ase

Highly relevant to my tiny fandom interests, exhibits one and two. We’re officially ready to start writing the actual Alliance Rising book, and along with it, we’re going to put Finity’s End into Closed-Circle. That’s a hundred or so years on…some of the same bunch. It's a little fuzzy which end of canon the new novel is set in, and I don't care, I'd cheerfully read anything Alliance-Union. Can it be publication time now?

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich): Strong entry-level feminism primer. If I were trying to do a women's history or women's studies 101 , I'd love to stick this on the book list and cherry-pick case studies. The author coined the title phrase in a graduate paper on colonial women; in the prologue, she reflects on its separation from its original source.

( Liked. )

I'd like this even more if there was more focus on the activism of the late 20th C, but that's out of Ulrich's academic focus. Instead I get many examples outside of my usual historical range, and read about women's history I would not have found on my own.

The Gate of Ivrel (C. J. Cherryh): The themes you don't notice when you're 17 are the most telling when you're 27. Vanye kills his brother, refuses to commit honorable suicide, is exiled and symbolically shorn of his honor, and after two years dodging avenging clan-kin, refuses three offers to be welcomed into a family/social unit (Liell at Irien, Roh and the Chya, Erij on the road to Ivrel), and goes pelting after the woman he cursed for binding him at the beginning of the novel. What I didn't notice were the callbacks to really pulp-ish sword and sorcery; the two-sons-plus-one family dynamics (seriously, what was Vanye's dad thinking? I sense Author's Hand); how much of the novel various characters spend wounded; the body count. I was an innocent young woman.

The first time I read The Gate of Ivrel was around the same time I found The Best of C. L. Moore, so I was ready to draw Morgaine and Jirel comparisons; I wonder if I shouldn't have made a detour through Fritz Lieber or other fantasy novelists first. The setup reads now to me more like a young writer asking, "what if I took these pulp tropes, only I made the mighty leader a woman?" than a reaction to or conversation with Moore's stories.

White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (Carl Elliott): I cannot for the life of me remember why I put a hold on this. It's an op-ed. Elliott attacks big pharma with the passion of the disenchanted (MD-PhD now teaching bioethics; someone who's smart and organized) to the degree I find myself looking for elided facts, appeals to irreverent authority, appeals to the common man (aka the Jeff Winger Student President Debate speech), and other emotional tricks that obscure the fact I'm probably on Elliott's side. Stop trying to sway me with emotion and give me statistics, and highlight the potholes that are getting skipped to get the book finished. If, quoting Elliott quoting a Carnegie-Mellon study, "coming clean means playing dirty" (p94), what are his motives for writing this book? I finished this thin book with the reflection I wanted to read the original research, or better research on Elliott's examples, not re-written column pieces stitched into hardcover format.

The Midnight Mayor (The Inauguration of Matthew Swift) (Kate Griffin): Sequel to A Madness of Angels; urban fantasy with a high body count and not a phouka or unseelie court in the worldbuilding. Usually I don't find much entertainment in urban fantasy; there's too much love of the fantasy elements and not enough city love. This is not a problem in The Midnight Mayor: London is a character in its own right. Isn't there a lowbrow sci-fi novel where books come to life, embodied as the main character? And Dune is represented by, well, desert and sandworms? When Griffin's writing, London feels a bit like that: alive and sense-of-wonder in its own right. Since that's how I feel about San Francisco, I think this is the best thing ever.

( Spoilers, book 2 and 3. This isn't a perfect novel, but I was entertained. )

"A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Woolf): Nonfiction. An essay which has been on my "to read" list for years. Woolf calls for the elevation of women in writing in a way that makes me think of a later woman's writing, and a progressive / reform political party formed of "the people that matter". If one were teaching Feminism and the Written Word 101, I'd have students read this, then read Audre Lorde's "Master's House" back to back, because Woolf's attiude is exactly what Lorde attacks. If all upper class women of the 1920's were this elitist and focused on their semi-bohemian artsy lives, I'm relieved to be long removed from that time and place.

And yet - without the Virginia Woolf, do you get Lois Bujold? Or many of the post-Woolf authors I like, female and male? Acknowledging both the contributions to a tradition and personal weaknesses in the same person is something I struggle with.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book By Patton Oswalt: Nonfiction / essay / memoir of a high school D&D / sci-fi geek turned standup comedian, the sort of person who knows people who know that zombies can live underwater, they just don't like it (p98 HC). Oswalt grew up in Sterling, VA, part of the greater DC exurb tedium which I know from intimate personal experience. Title from essay of the same name, which is written in the language of my people: "Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship." (p99) "The Matrix films are about a hero, Neo, who doesn't realize he is a Zombie, and also doesn't realize he's living in a Wasteland, until he's woken by Morpheus, who de-zombifies Neo by bringing him aboard a Spaceship." (p101) "Hey - why do heroes always "wander" the wasteland?" (p103). Light and funny, and sometimes sort of awful, as good comedy so often is.

