No Inclusive Set (January Reading)
Feb. 9th, 2009 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseWar, short stories, craziness, more craziness, different war. Fiction, nonfiction. No particular theme this month, except maybe stress.
The Paladin (C. J. Cherryh): Cherryh does a martial arts movie. Only, you know, not.
A peasant girl demands lessons in the sword from an aging, exiled lord of Chiyaden, bent on revenging herself on the lord that destroyed her family. The exiled lord in question calls her a fool, and crazy, and teaches her the sword, and eventually admits that if she runs off and gets herself killed, he'll miss her. Even when she's obnoxiously on target about his weaknesses.
For Cherryh, that's nearly true love.
It's worth noting that I keep failing to be utterly weirded out by the May/December romance, because 1.) everyone involved acknowledges they're insane, and 2.) Taizu really does shake Shoka up. It's romantic in the way it's about liking a person, and admiring their strengths, and seeing their craziness and grouchiness as part of that person.
None of which stops you from introducing said sword-trained peasant girl as your demon wife on a whim. A tactical whim, but still. Maybe not your smartest moment.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (ed. Sheree R. Thomas): Mostly short stories, some excerpts from longer novels, a handful of essays at the end. It's worth noting, in the context of Delany's essay on race and SF, that I am going to be lousy at expanding my own reading preferences, because I'm a white girl entrenched in her white girl culture. I don't want to page through the umpteen thousand new books coming out every month, I want to get a good recommendations list and check those books out of the library. So I'm sticking myself behind the double filter of other people's 1.) reading choices and likes, or 2.) the library's budget-driven purchasing choices, which might not be aware of what I want. Unless I go to the hassle of purchase recommendation forms (now online, yay) or, gasp, buying books on my own. Since I'm a cheapskate trying not to bulk up my material goods, I am seriously irritated by the thought of buying novels - hardcovers, even - on spec.
The flipside is that I'm lousy at expanding past the writers I'm familiar with, but don't want to invest the effort in the latest 500 page epic, so I wind up not reading the bad or good in spec fic. And sometimes I wander over to nonfiction.
I don't remember much about the actual stories, about a month later: I'm not a short fiction reader by native inclination, so the novel excerpts were often my favorite pieces. And after the recent brouhaha, I have no desire to go back and comment, because hey, crossfire. So I will say: look! Stuff people written by people not my color! And some of it I liked, and some of it was in loathsome phonetic dialect, and some of it was really forgettable, and the editor was way too proud of her "dark matter" pun. Also, I am not the target audience; this seems to have been an exercise in saying, "hey, there are more of us out here" and on that front likely succeeded.
Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh): The death and resurrection of Ari Emory.
There are two novels in this world which I have read, and reread, and consistently skip rereading large chunks of the novel: Bujold's Mirror Dance and Cyteen. In both cases, I skip the first, hideously stressful third and move right on to the major characters' deaths.
(Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Tyler Durden is the narrator's alternate personality. Anything else I can spoil for you?
This is one of the things that makes me think Cyteen and Mirror Dance might make an interesting paired read. They're thematically about identity, and a little about family, and a lot about how environment (positive and negative) and genetics shape identity. How much is necessary to replicate a person? Galen tried to beat Mark into someone who could mimic his geneparent; Ari was shaped to be the memetic as well as genetic continuation of her clone-sister. But Mark is smart and underhanded, like Miles, and Ari-younger is less ruthless (so far) than Ari-elder. Discuss in comments.
What's interesting about Cyteen is how the plot is basically an excuse for themes, and how well this works for me. I think the best science fiction entertains and makes you question. This is why I'm going to wind up reading Card again at some point (his writing makes me think), and regret it (his writing doesn't entertain me; it gives me the creeps). By the end of the book, who cares who murdered Ari Emory? There are, unfortunately, many people who wanted to, but not many with access to make it happen. But the themes! Ari is trying to control the evolution of an entire interstellar nation (or group of nations, depending on how you view the planets, star stations, and Administrative Territories), and I think she's ultimately doomed to fail. There will always and forever be a factor your models didn't take into account: for fun and games, try to analyze the end-game of 40,000 in Gehenna using in-universe terms. Did the AJ set ultimately add anything to the social matrix? What was the final definition of world?
Speaking of time passing, the technological assumptions make no sense 20 years on - big mainframes versus parallel processing; tape - seriously, analog tape - and the like. The final denouncement also dissolves into something like the fog of civil war, with no proper explanation of what happened or why. Also, Ari is well on her way to Evil Overlordship. She's very smart, but she's not 100% right. Some people who oppose her don't understand any of what she's doing, but some do, and oppose her anyway. I'd be interested to see if Justin had any thoughts on the really secret sociogenesis notes, if Justin weren't so far in Ari's pocket already.
