The Sons of Heaven, and the short story collections Black Projects, White Knights and Gods and Pawns. You'll note I skipped The Life of the World to Come, as my feelings on Mendoza's romance start at "faugh, this is not an entirely consensual relationship!" and go downhill from there.
The Company novels are wonderful entertainment: there's great worldbuilding with a number of clever little touches; a deep and wide cast of entertaining, well-evoked characters; coherence of plot and theme; deft comedic timing. They're not flawless: the Mendoza romance is predicated on some deeply sketchy "Edward is Always Right" nonsense. It's possible to argue there's an arc where Nicholas and Edward and Alec learn they aren't all that, but it's not entirely clear to me that's in line with the author's intention. I am happy to burble at length in comments, particularly about Joseph, or series structure, or the little gray men.
Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie) (2014): Sequel to Ancillary Justice. It was enjoyable, in a way that is a little aslant of AJ.
AJ has this nifty structure which jumps the reader between the narrative threads of present day Breq and Justice of Toren during the Shis'urna annexation. Leckie brings together the threads in a very compelling fashion. She also throws in a ton of worldbuilding, and with attention to some of the second-order effects a lot of writing overlooks. But other parts are not as well-developed. Characterization is good, but not outstanding.
There's been some discussion of Breq the Social Justice Advocate in AS. That didn't entirely go past me, but what struck me more strongly was the way the novel's pacing and focus threw me back to Cherryh's Foreigner series. There's this fiddly fine-grain approach to problems. Instead of focusing directly on the looming problem of Anaander Mianaai vs Anaander Mianaai, and her mandate to secure Athoek, Breq takes on some seemingly peripheral projects. She instigates repairs in a neglected section of Athoek Station, intervenes in a domestic dispute, goes into secluded mourning for a politically important death, and intervenes in another interpersonal conflict, this one sitting on decades of oppression.
I think this is a very tight focus, with unreliable narrator, on Breq and/or Tisarwat building a support base. Breq's looking at the system, going, "if two factions of the tyrant tear through here in conflict, where are the weak spots in the system?" Other than the garden dome, of course. No matter which Anaander Mianaai winds up in charge, Breq has a mandate to secure the system... though who she's securing the system for may be a question that merits (or hopefully rewards) close attention.
That may also play into why Tisarwat is getting such a long rope. Let the partial fragment of the tyrant do the things the tyrant would do, before the reconquering / reconsolidating Lord of the Radch shows up with a fleet behind her.
Translator Dlique's death felt a little underplayed, in the moment, to me. I was expecting much more clutching of pearls at the thought of a Presger diplomatic incident. Maybe the sleep deprivation, thinking in circles, questioning of self-identification and/or humanity, etc, is coming in the third novel.
While reading AS, I noticed I hadn't retained AJ was well as I had hoped. Therefore, I reread Ancillary Justice right after finishing AS. The Mercy of Kalr is currently my favorite character in the incomplete trilogy, being just as direct and alien (in a value neutral, love-and-salads* sense) as Breq / Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen.
*Fictional alien brains are not wired in the way (fictional, or actual) human brains are wired. So one might have aliens like the Atevi whose interpersonal relationships do not translate well, because the closest their language and neurochemistry come to the concept of love is expressing a preference for, say, salad. Related to this, I really, really hope Leckie has more Presger translators, or the Presger or another alien species, pop onstage in Ancilliary Mercy.
The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss) (2007): Fantasy novel. The retelling of the youth of Kvothe, called the Deathless, the Bloodless, Kingkiller, etc, by the red-haired green-eyed innkeeper Kote.
Jo Walton reviewed this favorably, and one of my friends really liked it, so I made an exception to my Fat Fantasy Epic rule. (The Rule: "Don't.") It didn't move me as strongly as others have been moved, but I'm intrigued by the artifice of the framing story. We're being told a story! The narrator may be rather unreliable! I certainly hope the portrayal of women is a side effect of the precocious mid-teens male protagonist PoV. The language is polished, nearly invisible, except when it does something particularly beautiful.
I still find myself inclined to wait until the trilogy (or series) is finished or permanently abandoned before reading the second novel.
My reading log is so behind it starts with last year's WSFA small press nominee voting bundle. The contents were:
"Trap-weed", Gemma Files (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
"The Traditional", Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed 5/13)
"Bits", Naomi Kritzer, (Clarkesworld 10/13)
"Set Your Face Towards the Darkness", David McDonald (Tales of Australia: Great Southern Land)
"Acts of Chivalry", Sean McMullen, (Tales of Australia: Great Southern Land)
"Morning Star", DK Mok (One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries)
"Like a Bat Out of Hell", Jonathan Shipley (After Death)
"Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma", Alex Shvartsman (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show 4/13)
Out of the park favorite: "Bits", Kritzer. Good writing! It got in, it got out, it treated sex toys and marital relations with humor. Also, Rule 34!
