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My Home is Not a Place (February Reading)
My brain is fried; instead of studying, book log.
Bone Dance (Emma Bull /![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeem): Sparrow, vodoun and the City. This came to my attention in a "gender in SF/F" context, an element which was played for characterization rather than questions of gender; or maybe for Sparrow's community identity rather than self identity. Eventually, I realized the vodoun elements weren't metaphorical; the metaphysical is real. It significantly changed how I was parsing the novel.
Bull's novels are well regarded by people whose reading tastes I broadly share, but I didn't love War for the Oaks, I've started Freedom and Necessity twice without making it past the first 30 pages, and I wasn't particularly taken with Bone Dance. Partly it was the mid-novel realization I was reading a story that wasn't in the book, but I may just not find much appeal in the writing strengths on display. I might reread Bone Dance again at some point, but I'm in no hurry.
Hestia (C. J. Cherryh): Sam Merritt, Earthborn engineer, builds a dam on colonial Hestia.
IIRC, this was a trunk novel, and it shows. ("Trunk novel": written and shoved in a trunk to be forgotten, usually for good reason.) Cherryh got much better at infusing depth into her writing and her fictional cultures, but in this novel the human-alien interactions are wincingly bad. Man meets exotic yet attractive cat-like alien woman and forges a cultural bridge. This reads like every Campbell-era short story ever - Merritt's an engineer! No one, not even the author, uses his first name, except the alien woman! - with a few surprises. Sam doesn't press forward with Campellian confidence, and the colonists win a place on Hestia by losing their civil engineering project. Adaptability, not aggression or applied technology, carries the day.
This is far weaker than most of Cherryh's novels, but prefigures a lot of the themes and characterization tools seen in later stories. The Jim-Sam-Meg relationship prefigures the "brother of chance"-protagonist-romantic love character-sets elsewhere, particularly the Rafe-Paul-Jillian triangle in Voyager in Night. Also, Jase-Bren-Jago, and Tristen-Cefwyn-Ninevrise, and I am deliberately skipping looser variations on the idea (cough Grant-Justin-Ari cough). The theme of single humans (especially men) as the bridge, and become more like the Other, crops up everywhere: Sten Duncan and the Mri; Elizabeth McGee and tower culture in 40,000 in Gehenna; the entire Foreigner series; Thorn in Cuckoo's Egg; to some degree Tully and the hani. I enjoyed playing the trope game, but I'd never hand it to someone without significant screening and warnings.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson): One of the "NPR reads", books that get good press and 200 person waitlists for library copies. It's justified: The Warmth of Other Suns raises the profile of the movement of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cities. It also frames the migration in terms of extra-American immigrants, asking about the psychology of the urban newcomers, as well as the different challenges, especially racism, faced by black American nationals. Engaging, easy read; Wilkerson sometimes repeats information, which I found irritating, but it's useful for re-orienting as she swaps between the three primary stories she follows. It's been overhyped a bit, but Wilkerson's writing is solid and worth reading. Seek out and enjoy.
Exile's Gate (C. J. Cherryh): The fourth book about Nhi Vanye i Chya, swordsman, and Morgaine the traveller and gate-closer. Reread.
It's interesting to reflect on changes of genre between the first book (published 1976) and Exile's Gate (published 1988), but I'm rereading Gate of Ivrel and want to finish it before digging into that topic. I would briefly like to note it's 400 pages to the earlier novels' 200 - 250 pages, and reads very obviously as an addition to a closed trilogy. The story had been left at a balanced point: Vanye's honor is restored; Roh gets a happy ending; Morgaine and Vanye are totally in courtly love. The fourth book time/genre changes are getting backeted off for a later post.
The gap between third and fourth books is longer than the gap between my last reread and this one. I remember liking it the first time I read it, mostly for the toe-curling "lightning to the lizard brain" RST. Which was still awesome, by the way, in a way rarely seen outside of fan fiction. This time I was more invested in Chei's plotline, poor boy. I got to the point where Morgaine drives off Chei and had to put the book down for a moment. There's situational ethics and then there's excessive cruelty in what's supposed to be pleasure reading.
Cherryh's bibliography suggests she's always been a prolific author, but her novels of the late '80s and early '90s are prolific and diverse: Exile's Gate has one foot on each side of the fantasy/epic and science fiction sides of the divide; Cyteen (science fiction) and The Paladin (historical fiction) were published the same year as Exile's Gate.
The irony of bookending the month with novels that include evil body-snatching Those Other Folks and The Scary Woman On Humanity's Side (Bull: Frances; Cherryh; Morgaine) is not lost on me.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 reread; 3 fiction, 1 nonfiction.
