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Since I have already finished one book this month, it must be time to put up last month's book log!
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany): This is "how Marq Dyeth falls in love with Rat Korga" in the same way that Memory is "how Miles became an Imperial Auditor". Which is to say, it's where the novel goes, but it's not what the story's goal is. It's the plot-scaffold on which all the interesting parts of the novel are grown.
Korga is a "rat", a slave caste which has undergone Radical Anxiety Termination. He is also a survivor of catastophe.
Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat1, whose family has a castle (sort of) and ties to a dead tyrant. The castle brings students, among them the extraordinary Rat Korga, who may have some of the dead Vondramach Tyrannus' character, or who maybe is having that imposed by society.
It takes Delany something like half the book to get these two in the same room, and the story is so interesting that I don't care. I am all about the worldbuilding and the relationships between people in this story. (With the one exception of Rat and Marq, because there's emo romance moping. From a 36 year old.) There's also some really interesting things Delaney is doing with how people form families, and how they evaluate each other, and cultural assumptions. Okay, I'm starting in on quotes:
( Cut for spoilers and length. I really, really enjoyed this book, in all its dense strange-to-me worldbuilding. )
Since I did not do well with Babel-17, I was very surprised to discover I was really enjoying Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and would have been happy to follow the characters around for another 400 pages.
The Millionaire Next Door (William D. Danko, Thomas J. Stanley): ( How to get rich slowly. )
I'm at a bit of a crossroads: do I pursue full time grad school, do I work and take classes toward an M.Sci or MBA, do I jump ship for something else entirely? My experiences in life have cemented in me a belief that money is not freedom, but its lack is certainly a cage. I don't think I have the interest or ambition to make Avi and Randy's "fuck-you money", but I have also have no desire to spend the next 20 years living paycheck to paycheck, freaking out about life after 65, and crashing on couches when I go on vacation because I have no other choice if I want to go on vacation. For me, The Millionaire Next Door is a reminder that I have to think about my money if I want to keep and control the way I use it, so I can achieve my goals in life.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): In which people are consistently not rational operators, using pure logic to shape their decisions. In fact, kind of the opposite. Kept my attention in transit during vacation with descriptions of experiments demonstrating how people react to "free" versus one cent and other examples of how people's brains do not operate on pure logic.
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness): The blurb on the back (attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce) says, "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!"
I will not keep you in suspense: the first line is, "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
I was completely underwhelmed. Fortunately, it got better from there.
When the book opens, Todd Hewitt is 30 days from his 13th birthday and manhood in Prentisstown, the only town on the planet, where all the settlers are men, survivors of a war that killed their women and left them hearing the Noise of every living animal, including each other. That's Todd's world - until he finds an empty hole in the Noise.
( Cut for a late-book out of context quote and length. )
This is a book about living in violent times, and it's absolutely riveting despite some really gross injuries I could have lived without reading about. I'll be reading the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as soon as the library gets it.
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane): If I had read this when I was ten*? Awesome. Unfortunately, I will be 26 in less than a week, and I am fully cognizant of Duane's writing quirks. So some of Ael's reflections on Powers and elements threw me right back into Duane's Young Wizards series, which I do not think was the intended effect. It's a perfectly reasonable story of James T. Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission of derring-do, with heavy Duane flavor. It just didn't scratch my post-reboot itch.
*I say ten because, to the best of my reconstruction, that's when dad left a library copy of Star Wars: The Last Command lying around, introducing me to media tie-in novels. Before I broke up with the Extended Universe I had read such deathless works of prose as Young Jedi Knights: Crisis at Cloud City.
Numbers: 5 total. 5 new; 3 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany): This is "how Marq Dyeth falls in love with Rat Korga" in the same way that Memory is "how Miles became an Imperial Auditor". Which is to say, it's where the novel goes, but it's not what the story's goal is. It's the plot-scaffold on which all the interesting parts of the novel are grown.
Korga is a "rat", a slave caste which has undergone Radical Anxiety Termination. He is also a survivor of catastophe.
Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat1, whose family has a castle (sort of) and ties to a dead tyrant. The castle brings students, among them the extraordinary Rat Korga, who may have some of the dead Vondramach Tyrannus' character, or who maybe is having that imposed by society.
It takes Delany something like half the book to get these two in the same room, and the story is so interesting that I don't care. I am all about the worldbuilding and the relationships between people in this story. (With the one exception of Rat and Marq, because there's emo romance moping. From a 36 year old.) There's also some really interesting things Delaney is doing with how people form families, and how they evaluate each other, and cultural assumptions. Okay, I'm starting in on quotes:
( Cut for spoilers and length. I really, really enjoyed this book, in all its dense strange-to-me worldbuilding. )
Since I did not do well with Babel-17, I was very surprised to discover I was really enjoying Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and would have been happy to follow the characters around for another 400 pages.
The Millionaire Next Door (William D. Danko, Thomas J. Stanley): ( How to get rich slowly. )
I'm at a bit of a crossroads: do I pursue full time grad school, do I work and take classes toward an M.Sci or MBA, do I jump ship for something else entirely? My experiences in life have cemented in me a belief that money is not freedom, but its lack is certainly a cage. I don't think I have the interest or ambition to make Avi and Randy's "fuck-you money", but I have also have no desire to spend the next 20 years living paycheck to paycheck, freaking out about life after 65, and crashing on couches when I go on vacation because I have no other choice if I want to go on vacation. For me, The Millionaire Next Door is a reminder that I have to think about my money if I want to keep and control the way I use it, so I can achieve my goals in life.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): In which people are consistently not rational operators, using pure logic to shape their decisions. In fact, kind of the opposite. Kept my attention in transit during vacation with descriptions of experiments demonstrating how people react to "free" versus one cent and other examples of how people's brains do not operate on pure logic.
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness): The blurb on the back (attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce) says, "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!"
I will not keep you in suspense: the first line is, "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
I was completely underwhelmed. Fortunately, it got better from there.
When the book opens, Todd Hewitt is 30 days from his 13th birthday and manhood in Prentisstown, the only town on the planet, where all the settlers are men, survivors of a war that killed their women and left them hearing the Noise of every living animal, including each other. That's Todd's world - until he finds an empty hole in the Noise.
( Cut for a late-book out of context quote and length. )
This is a book about living in violent times, and it's absolutely riveting despite some really gross injuries I could have lived without reading about. I'll be reading the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as soon as the library gets it.
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane): If I had read this when I was ten*? Awesome. Unfortunately, I will be 26 in less than a week, and I am fully cognizant of Duane's writing quirks. So some of Ael's reflections on Powers and elements threw me right back into Duane's Young Wizards series, which I do not think was the intended effect. It's a perfectly reasonable story of James T. Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission of derring-do, with heavy Duane flavor. It just didn't scratch my post-reboot itch.
*I say ten because, to the best of my reconstruction, that's when dad left a library copy of Star Wars: The Last Command lying around, introducing me to media tie-in novels. Before I broke up with the Extended Universe I had read such deathless works of prose as Young Jedi Knights: Crisis at Cloud City.
Numbers: 5 total. 5 new; 3 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
