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aseWhy 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.
Once upon a time, it was a trader's nightmare to get spices from their source to the customers. Cloves and nutmeg would make their way to India and Kozhikode (then called Calicut) on the West coast, along with ginger, Indian pepper, and other spices. European or Islamic traders from the Arabian peninsula would sail out of the Red Sea and catch prevailing easterlies, buy everything their holds could hole, and wait for the monsoon to kick in and switch the easterlies to westerlies that took them back. The spices might be transported up to Byzantium by camel caravan and ship, or later to Venice; and from there distributed across Europe. This was neither cheap nor easy, but it was the only way until the round-Africa route was pioneered by the Portugese in the 16th century. Which also resulted in a lot of maritime deaths.
Turner talks about the consequences of this uncertain trade: the uncertainty about spices' Earthly origin, the mystic cachet they acquired, and the implications for Medieval medicine (which is more inovative and weird than ideas seen in some fantasy novels), and who got them (the very rich, and... the very rich. Also sometimes the sick.)
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.
Good: SFnal elements are a dynamic part of story; not the Romance! In! SPAACE! issue. On a related note, the biology did not comprehensively suck.
Meh: there are, possibly, a couple of different middling-sized novels in here: the Last Days On Earth, Year One on-ship and on planet, the politics of colonization (as seen by the colonizers). Thematic underpinnings are weak; I'm all about a unifying theme uniting the personal, community, and political stuff. Also, happened to Earth? In umpteen million time-dilated years, what happened in the galaxy? I'm having a Different Story problem here.
Bad: The prose is rough. The novel needs to be beaten with the editor stick: show not tell (Catharin and Joseph's parent backstory could've been handled more neatly. Related to that: wooo! Non-nuclear families FTW!) I have unfortunate sympathy for Lary; I'm not sure that's what Latner was trying to evoke.
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.
Technically entertaining book where high schoolers fight The Man: the Department of Homeland Security in a particularly totalitarian shadow. I hate this novel because it has the unpleasant stink of truth: the pungent stench of fear, the coppery back-of-the-mouth taste of abuse, the synaesthesia of violation, in the body, spirit and place. Also, word of advice: don't read torture scenes when you're stuck between underground stations on the metro. Really, just - don't.
Getting past my visceral reaction that Doctorow put a little more reality in my fiction than I was really after, this was pretty awesome YA. I think I'm not the target audience, but if I had read this when I was 15, I would have loved it. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!' I would have loved the idea that teenagers can be a power, and protest stupidity, and effect change in a system designed to generate fear without true security. This would be one of my pet peeves, so I'm glad Doctorow found an opportunity to express through his narraror the stupidity of security measures aren't just useless moneywasters, they're active impediments to life and liberty. So parts of this still resonate, and there are brief gleeful moments of Little Brother that are highly entertaining, like the vampmob game (before it ends the way all mass population events in totalitarian systems do). However, I wonder about unintended consequences: RFID cloners used to avoid public transit payments and road tolls, not just hassle profilers and their tracking systems, first of all. I think the state of privacy in this country is screwed up ("you don't have anything to hide, so hang it all out there" strikes me as TMI at best), but that doesn't give you a right to siphon other peoples' bank accounts for fun and games.
I have to wonder what inspired the bad guys in Little Brother to give American kids Hell in the name of keeping America safe. What the heck were they thinking? I'd love to know what Doctorow thought his evil characters were thinking when he wrote them. Did they sincerely believe they were acting in the best interests of public security? Was this an Abu Ghraib-like screwup, with overstressed personnel bending the rules unto destruction? Are these people just on power trips?
Conclusions: I would hand this to almost any teenager in a second, but for the same reasons I am not so sure of its appeal outside the target audience. Technically good, may merit a reread in a couple of years after we've all donated lots of money and maybe some time to good organizations like the ACLU and
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.
Once upon a time, it was a trader's nightmare to get spices from their source to the customers. Cloves and nutmeg would make their way to India and Kozhikode (then called Calicut) on the West coast, along with ginger, Indian pepper, and other spices. European or Islamic traders from the Arabian peninsula would sail out of the Red Sea and catch prevailing easterlies, buy everything their holds could hole, and wait for the monsoon to kick in and switch the easterlies to westerlies that took them back. The spices might be transported up to Byzantium by camel caravan and ship, or later to Venice; and from there distributed across Europe. This was neither cheap nor easy, but it was the only way until the round-Africa route was pioneered by the Portugese in the 16th century. Which also resulted in a lot of maritime deaths.