Bone Dance (Emma Bull /
coffeeem): Sparrow, vodoun and the City. This came to my attention in a "gender in SF/F" context, an element which was played for characterization rather than questions of gender; or maybe for Sparrow's community identity rather than self identity. Eventually, I realized the vodoun elements weren't metaphorical; the metaphysical is real. It significantly changed how I was parsing the novel. Bull's novels are well regarded by people whose reading tastes I broadly share, but I didn't love War for the Oaks, I've started Freedom and Necessity twice without making it past the first 30 pages, and I wasn't particularly taken with Bone Dance. Partly it was the mid-novel realization I was reading a story that wasn't in the book, but I may just not find much appeal in the writing strengths on display. I might reread Bone Dance again at some point, but I'm in no hurry.
Hestia (C. J. Cherryh): Sam Merritt, Earthborn engineer, builds a dam on colonial Hestia.
IIRC, this was a trunk novel, and it shows. ("Trunk novel": written and shoved in a trunk to be forgotten, usually for good reason.) Cherryh got much better at infusing depth into her writing and her fictional cultures, but in this novel the human-alien interactions are wincingly bad. Man meets exotic yet attractive cat-like alien woman and forges a cultural bridge. This reads like every Campbell-era short story ever - Merritt's an engineer! No one, not even the author, uses his first name, except the alien woman! - with a few surprises. Sam doesn't press forward with Campellian confidence, and the colonists win a place on Hestia by losing their civil engineering project. Adaptability, not aggression or applied technology, carries the day.
This is far weaker than most of Cherryh's novels, but prefigures a lot of the themes and characterization tools seen in later stories. The Jim-Sam-Meg relationship prefigures the "brother of chance"-protagonist-romantic love character-sets elsewhere, particularly the Rafe-Paul-Jillian triangle in Voyager in Night. Also, Jase-Bren-Jago, and Tristen-Cefwyn-Ninevrise, and I am deliberately skipping looser variations on the idea (cough Grant-Justin-Ari cough). The theme of single humans (especially men) as the bridge, and become more like the Other, crops up everywhere: Sten Duncan and the Mri; Elizabeth McGee and tower culture in 40,000 in Gehenna; the entire Foreigner series; Thorn in Cuckoo's Egg; to some degree Tully and the hani. I enjoyed playing the trope game, but I'd never hand it to someone without significant screening and warnings.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson): One of the "NPR reads", books that get good press and 200 person waitlists for library copies. It's justified: The Warmth of Other Suns raises the profile of the movement of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cities. It also frames the migration in terms of extra-American immigrants, asking about the psychology of the urban newcomers, as well as the different challenges, especially racism, faced by black American nationals. Engaging, easy read; Wilkerson sometimes repeats information, which I found irritating, but it's useful for re-orienting as she swaps between the three primary stories she follows. It's been overhyped a bit, but Wilkerson's writing is solid and worth reading. Seek out and enjoy.
Exile's Gate (C. J. Cherryh): The fourth book about Nhi Vanye i Chya, swordsman, and Morgaine the traveller and gate-closer. Reread.
It's interesting to reflect on changes of genre between the first book (published 1976) and Exile's Gate (published 1988), but I'm rereading Gate of Ivrel and want to finish it before digging into that topic. I would briefly like to note it's 400 pages to the earlier novels' 200 - 250 pages, and reads very obviously as an addition to a closed trilogy. The story had been left at a balanced point: Vanye's honor is restored; Roh gets a happy ending; Morgaine and Vanye are totally in courtly love. The fourth book time/genre changes are getting backeted off for a later post.
The gap between third and fourth books is longer than the gap between my last reread and this one. I remember liking it the first time I read it, mostly for the toe-curling "lightning to the lizard brain" RST. Which was still awesome, by the way, in a way rarely seen outside of fan fiction. This time I was more invested in Chei's plotline, poor boy. I got to the point where Morgaine drives off Chei and had to put the book down for a moment. There's situational ethics and then there's excessive cruelty in what's supposed to be pleasure reading.
Cherryh's bibliography suggests she's always been a prolific author, but her novels of the late '80s and early '90s are prolific and diverse: Exile's Gate has one foot on each side of the fantasy/epic and science fiction sides of the divide; Cyteen (science fiction) and The Paladin (historical fiction) were published the same year as Exile's Gate.
The irony of bookending the month with novels that include evil body-snatching Those Other Folks and The Scary Woman On Humanity's Side (Bull: Frances; Cherryh; Morgaine) is not lost on me.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 reread; 3 fiction, 1 nonfiction.