Speaking of Justin - anyone want to do a recap on family and Reseune? Sibling-sets are important; azi-and-CIT pairs are important; parents are a problem. I still think no one's looking closely enough at Amy Carnath.
Cyteen holds a special place in my heart. You can only be 17, doing a bad job of bridging the gap between middle-class teenage privilege and adult responsibility, and realizing your primary caretaker is failing to take care of her responsibilities, and lying to herself and everyone around her, while reading Cherryh, once. Possibly I identified with Justin more than is healthy. So I was all kinds of thrilled when I heard that Regenesis was getting published.
Regenesis (C. J. Cherryh): FINALLY. FINALLY, YAY. So I maybe approached this from a slightly less than objective perspective. And by "not objective" I mean capslock and emoticons. And Robbie Williams on the tribute mp3 mix. The fact I'm thinking in terms of mixes should tell you something about my wilingness to love this book. And I did! Except when I wanted to smack it!
If you have read a novel in Cherryh's Foreigner series, you have read Regenesis. I was disappointed by this, because what I loved about Cyteen were the huge sweeping themes, and Justin and Grant arguing over ethics, and the sense of applied theory hanging over Ari junior's creation. Regenesis is all nit-picking angst about household staff angst and fiddly slow repeating reactions to events and worrying about Ari's security and how she's the fragile precious line between humanity and civil war. And ten thousand lines of internal monologue for every actual event, and wow, does that drive me insane, with none of the spark making that evolution of idea a joy to watch.
Feh. Feh, I say. Give me a noise with little denotation and a scornful connotation. Cherryh is much more interesting when characters are failing and screwing up and going off the plan, when there's no time to think and angst, only time to react. So I liked seeing some of the characters again, but would have been much more interested in a different sequel to Cyteen, one set 50 or 100 years or even further in the future, once the grand sweep of history set in. This six-months of Ari builds a Fortress of Solitude and civil war in Novogorod and the rot in the spacer military was all from the wrong angle. Though watching everyone collaborate on the Kyle AK situation was awesome. If the entire book had been that sort of brain surgery and psychological craziness and history rebounding unto another generation, in real time, with about 300% fewer internal asides, I would have been thrilled to my toes.
Possibly later I'll post the chapter-by-chapter reactions I started before I got too bored to stop and record stuff.
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War (Evan Wright): First of all, the subtitle is misleading. This isn't about the "new face", it's one guy in a Humvee with a Marine unit in Iraq. This is "about" highly trained, very aggressive Americans going to war. It's absolutely fascinating: there's no way in a million years I'd ever do anything like what Wright and Bravo Platoon are doing (plus, that whole "no women in combat" thing), but Wright brings out a lot of the emotion and reasons men might want to do that. It's brutal and not comfortable, and at certain points you stop, do the math, and realize no one's had a shower in more than a week (ew), in sweltering temperatures and poorly designed chemical warfare protective suits, but you're still reading. Because Wright makes you understand a little bit about why people are doing this, and the balance of protecting your people versus protecting civilians in a war zone, and the stupid things that happen because war is chaos squared, on a slow day.
It's also interesting to read the recent trade paperback edition, which has an additional "where are people and what have I been up to" afterword from Wright. The HBO actors' reactions to their living counterparts (you mean, when he's not hopped up on every upper known to man and Marine, Person doesn't constantly trash-talk Justin Timberlake?) are kind of hysterical.
So yeah, definite recommendation.
Numbers games: 5 total. 2 reread, 3 new; 4 fiction (1 short stories/essays), 1 nonfiction.
The Paladin (C. J. Cherryh): Cherryh does a martial arts movie. Only, you know, not.
"All right," he said. "Those are the terms. You cook and you clean, and I'll teach you. And when you've had enough, you can tell me. I give you my solemn word. Is that enough?"
There was a moving in the brush further down the trail. In a few moments she came around the bend of the path, sweaty and scratched and filthy, her shorn hair standing on end and matted with twigs and leaves; but her eyes were shining.
A peasant girl demands lessons in the sword from an aging, exiled lord of Chiyaden, bent on revenging herself on the lord that destroyed her family. The exiled lord in question calls her a fool, and crazy, and teaches her the sword, and eventually admits that if she runs off and gets herself killed, he'll miss her. Even when she's obnoxiously on target about his weaknesses.
For Cherryh, that's nearly true love.
It's worth noting that I keep failing to be utterly weirded out by the May/December romance, because 1.) everyone involved acknowledges they're insane, and 2.) Taizu really does shake Shoka up. It's romantic in the way it's about liking a person, and admiring their strengths, and seeing their craziness and grouchiness as part of that person.