Among Others (Jo Walton): Fiction: 15 year old Welsh girl at English boarding school, with a limp, a diary, a grievous family situation, and a yen for libraries. Plus or minus the fairies, this was my 1996. It's hard to say if I like Among Others over the feedback squeal; I had to keep reading or I wasn't sure I'd finish it. Some reviewers dislike the mish-mash of genres - boarding school, fantasy, semiautobiographgical mimetic, etc - which I'd say is part of the fun. The only genre stance the novel takes is falling on the fantasy side: in the book world, magic is real (and not very nice).

After skimming half of Paladin of Souls, I reread Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt. The pacing is terrifically uneven, the first half wending along asking "is this my plot? What about this?" and finally turning on Horseriver and the Wounded Woods. One gets the impression Ingrey would very much like this story to be about someone else, please, while he and Ijada neck in the back of the theater; fortunately for me, Ingrey is not the driving - writing - hand.

Numbers game: 8 total finished. 6 new, 2 reread; 4 fiction, 4 nonfiction.

My hours sleep / caffeinated drinks ratio is edging towards one. I feel fantastic, whenever my eyes uncross, but I dimly sense there's been some intellectual impact.

A Daughter of the Samurai (Etsu Sugimoto): Charming memoir of a Japanese immigrant to America. Picked this up after Lois Bujold mentioned it on the LMB mailing list. My first reflection was, "this delights in the way Hitty: Her First Hundred Years charms," which is less of a surprise when one considers they were both published in the 1920's. Sugimoto's memoir is written in a light-hearted storytelling style, recalling details of her experiences growing up on the western side of Japan, in what's now part of the Niigata Prefecture, as well as her stories of attending a missionary school in Tokyo, living in America as a wife and mother, and her temporary return to Japan after her husband's death.

The gentle tone glides past shadows of other stories: how did her husband die? How did Sugimoto support herself as a widow when she returned to America? After her husband's untimely death, it was expected she would return to Japan, but what moved her to move back to America? Sugimoto gracefully speaks of both sorrow and joy in her life, opening a window to another time and place.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin): Heiress to a minor kingdom is summoned by her grandfather and named one of the three candidates to be heir to his authority over all the kingdoms. Yeine has her wits and her mother's training to defend her against family politics and fettered gods with a plan to end their slavery.

( Long, thematic but no explicit spoilers. )

I wasn't overwhelmed by the story or characters, but I was intrigued by the worldbuilding. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first in a trilogy; my lukewarm reaction to the first novel means I'll be waiting to see what other people think of the second and third novels before picking up anything else in the series, but if you're in the mood for "god of light and order is not equal to god of right" fiction, you'd probably like this.

The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner): Sequel to Swordspoint; briefly discussed previously. Duke Alec summons his sister's daughter from a country estate to settle a family break and have his niece trained as a swordsman. Niece Katherine expects a different sort of Season on the Hill in the wake of her uncle the Mad Duke. (I just love that phrase.)

Kushner is a charming stylist, but her plots are not nearly as intriguing. I liked Katherine, and I wanted to like the story, but I was disappointed that events didn't unroll to illuminate character or story very efficiently. For example, I can certainly make up a story about why Alec and Richard simply cannot be together despite their love, but I was sort of expecting the writer to explain how the characters got from Point A at the end of Swordspoint to Point B in Privilege of the Sword. I also hoped for some clever thoughts on Katherine taking up a role that was both traditionally male and beneath her class, but these didn't materialize. I can make inferences from her atraditional romance with Marcus, and her relationship with Artemisia, mediated through their mutual love for the "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death", a novel-in-a-novel, but I was hoping for more explicit authorial intent and less Choose Your Own Adventure.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Linda Gordon): Picked off the library shelves on a whim. Dorothea Lange went down in history for photographing the iconic "Migrant Mother" picture of the Depression era, but also made significant contributions to national documentary photography and the San Francisco arts scene. ( Okay bio with significant weaknesses. )

Perhaps I'm judging on tone; perhaps I'm holding a female biographer to a double standard. However, this sort of writer construction from bare-bones accounts happens more than once: Lange and the FSA photographers, her thorny relationship with her mother, how her childhood polio might have progressed. It pushes the bounds of creative nonfiction right out of biography and into storytelling, a disappointing development. I'm not inclined to recommend this, unless you're looking for a generalist bio and can remain aware of its flaws.

A Madness of Angels (Kate Griffin): Matthew Swift comes back to life. Inspired by the American cover, I described this as "Castiel in London" for norabombay. The book is in that vein: high on concept and worldbuilding, a little low on characterization. ( Spoilers. )

I backslid and reread the back half of Cherryh's Regenesis. I stand by my earlier assertions there's a smashing good 300 page novel threading through some serious bloat.

Numbers game: 5 total finished. 5 new, 0.5 reread; 3.5 fiction, 2 nonfiction.

I am having a death to mornings morning, so here is my happy depth-free book list from February.

The Riddle-Master of Hed (Patricia McKillip): As previously discussed in this journal, not really my thing. I like the very end, where Morgon's shout cracks the doors with the force of his despair, and I liked the vestas, but that's about all that really resonated. I think I may be approaching this wrong, without the appropriate storytelling background to appreciate what McKillip is trying to do, but I can't care enough to try to find that angle. There are images I liked, and themes I should have liked, but I didn't find the book resonating strongly.