Turner talks about the consequences of this uncertain trade: the uncertainty about spices' Earthly origin, the mystic cachet they acquired, and the implications for Medieval medicine (which is more inovative and weird than ideas seen in some fantasy novels), and who got them (the very rich, and... the very rich. Also sometimes the sick.)
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. Good: SFnal elements are a dynamic part of story; not the Romance! In! SPAACE! issue. On a related note, the biology did not comprehensively suck.
Meh: there are, possibly, a couple of different middling-sized novels in here: the Last Days On Earth, Year One on-ship and on planet, the politics of colonization (as seen by the colonizers). Thematic underpinnings are weak; I'm all about a unifying theme uniting the personal, community, and political stuff. Also, happened to Earth? In umpteen million time-dilated years, what happened in the galaxy? I'm having a Different Story problem here.
Bad: The prose is rough. The novel needs to be beaten with the editor stick: show not tell (Catharin and Joseph's parent backstory could've been handled more neatly. Related to that: wooo! Non-nuclear families FTW!) I have unfortunate sympathy for Lary; I'm not sure that's what Latner was trying to evoke.
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.
Technically entertaining book where high schoolers fight The Man: the Department of Homeland Security in a particularly totalitarian shadow. I hate this novel because it has the unpleasant stink of truth: the pungent stench of fear, the coppery back-of-the-mouth taste of abuse, the synaesthesia of violation, in the body, spirit and place. Also, word of advice: don't read torture scenes when you're stuck between underground stations on the metro. Really, just - don't.
Getting past my visceral reaction that Doctorow put a little more reality in my fiction than I was really after, this was pretty awesome YA. I think I'm not the target audience, but if I had read this when I was 15, I would have loved it. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!' I would have loved the idea that teenagers can be a power, and protest stupidity, and effect change in a system designed to generate fear without true security. This would be one of my pet peeves, so I'm glad Doctorow found an opportunity to express through his narraror the stupidity of security measures aren't just useless moneywasters, they're active impediments to life and liberty. So parts of this still resonate, and there are brief gleeful moments of Little Brother that are highly entertaining, like the vampmob game (before it ends the way all mass population events in totalitarian systems do). However, I wonder about unintended consequences: RFID cloners used to avoid public transit payments and road tolls, not just hassle profilers and their tracking systems, first of all. I think the state of privacy in this country is screwed up ("you don't have anything to hide, so hang it all out there" strikes me as TMI at best), but that doesn't give you a right to siphon other peoples' bank accounts for fun and games.
I have to wonder what inspired the bad guys in Little Brother to give American kids Hell in the name of keeping America safe. What the heck were they thinking? I'd love to know what Doctorow thought his evil characters were thinking when he wrote them. Did they sincerely believe they were acting in the best interests of public security? Was this an Abu Ghraib-like screwup, with overstressed personnel bending the rules unto destruction? Are these people just on power trips?
Conclusions: I would hand this to almost any teenager in a second, but for the same reasons I am not so sure of its appeal outside the target audience. Technically good, may merit a reread in a couple of years after we've all donated lots of money and maybe some time to good organizations like the ACLU and
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 11:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 03:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 12:11 pm (UTC)While I disagree with Homeland Security from the name down, I think setting the entire department up as Black Hats does a disservice to the (presumably) many people of integrity who work for the department in real life.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:46 pm (UTC)I finally read the first two Steerswoman books and liked them, but not that much, as I found the world to be kind of a Mary-Sue-culture (look! A world where scientists are honored and given free hotel rooms! And don't fight over publications and grant money!) - it's too bad I didn't read them ten years ago before I was jaded and cynical.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-02 03:27 am (UTC)Ha ha ha! I had not thought of it that way, but I guess it's true! I tend to notice that the protagonist is sort of awful with people, but the traits that make her seem abrupt and distracted are exactly those that make her a good student of the world. I also may be completely riveted by the way Kirstein starts with an apparent fantasy/quest setup and completely turns those assumptions upside down.
it's too bad I didn't read them ten years ago before I was jaded and cynical.
Academia seems to be an embittering experience, where the lower the stakes are, the more vicious the infighting and personal attacks.
On a side note, Kirstein has worked in music and IT, but doesn't seem to have a science background. I bet pettiness happens there, too. (Huh. Wizards as mad scientists run amok, and steerswomen as natural philosophers or something? The competitive versus co-operative spirits? I'm just talking for the sake of talking.)
I'm sorry I didn't like Cordwainer Smith, too! Like I said, I would bet I've read stories and novels influenced by him, and would enjoy his stories more by looking at what he did first and who copied him later.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 12:05 am (UTC)