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Recent Reading
Aug. 5th, 2018 09:42 pmThe Magician King (Lev Grossman) (2011): Quentin something something Julia! I knew how Julia's story would end because I had watched the TV show first, but wow, Quentin is so... so... he frames every woman in terms of bangability! I want less Quentin in favor of magic and Fillory and other people's stories. There's some smart concepts floating around, and the prose is as good as the first novel, but... Quentin. Meh.
The Magician's Land (Lev Grossman) (2014): Readers who also have read C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle may recall how it collapses under the weight of the Book of Revelations. The Magician's Land avoids that by playing Quentin's third fictional outing dead straight. ( Spoilers. )
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Caroline Fraser) (2017): A new biography of the "Little House" author. As a reader not steeped in Little House scholarship, this didn't seem to add a lot of new info to our knowledge of the series, or of Wilder's life, but it put known information in one place. The Ingalls were very poor, Federal land management of the West was not that great, the novels' attitude toward non-whites was being questioned not long after their initial publication, etc. Rose Wilder Lane was kind of a disaster of a human being, sadly.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou) (2018): Or, how not to run a startup; and in later chapters, how not to run a lab that claims to be FDA- and CLIA-compliant. Late in the book, Carreyrou describes a meeting with a Theranos exec, and the lawyers that accompany him, with language that makes me wonder how many drafts it took to tone the sense of journalistic detachment peeling away under the blasts from the Theranos legal team down to something that the editors would okay. Because all indications suggest that the Theranos C-suite was a hot mess who spent more on lawyers than science, then used the lawyers as bully-sticks against anyone who dared suggest they needed to do more science. It's easy to kick the company now that it's down, but there are lessons about fraud and how to avoid people trying to mislead you (and your money).
Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee) (2018): Third in the Machineries of Empire trilogy. The alternative title could be "Kujen Must Die." Though, "And You Thought Ari Emory Had an Ego Problem" might work too. RG opens with a disoriented Garach Jedao Shkan wondering what he and Ruo have gotten up to this time. For the players paying attention, Ruo has been dead for more than four hundred years, so there's your first hint Something Is Going On.
( Many spoilers, discussion of consent, tread with caution. )
If you can get past that, the servitor characters are a delight; Brezan and Tseya needed about fifty pages more of their engagement negotiations (and huh, how does Tseya really feel about this marriage deal?); various groups teaming up against Kujen is the sort of thing that is right up my alley. I wish we'd gotten more Cheris, but don't I always.
Storm Front (Jim Butcher) (2000): Wisecracking wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden solves a murder and does magic. I'm only here because of the fandom occasionally leaks into my friends-of page, and because summer reading happens.
There is no way to take this on its own merits, because Harry is That Guy. You know, the one who thinks that holding doors for women is "chivalrous" (can holding doors be gender-irrelevant common courtesy? Please?) and can't see a woman without commenting on her attractiveness, even if the woman is gruesomely dead when he first sees her. The one who is a self-taught expert and will bend every room party conversation back to their area of interest. That guy.
On the plus side, Butcher is compulsively readable. Some people are gifted with storytelling talent, and figure out how to write later, if ever; Butcher's one of them.
The Magician's Land (Lev Grossman) (2014): Readers who also have read C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle may recall how it collapses under the weight of the Book of Revelations. The Magician's Land avoids that by playing Quentin's third fictional outing dead straight. ( Spoilers. )
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Caroline Fraser) (2017): A new biography of the "Little House" author. As a reader not steeped in Little House scholarship, this didn't seem to add a lot of new info to our knowledge of the series, or of Wilder's life, but it put known information in one place. The Ingalls were very poor, Federal land management of the West was not that great, the novels' attitude toward non-whites was being questioned not long after their initial publication, etc. Rose Wilder Lane was kind of a disaster of a human being, sadly.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou) (2018): Or, how not to run a startup; and in later chapters, how not to run a lab that claims to be FDA- and CLIA-compliant. Late in the book, Carreyrou describes a meeting with a Theranos exec, and the lawyers that accompany him, with language that makes me wonder how many drafts it took to tone the sense of journalistic detachment peeling away under the blasts from the Theranos legal team down to something that the editors would okay. Because all indications suggest that the Theranos C-suite was a hot mess who spent more on lawyers than science, then used the lawyers as bully-sticks against anyone who dared suggest they needed to do more science. It's easy to kick the company now that it's down, but there are lessons about fraud and how to avoid people trying to mislead you (and your money).
Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee) (2018): Third in the Machineries of Empire trilogy. The alternative title could be "Kujen Must Die." Though, "And You Thought Ari Emory Had an Ego Problem" might work too. RG opens with a disoriented Garach Jedao Shkan wondering what he and Ruo have gotten up to this time. For the players paying attention, Ruo has been dead for more than four hundred years, so there's your first hint Something Is Going On.
( Many spoilers, discussion of consent, tread with caution. )
If you can get past that, the servitor characters are a delight; Brezan and Tseya needed about fifty pages more of their engagement negotiations (and huh, how does Tseya really feel about this marriage deal?); various groups teaming up against Kujen is the sort of thing that is right up my alley. I wish we'd gotten more Cheris, but don't I always.
Storm Front (Jim Butcher) (2000): Wisecracking wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden solves a murder and does magic. I'm only here because of the fandom occasionally leaks into my friends-of page, and because summer reading happens.
There is no way to take this on its own merits, because Harry is That Guy. You know, the one who thinks that holding doors for women is "chivalrous" (can holding doors be gender-irrelevant common courtesy? Please?) and can't see a woman without commenting on her attractiveness, even if the woman is gruesomely dead when he first sees her. The one who is a self-taught expert and will bend every room party conversation back to their area of interest. That guy.
On the plus side, Butcher is compulsively readable. Some people are gifted with storytelling talent, and figure out how to write later, if ever; Butcher's one of them.