None of which stops you from introducing said sword-trained peasant girl as your demon wife on a whim. A tactical whim, but still. Maybe not your smartest moment.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (ed. Sheree R. Thomas): Mostly short stories, some excerpts from longer novels, a handful of essays at the end. It's worth noting, in the context of Delany's essay on race and SF, that I am going to be lousy at expanding my own reading preferences, because I'm a white girl entrenched in her white girl culture. I don't want to page through the umpteen thousand new books coming out every month, I want to get a good recommendations list and check those books out of the library. So I'm sticking myself behind the double filter of other people's 1.) reading choices and likes, or 2.) the library's budget-driven purchasing choices, which might not be aware of what I want. Unless I go to the hassle of purchase recommendation forms (now online, yay) or, gasp, buying books on my own. Since I'm a cheapskate trying not to bulk up my material goods, I am seriously irritated by the thought of buying novels - hardcovers, even - on spec.
The flipside is that I'm lousy at expanding past the writers I'm familiar with, but don't want to invest the effort in the latest 500 page epic, so I wind up not reading the bad or good in spec fic. And sometimes I wander over to nonfiction.
I don't remember much about the actual stories, about a month later: I'm not a short fiction reader by native inclination, so the novel excerpts were often my favorite pieces. And after the recent brouhaha, I have no desire to go back and comment, because hey, crossfire. So I will say: look! Stuff people written by people not my color! And some of it I liked, and some of it was in loathsome phonetic dialect, and some of it was really forgettable, and the editor was way too proud of her "dark matter" pun. Also, I am not the target audience; this seems to have been an exercise in saying, "hey, there are more of us out here" and on that front likely succeeded.
Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh): The death and resurrection of Ari Emory.
There are two novels in this world which I have read, and reread, and consistently skip rereading large chunks of the novel: Bujold's Mirror Dance and Cyteen. In both cases, I skip the first, hideously stressful third and move right on to the major characters' deaths.
(Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Tyler Durden is the narrator's alternate personality. Anything else I can spoil for you?
This is one of the things that makes me think Cyteen and Mirror Dance might make an interesting paired read. They're thematically about identity, and a little about family, and a lot about how environment (positive and negative) and genetics shape identity. How much is necessary to replicate a person? Galen tried to beat Mark into someone who could mimic his geneparent; Ari was shaped to be the memetic as well as genetic continuation of her clone-sister. But Mark is smart and underhanded, like Miles, and Ari-younger is less ruthless (so far) than Ari-elder. Discuss in comments.
What's interesting about Cyteen is how the plot is basically an excuse for themes, and how well this works for me. I think the best science fiction entertains and makes you question. This is why I'm going to wind up reading Card again at some point (his writing makes me think), and regret it (his writing doesn't entertain me; it gives me the creeps). By the end of the book, who cares who murdered Ari Emory? There are, unfortunately, many people who wanted to, but not many with access to make it happen. But the themes! Ari is trying to control the evolution of an entire interstellar nation (or group of nations, depending on how you view the planets, star stations, and Administrative Territories), and I think she's ultimately doomed to fail. There will always and forever be a factor your models didn't take into account: for fun and games, try to analyze the end-game of 40,000 in Gehenna using in-universe terms. Did the AJ set ultimately add anything to the social matrix? What was the final definition of world?
Speaking of time passing, the technological assumptions make no sense 20 years on - big mainframes versus parallel processing; tape - seriously, analog tape - and the like. The final denouncement also dissolves into something like the fog of civil war, with no proper explanation of what happened or why. Also, Ari is well on her way to Evil Overlordship. She's very smart, but she's not 100% right. Some people who oppose her don't understand any of what she's doing, but some do, and oppose her anyway. I'd be interested to see if Justin had any thoughts on the really secret sociogenesis notes, if Justin weren't so far in Ari's pocket already.
Speaking of Justin - anyone want to do a recap on family and Reseune? Sibling-sets are important; azi-and-CIT pairs are important; parents are a problem. I still think no one's looking closely enough at Amy Carnath.
Cyteen holds a special place in my heart. You can only be 17, doing a bad job of bridging the gap between middle-class teenage privilege and adult responsibility, and realizing your primary caretaker is failing to take care of her responsibilities, and lying to herself and everyone around her, while reading Cherryh, once. Possibly I identified with Justin more than is healthy. So I was all kinds of thrilled when I heard that Regenesis was getting published.
Regenesis (C. J. Cherryh): FINALLY. FINALLY, YAY. So I maybe approached this from a slightly less than objective perspective. And by "not objective" I mean capslock and emoticons. And Robbie Williams on the tribute mp3 mix. The fact I'm thinking in terms of mixes should tell you something about my wilingness to love this book. And I did! Except when I wanted to smack it!
