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Why yes, I do fail at keeping my book log up to date!
SEPTEMBER
Spice: The History of a Temptation (Jack Turner): Nonfiction amble through Roman and medieval times by way of the exotics. I was hoping for a history focusing on the Indian, Indonesian, and generally Far East (whatever the PC term is today) perspective, so I was disappointed, but the book taken on its own terms isn't bad. Turner illustrates spices' culinary, medicinal, and ceremonial uses with generous quantities of examples, and emphasizes the altered role of spices - from a European perspective - now that they're no longer as expensive and storied as gold and silver. Turner's thesis can be summed up in about a paragraph.
( More description and reactions. )
Solid book, but it took me something like three weeks to read it, twenty minutes at a time, on the bus, so I got pretty tired of the umpteen illustrative examples.
Cordwainer Smith short stories: "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, ""The Game of Rat and Dragon", "The Burning of the Brain", "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal". I suspect my lack of enthusiasm for Smith can be traced to him doing the tropes first - not always in the most polished way - as well as his affection for cats outweighing mine by an order of magnitude.
Hurricane Moon (Alexis Glynn Latner): having subjected![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meril to some rants about SF/romance novels that might be more accurately described as "romance... IIIN SPAAAAACE", she recommended I try this.
( Mixed bag. I try again with my theories of genre! )
I really wonder if there isn't some prose standard I've unconsciously absorbed from SF/F: in the cross-genre and "pure" romances I've read, the prose often seems very choppy on a sentence or paragraph level. It doesn't flow; there's some connection I'm supposed to make that I don't. I've tried saying this before, but I'm not sure I'm getting my point across.
ETA, 11/30: The Steerswoman (Rosemary Kirstein): Reread. I discovered the hard way that the original Del Rey publication has a printer's error: pages 217 to 248 were replaced with pages 221 to 252 of The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys. Crying shame that a critical piece of the climax was replaced with another book.
OCTOBER
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Atul Gawande): Lightweight nonfiction. Succint and entertaining. Gawande takes diligence and making a "science of performance" as his thesis, with interesting supporting examples from Indian surgery, battlefield care in Iraq, cystic fibrosis maintenance care in the US, and child delivery in the States. Excellent bus reading; pretty good for anywhere.
Larklight (Phillip Reeve; David Wyatt illustrator): YA steampunk novel. Entertaining for what it is: Kipling-esque However, the illustrations of the freaking huge evil spiders did not sit well with me. Someone else want to say something on the topic of missing moms with missing pasts and superpowers? I feel like there's something going on there.
The Gate of Ivory (Doris Egan): Reread. Deep like puddle, entertaining like puddle. When you have a sailboat and are emotionally five years old. Oh, snap, this is a romance! I've just been distracted from its schmoopy qualities by the blood-feuds, spaceships and tarot cards! And Theodora's slightly mousy but quite stirling personality! Eeek, squishy girl emotions!
Yeah, you're prying this comfort reading out of my cold, dead hands.
NOVEMBER
Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (James Davidson): What the titles says: a study of where wastrel Athenians spent their money. Entertaining and generously endnoted, it earned triple bonus points for analyzing and destroying some of Foucault and Halperin's more bizaare conclusions about Greek sexuality. This makes me feel much better about wondering what Halperin was smoking when I read the relevant essay during college. Penetrative model out, pleasure model in, yay.
Davidson also delights me by throwing around ten-cent vocabulary with the constructed abandon of the academic class. Nice followup to Spices, since it starts with Athenian culinary excesses.
Little Brother (Cory Doctorow): High schooler Marcus Yallow cuts school the day of the Bay Bridge bombings and learns from hard personal experience that the Department of Homeland Security is evil with bells on. With one friend missing, last seen in DHS custody, Marcus vows to take down DHS, one technology hack at a time.
( Spoilers and reaction. Really, do *not* read torture scenes when you're stuck in a metal tube underground! )
SEPTEMBER
Spice: The History of a Temptation (Jack Turner): Nonfiction amble through Roman and medieval times by way of the exotics. I was hoping for a history focusing on the Indian, Indonesian, and generally Far East (whatever the PC term is today) perspective, so I was disappointed, but the book taken on its own terms isn't bad. Turner illustrates spices' culinary, medicinal, and ceremonial uses with generous quantities of examples, and emphasizes the altered role of spices - from a European perspective - now that they're no longer as expensive and storied as gold and silver. Turner's thesis can be summed up in about a paragraph.
( More description and reactions. )
Solid book, but it took me something like three weeks to read it, twenty minutes at a time, on the bus, so I got pretty tired of the umpteen illustrative examples.
Cordwainer Smith short stories: "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, ""The Game of Rat and Dragon", "The Burning of the Brain", "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal". I suspect my lack of enthusiasm for Smith can be traced to him doing the tropes first - not always in the most polished way - as well as his affection for cats outweighing mine by an order of magnitude.
Hurricane Moon (Alexis Glynn Latner): having subjected
meril to some rants about SF/romance novels that might be more accurately described as "romance... IIIN SPAAAAACE", she recommended I try this. ( Mixed bag. I try again with my theories of genre! )
I really wonder if there isn't some prose standard I've unconsciously absorbed from SF/F: in the cross-genre and "pure" romances I've read, the prose often seems very choppy on a sentence or paragraph level. It doesn't flow; there's some connection I'm supposed to make that I don't. I've tried saying this before, but I'm not sure I'm getting my point across.
ETA, 11/30: The Steerswoman (Rosemary Kirstein): Reread. I discovered the hard way that the original Del Rey publication has a printer's error: pages 217 to 248 were replaced with pages 221 to 252 of The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys. Crying shame that a critical piece of the climax was replaced with another book.
OCTOBER
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Atul Gawande): Lightweight nonfiction. Succint and entertaining. Gawande takes diligence and making a "science of performance" as his thesis, with interesting supporting examples from Indian surgery, battlefield care in Iraq, cystic fibrosis maintenance care in the US, and child delivery in the States. Excellent bus reading; pretty good for anywhere.
Larklight (Phillip Reeve; David Wyatt illustrator): YA steampunk novel. Entertaining for what it is: Kipling-esque However, the illustrations of the freaking huge evil spiders did not sit well with me. Someone else want to say something on the topic of missing moms with missing pasts and superpowers? I feel like there's something going on there.
The Gate of Ivory (Doris Egan): Reread. Deep like puddle, entertaining like puddle. When you have a sailboat and are emotionally five years old. Oh, snap, this is a romance! I've just been distracted from its schmoopy qualities by the blood-feuds, spaceships and tarot cards! And Theodora's slightly mousy but quite stirling personality! Eeek, squishy girl emotions!
Yeah, you're prying this comfort reading out of my cold, dead hands.
NOVEMBER
Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (James Davidson): What the titles says: a study of where wastrel Athenians spent their money. Entertaining and generously endnoted, it earned triple bonus points for analyzing and destroying some of Foucault and Halperin's more bizaare conclusions about Greek sexuality. This makes me feel much better about wondering what Halperin was smoking when I read the relevant essay during college. Penetrative model out, pleasure model in, yay.
Davidson also delights me by throwing around ten-cent vocabulary with the constructed abandon of the academic class. Nice followup to Spices, since it starts with Athenian culinary excesses.
Little Brother (Cory Doctorow): High schooler Marcus Yallow cuts school the day of the Bay Bridge bombings and learns from hard personal experience that the Department of Homeland Security is evil with bells on. With one friend missing, last seen in DHS custody, Marcus vows to take down DHS, one technology hack at a time.
( Spoilers and reaction. Really, do *not* read torture scenes when you're stuck in a metal tube underground! )