Race to the bottom: "Acts of Chivalry", "The Traditional", "Set Your Face Towards the Darkness". "Acts of Chivalry" had tropes I am bored with (werewolves) embedded in really uninspired prose. There was nothing new in the story, and nothing old done well. "Traditional" is apocalyptic shippiness in the dread second person present tense, with an anti-kink. The technical chops on display are pretty good: I skipped to the end instead of throwing it across the room. "Set Your Face" is epistolary explorer fic, with vampires and werewolves. I am a very hard sell on epistolary fic. No, harder than that.
Middle of the pack: "Trap-Weed" was selkies I didn't instantly dislike; "Like a Bat" was entertaining; "Morning Star" has spaceships (+1!) but blows up the Earth (-1). I really want to like it, but... shaky characterization in a "three people in a locked spaceship" story? Meh. "Explaining Cthulu to Grandma" was cute, but otherwise didn't stick with me.
Readers, feel my shame. I reread Mercedes Lackey.
The Valdemar novels just don't age well. The Tarma and Kethry novels hold up best - because for Tarma and Kethry, emo tends to be trumped by righteous sword-swinging fury - and not surprisingly that's where I started! It's sad that, even though the '90s saw this amazing explosion of brick-sized fantasy epics with swords and magic and all that, there's very little I can point to and say,"if you liked this pair of women action heroines from the '80s, this scratches that same itch." Whether this reflects a shift from short form stories where familiar characters glued together short story series - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric of Melnibone, etc - to the long epics where the characters become vehicles for the plot (Wheel of Time, I am looking at you) is a great question! Or maybe I am missing out because honestly, there came a point when I got bored with fishing for a fat novel by touch and coming up with Fat Albert (Molecular Biology of the Cell, Albert et al, 1500 pages) by accident*.
*Okay, I exaggerate. But I'm pretty sure The Fires of Heaven rivals some intro science textbooks in heft.
Where Lackey's word count started growing, my interest dropped. Tarma and Kethry? Bring it. Talia? I could write essays on the plotting, worldbuilding, subgenre development, and entertainment value of the Queen's Own trilogy. This time around, I skipped right to my favorite part, Talia and Kris snowed in during Arrow's Flight - for all the moustache-twirling bad guys, the blizzard and digging-out is the only thing in the entire Valdemar universe that creeped me out on purpose - and sort of skimmed on to By the Sword. BtS would be a much better novel without the surprise lifebonds and Choosing by reincarnated mages, complete with ridiculously heavy-handed hints with respect to reincarnation. There's just too many neatly-wrapped happy-ish endings.
I did not venture into Mage Winds / Mage Storms territory (much), instead making a hard swerve into the Vanyel trilogy. It seems I still have many feelings about the (possibly unintentional) structure of foreshadowing and capital-D Destiny, while being less and less invested in the actual story. Teenagers are not all that good at life decisions, who knew? Teenagers with superpowers are not that good at life decisions with superpowers, not shocking! Unless you are a Herald, apparently.
One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love (ed. Rebecca Walker) (2009): Essays on family. A mixed bag, which killed some bus time.
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Dan Fagin) (2013): Nonfiction. A recounting of the history of a chemical plant in a New Jersey town, and of the legal wrangling that arose during the plant's decline. Long, heavily end-noted, very well written. There was enough science I can look up the technical aspects for more details, and the science that was in the book was clearly described for a lay audience. The legal aspects also seemed well done to me, evoking the tedium and inanity of major legal actions, and the ambiguous closure - or lack of closure - associated with the final settlements.
Also, I will never look at tap water the same way. Highly recommended.
ETA, 2015: SAN trimer results complete, ambiguous. The study is discussed in Fagin's book in some detail.
For reasons, I reread broad swathes of Kage Baker's Company novels (1997 - 2007): In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Children of the Company, The Machine's Child, The Sons of Heaven, and the short story collections Black Projects, White Knights and Gods and Pawns. You'll note I skipped The Life of the World to Come, as my feelings on Mendoza's romance start at "faugh, this is not an entirely consensual relationship!" and go downhill from there.
The Company novels are wonderful entertainment: there's great worldbuilding with a number of clever little touches; a deep and wide cast of entertaining, well-evoked characters; coherence of plot and theme; deft comedic timing. They're not flawless: the Mendoza romance is predicated on some deeply sketchy "Edward is Always Right" nonsense. It's possible to argue there's an arc where Nicholas and Edward and Alec learn they aren't all that, but it's not entirely clear to me that's in line with the author's intention. I am happy to burble at length in comments, particularly about Joseph, or series structure, or the little gray men.
Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie) (2014): Sequel to Ancillary Justice. It was enjoyable, in a way that is a little aslant of AJ.
AJ has this nifty structure which jumps the reader between the narrative threads of present day Breq and Justice of Toren during the Shis'urna annexation. Leckie brings together the threads in a very compelling fashion. She also throws in a ton of worldbuilding, and with attention to some of the second-order effects a lot of writing overlooks. But other parts are not as well-developed. Characterization is good, but not outstanding.
There's been some discussion of Breq the Social Justice Advocate in AS. That didn't entirely go past me, but what struck me more strongly was the way the novel's pacing and focus threw me back to Cherryh's Foreigner series. There's this fiddly fine-grain approach to problems. Instead of focusing directly on the looming problem of Anaander Mianaai vs Anaander Mianaai, and her mandate to secure Athoek, Breq takes on some seemingly peripheral projects. She instigates repairs in a neglected section of Athoek Station, intervenes in a domestic dispute, goes into secluded mourning for a politically important death, and intervenes in another interpersonal conflict, this one sitting on decades of oppression.
I think this is a very tight focus, with unreliable narrator, on Breq and/or Tisarwat building a support base. Breq's looking at the system, going, "if two factions of the tyrant tear through here in conflict, where are the weak spots in the system?" Other than the garden dome, of course. No matter which Anaander Mianaai winds up in charge, Breq has a mandate to secure the system... though who she's securing the system for may be a question that merits (or hopefully rewards) close attention.
That may also play into why Tisarwat is getting such a long rope. Let the partial fragment of the tyrant do the things the tyrant would do, before the reconquering / reconsolidating Lord of the Radch shows up with a fleet behind her.
Translator Dlique's death felt a little underplayed, in the moment, to me. I was expecting much more clutching of pearls at the thought of a Presger diplomatic incident. Maybe the sleep deprivation, thinking in circles, questioning of self-identification and/or humanity, etc, is coming in the third novel.
While reading AS, I noticed I hadn't retained AJ was well as I had hoped. Therefore, I reread Ancillary Justice right after finishing AS. The Mercy of Kalr is currently my favorite character in the incomplete trilogy, being just as direct and alien (in a value neutral, love-and-salads* sense) as Breq / Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen.
*Fictional alien brains are not wired in the way (fictional, or actual) human brains are wired. So one might have aliens like the Atevi whose interpersonal relationships do not translate well, because the closest their language and neurochemistry come to the concept of love is expressing a preference for, say, salad. Related to this, I really, really hope Leckie has more Presger translators, or the Presger or another alien species, pop onstage in Ancilliary Mercy.
The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss) (2007): Fantasy novel. The retelling of the youth of Kvothe, called the Deathless, the Bloodless, Kingkiller, etc, by the red-haired green-eyed innkeeper Kote.
Jo Walton reviewed this favorably, and one of my friends really liked it, so I made an exception to my Fat Fantasy Epic rule. (The Rule: "Don't.") It didn't move me as strongly as others have been moved, but I'm intrigued by the artifice of the framing story. We're being told a story! The narrator may be rather unreliable! I certainly hope the portrayal of women is a side effect of the precocious mid-teens male protagonist PoV. The language is polished, nearly invisible, except when it does something particularly beautiful.
I still find myself inclined to wait until the trilogy (or series) is finished or permanently abandoned before reading the second novel.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-20 05:28 am (UTC)I started Name of the Wind once, but I wasn't able to get through it. (I think I just didn't care much about the character?) Should I try again?
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-20 05:54 am (UTC)I started Name of the Wind once, but I wasn't able to get through it. (I think I just didn't care much about the character?) Should I try again?
At this time I would say no. First, it's a very fat book in an incomplete trilogy. Second, remember those short chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea which cover the young Sparrowhawk at Roke? Now, imagine that, expanded to about five hundred pages. It's a very smooth story of a precocious young boy-wizard, his friendships, and his relationship with his studies and teachers, but I kept waiting for the plot to go somewhere. Also, as mentioned above, the women in the story are peripheral, or The Only Girl In All The World. It's not inappropriate for the context, but it's such a mundane interpretation of the possibilities open to a fantasy novel.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-21 01:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-22 01:53 am (UTC)It’s a little surprising. Walton seemed pretty excited about the second novel, too.
(BTW, hi! Long time no talk. How are things going?)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-22 04:54 am (UTC)Things are up in the air. Weirdness at work re spinoff, me getting more and more work to do, also I am back to school trying to be a left-handed interior designer. I mostly was avoiding posting at Dreamwidth because I was writing for a Brewers blog, but that gig went south and now I need other stuff to do when I'm not smudging home plans.