If you have read a novel in Cherryh's Foreigner series, you have read Regenesis. I was disappointed by this, because what I loved about Cyteen were the huge sweeping themes, and Justin and Grant arguing over ethics, and the sense of applied theory hanging over Ari junior's creation. Regenesis is all nit-picking angst about household staff angst and fiddly slow repeating reactions to events and worrying about Ari's security and how she's the fragile precious line between humanity and civil war. And ten thousand lines of internal monologue for every actual event, and wow, does that drive me insane, with none of the spark making that evolution of idea a joy to watch.
Feh. Feh, I say. Give me a noise with little denotation and a scornful connotation. Cherryh is much more interesting when characters are failing and screwing up and going off the plan, when there's no time to think and angst, only time to react. So I liked seeing some of the characters again, but would have been much more interested in a different sequel to Cyteen, one set 50 or 100 years or even further in the future, once the grand sweep of history set in. This six-months of Ari builds a Fortress of Solitude and civil war in Novogorod and the rot in the spacer military was all from the wrong angle. Though watching everyone collaborate on the Kyle AK situation was awesome. If the entire book had been that sort of brain surgery and psychological craziness and history rebounding unto another generation, in real time, with about 300% fewer internal asides, I would have been thrilled to my toes.
Possibly later I'll post the chapter-by-chapter reactions I started before I got too bored to stop and record stuff.
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War (Evan Wright): First of all, the subtitle is misleading. This isn't about the "new face", it's one guy in a Humvee with a Marine unit in Iraq. This is "about" highly trained, very aggressive Americans going to war. It's absolutely fascinating: there's no way in a million years I'd ever do anything like what Wright and Bravo Platoon are doing (plus, that whole "no women in combat" thing), but Wright brings out a lot of the emotion and reasons men might want to do that. It's brutal and not comfortable, and at certain points you stop, do the math, and realize no one's had a shower in more than a week (ew), in sweltering temperatures and poorly designed chemical warfare protective suits, but you're still reading. Because Wright makes you understand a little bit about why people are doing this, and the balance of protecting your people versus protecting civilians in a war zone, and the stupid things that happen because war is chaos squared, on a slow day.
It's also interesting to read the recent trade paperback edition, which has an additional "where are people and what have I been up to" afterword from Wright. The HBO actors' reactions to their living counterparts (you mean, when he's not hopped up on every upper known to man and Marine, Person doesn't constantly trash-talk Justin Timberlake?) are kind of hysterical.
So yeah, definite recommendation.
Numbers games: 5 total. 2 reread, 3 new; 4 fiction (1 short stories/essays), 1 nonfiction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 01:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 02:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 02:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-11 03:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 02:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:42 am (UTC)Military memoirs
Date: 2009-02-10 12:05 pm (UTC)It might also amuse you to know that there is a Marine Corps recommended reading list.
http://www.usna.edu/Library/Marineread.html
GRS from WSFA
Re: Military memoirs
Date: 2009-02-10 03:38 pm (UTC)1. Ballard, Michael B. – Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
2. Brust, Steven - Jhegaala (Fantasy novel). New York: Tor Books, 2008.
3. Davies, Steve – Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs. Osprey, 2008.
4. Durkota, Alan; Thomas Darcey & Victor Kulikov – The Imperial Russian Air Service: Famous Pilots and Aircraft of World War One. Flying Machines Press, 1995.
5. Getty, J. Arch & Oleg V. Naumov – Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist.” Yale University Press, 2008.
6. Grossman, Austin – Soon I Will Be Invincible (Fantasy novel). Pantheon Books, 2007.
7. Hood, Erwin – Heinkel He 100: Record Breaker. Midland (Ian Allen), 2008.
8. Jennings, Charles – The Fast Set: Three Extraordinary Men and Their Race for the Land Speed Record. Little, Brown, 2004.
9. McConnell, Michael N. – Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758-1775. University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
10. Prushankin, Jeffery S. – A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-Mississippi. Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
11. Stross, Charles – Singularity Sky (SF novel). Ace
Books, 2003.
12. Tsutsui, William – Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
GRS from WSFA
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:48 am (UTC)I'm waiting for the library to process Horizon and Half a Crown. If I were less of a cheapskate, I might buy HaC new, but I have other plans for those $20.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 12:18 pm (UTC)I had discovered LMB in the Bethesda branch library when I lived there, and clearly many others had, too. I really like this section of the country, but it clearly is not perfect. :-}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 03:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 09:50 am (UTC)attempted rapeunfortunate interaction with Marie. I even ended up skipping a couple of discs on the audiobook. It's just too painful to watch Mark screw up and dig himself deeper and deeper into that hole.(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-10 06:35 pm (UTC)