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Recent Reading
The 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. The forms of the dying fantasy land are there, stripped of the biblical antecedents. It opens in media res with a heist, which may be the best part of the novel. Flashbacks reveal Quentin fumbled a job at Brakebills because Alice Feels, then did the heist, then learned about how to make worlds? But he was really bad at it? And then he saves Alice from eternity as a niffin, not that she asked him to, and re-creates a dying Fillory and then goes back to Earth and creates a better world and rides into the sunset on the Comfortable Horse, with Alice, a complete and mature adult man.
Huh?
The thing that made The Magicians interesting was its awareness of genre tropes. You know, that element that's entirely missing from this very straight (emphasis on straight) story of Becoming A Man. Who is incomplete without a Girl. It was an unimpressive conclusion to the trilogy.
The opening heist wasn't bad, though. It would have been better told from Asmodeus's PoV, but too bad.
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.
The rest of the novel is Kujen fielding the scraps of Jedao that Cheris didn't get when she was scraping carrion glass off the floor of her command moth against the combined forces of Cheris' breakaway Compact and Hexarchate loyalists.
Revenant Gun has a great title. It's thematically appropriate, it calls back to Kujen and the Hexarchate using people as things, it's specific to baby Jedao - Jedao Mark Two - whatever he's going to be called. But there's some issues baked in that make me very ambiguous about RG.
It's not an accident I invoked Cyteen's main character to describe Revenant Gun. The opening chapter had me off-balance in ways that had me badly misreading the rest of the novel until I noticed the early interactions between thinks-he's-seventeen Jedao and Kujen smash all my "Justin Warrick has no idea how badly he is dealing with Ari Emory" buttons for pages and pages. Once I saw that, it made it difficult to unsee RG through a lens of consent.
(For people who haven't read Cyteen, teenage Justin tries to pull a fast one on Ari, a woman who is older, more ruthless, and much better at manipulating people than he is, who has been harassing him since before page one. It goes very badly for Justin.)
In the first novel, Cheris doesn't volunteer specifically to be Jedao's anchor, but she did volunteer to be Kel, with some idea of how formation instinct worked and the expectations of Kel service in hexarchate society. In the second novel, Cheris-as-Jedao yanks around thousands of Kel by formation instinct. In contrast, Brezan is a crashhawk who can resist formation instinct, swears to fight this person who is perverting the system, but ultimately he chooses not to stop Cheris because one, she's doing a better job of serving the Kel than their nominal hexarchate masters; and two, she's working on a plan to make the calendrical effects each faction is known for affect only the willing. The consenting volunteers, if you will.
The first chapter of the third book closes with baby Jedao telling Kujen "I'm your gun", echoing a phrase that's cropped up in the other novels, and Kujen uses him like one, a weapon to drag a different set of Kel into Kujen's dominion by formation instinct, Cheris-style, and using Jedao's tactical brilliance for Kujen's ends. While Jedao nominally consents to this, Kujen neglected to mention how Jedao wound up with intact memories only to age seventeen but scattered functional knowledge of his forty-four year old self. A fun side effect of 44-going-on-18!Jedao is that he's acutely aware of his inadequacies, the Kel are largely unhappy with Leader Kujen dragging them around by formation instinct, and... you know that thing Cherryh does, where the characters are running on coffee and adrenaline, uncertain they're making the right choices, but desperately loyal to their people with lots of feelings about those people? It's that, only no one has people to be loyal to, and by the end of the book Kujen's dead, Jedao's realized he's part moth, and also he had sex with someone who couldn't say "no, I don't want this", but who did find a path for saying, "now I can put the gun to my head and pull the trigger." It's... pretty awful, as a reader, especially as a dark echo of Cheris and Khiruev in the second novel.
So I am debating whether I can recommend anything past the first novel without major warnings for major consent issues.
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. The forms of the dying fantasy land are there, stripped of the biblical antecedents. It opens in media res with a heist, which may be the best part of the novel. Flashbacks reveal Quentin fumbled a job at Brakebills because Alice Feels, then did the heist, then learned about how to make worlds? But he was really bad at it? And then he saves Alice from eternity as a niffin, not that she asked him to, and re-creates a dying Fillory and then goes back to Earth and creates a better world and rides into the sunset on the Comfortable Horse, with Alice, a complete and mature adult man.
Huh?
The thing that made The Magicians interesting was its awareness of genre tropes. You know, that element that's entirely missing from this very straight (emphasis on straight) story of Becoming A Man. Who is incomplete without a Girl. It was an unimpressive conclusion to the trilogy.
The opening heist wasn't bad, though. It would have been better told from Asmodeus's PoV, but too bad.
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.
The rest of the novel is Kujen fielding the scraps of Jedao that Cheris didn't get when she was scraping carrion glass off the floor of her command moth against the combined forces of Cheris' breakaway Compact and Hexarchate loyalists.
Revenant Gun has a great title. It's thematically appropriate, it calls back to Kujen and the Hexarchate using people as things, it's specific to baby Jedao - Jedao Mark Two - whatever he's going to be called. But there's some issues baked in that make me very ambiguous about RG.
It's not an accident I invoked Cyteen's main character to describe Revenant Gun. The opening chapter had me off-balance in ways that had me badly misreading the rest of the novel until I noticed the early interactions between thinks-he's-seventeen Jedao and Kujen smash all my "Justin Warrick has no idea how badly he is dealing with Ari Emory" buttons for pages and pages. Once I saw that, it made it difficult to unsee RG through a lens of consent.
(For people who haven't read Cyteen, teenage Justin tries to pull a fast one on Ari, a woman who is older, more ruthless, and much better at manipulating people than he is, who has been harassing him since before page one. It goes very badly for Justin.)
In the first novel, Cheris doesn't volunteer specifically to be Jedao's anchor, but she did volunteer to be Kel, with some idea of how formation instinct worked and the expectations of Kel service in hexarchate society. In the second novel, Cheris-as-Jedao yanks around thousands of Kel by formation instinct. In contrast, Brezan is a crashhawk who can resist formation instinct, swears to fight this person who is perverting the system, but ultimately he chooses not to stop Cheris because one, she's doing a better job of serving the Kel than their nominal hexarchate masters; and two, she's working on a plan to make the calendrical effects each faction is known for affect only the willing. The consenting volunteers, if you will.
The first chapter of the third book closes with baby Jedao telling Kujen "I'm your gun", echoing a phrase that's cropped up in the other novels, and Kujen uses him like one, a weapon to drag a different set of Kel into Kujen's dominion by formation instinct, Cheris-style, and using Jedao's tactical brilliance for Kujen's ends. While Jedao nominally consents to this, Kujen neglected to mention how Jedao wound up with intact memories only to age seventeen but scattered functional knowledge of his forty-four year old self. A fun side effect of 44-going-on-18!Jedao is that he's acutely aware of his inadequacies, the Kel are largely unhappy with Leader Kujen dragging them around by formation instinct, and... you know that thing Cherryh does, where the characters are running on coffee and adrenaline, uncertain they're making the right choices, but desperately loyal to their people with lots of feelings about those people? It's that, only no one has people to be loyal to, and by the end of the book Kujen's dead, Jedao's realized he's part moth, and also he had sex with someone who couldn't say "no, I don't want this", but who did find a path for saying, "now I can put the gun to my head and pull the trigger." It's... pretty awful, as a reader, especially as a dark echo of Cheris and Khiruev in the second novel.
So I am debating whether I can recommend anything past the first novel without major warnings for major consent issues.
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.