Regenesis (the good bits version) (C. J. Cherryh): Once upon a time there was an azi designated Grant ALX Warrick and he was pretty freaking awesome. He was the sort of awesome where you suspect that somewhere, someone is drawing hearts and stars around his name, because Grant is a calming influence on crazy people. By which I mean pretty much everyone in Reseune.

I always want Cherryh to make up more worldbuilding at the levels of philosophy and fake science, so I am not as happy with Regenesis as with Cyteen or even Hellburner, because there's less arguing about how people think and interact. I'm also not fond of the superpowered 17-year-olds. Yes, there's a recurring theme that younger people are underutilized in a universe with awesome life-extension drugs; no, Maddy Strassen would not be running a fashion store at 17.

Merchanter's Luck (C. J. Cherryh): I didn't mean to reread this, it just sort of happened. I remember the places I have been while reading ML better than I remember the book - it's slight in word count and in impact.

The Thief (Megan Whalen Turner): YA fantasy novel about an imprisoned thief challenged to steal a long-lost object with religious and political significance. This was merely okay until the twist near the end of the novel, and the twist made me think the sequel would be worth reading.

Julie & Julia (Julie Powell): The only part of this book that spoke to me was on page 262.

It seemed that someone had alerted Mr. Kline about the heretical content of my blog. . . "Are you unhappy here?" he asked. "No! No, sir. I just - well, I am a secretary, Mr. Kline. Sometimes it's frustrating."
"You're an asset to the organization, Julie. You just need to try to find a way to channel that negative energy."

...channel that negative energy?

And I cackled, there at SFO, tired and a little hysterical, thirteen hours before opening my work inbox and finding a "you have DNA extractions!" email. Not, you know, "welcome back, you have..." just, you know, a stack of work. That really hit me in bad ways. I had a good job: I like most of my coworkers most of the time, and I like most of the work most of the time, and the times that I don't, well, some of the people who get on your last nerve are the people who cover holes you can't even see, and there is no way to get around pain in the typing joints SOX-compliant paperwork. But at a certain point, it is time to run away from home. Julie had a lousy job, and I have a lousy hometown complex, and I've been at my job for two years. It was the only moment when I was in full sympathy, and really realized that Julie was halfway coping with her life by cooking in the way I halfway cope by having speculative fiction-inspired IM conversations that devolve into desultory arguments about who can fight Ari Emory. (Well, anyone can try to fight Ari, but most people get cold-cocked in the first round. There's a possibility Benton Frasier would make it to a second round on a crazy luck roll. Kanye West does not. Every Mercedes Lackey character ever gets pwnd, execept maybe Savil, because I like her best. Miles Vorkosigan versus Ari Emory is a psych-out for the ages. Possibly it ends in some azified Vorish DNA and a project for Justin and Grant. Aaaaaand downhill slides like that are why I am quitting my job and moving.)

Other than that, well: I hate New York City, and I hate people who don't do research before starting a project like driving to DC to deliver unto the Smithsonian and Julia Child's kitchen a pound of butter. So I made the Eyebrows of Native Scorn when Powell and her husband tried to find parking on the Mall on a Saturday, then tried to find a grocery store within walking distance of the Mall. I suspect I would've liked Powell's blog much better than her post-blog book deal. I like cooking, but I have very limited tolerance for people who can't be bothered to use Metro.

On a related note, I was recently at the American History museum, and there was an empty one-pound butter box at the Julia Child exhibit. I may have had a moment of cognitive dissonance.

Gods and Pawns (Kage Baker): Collection of short stories set in Baker's Company universe. "To the Land Beyond the Sunset" is Lewis and Mendoza in South America, with typically Mendoza results. "The Catch" deals with one of the Company's immortal failures. "The Angel in the Darkness" is about one of Porfirio's relatives in LA, in a bad spot, and the long thin shadow of immortal machinations. "Standing in His Light" is about art manipulation. "A Night on the Barbary Coast" is Joseph and Mendoza in their most dad-and-daughter style, a lichen, San Francisco in the gold rush, and a Company mandate. "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst" prefigures Project Adonai. "Hellfire at Twilight" is Lewis and intoxication. The humor and random combinations of historical trivia and stock character types that I like in Baker's writing are present in all of these, but no one story stood out above the others. Kage Baker recently passed away, so it's kind of nice to reread her stories and know something of her continues to impact the world.

Hellburner (C. J. Cherryh): It's The Right Stuff but in space. It's my favorite sort of popcorn book. Hellburner was published around the same time as Chanur's Legacy: both novels are fairly minor books in the Union-Alliance timeline, but they're both very tightly plotted and can be handed to innocent bystanders without warning for psychological damage. Sometimes they're even funny. ("Don't kill me, Ben, but... what time is it?" This is hilarious in context, I promise.) But Hellburner just makes me happy: it starts in tragedy and ends in victory, and in between there's the right amounts of emotional angst and made-up engineering. In the long run everyone's in trouble, but in the short term most of the protagonists get what they want. It's practically a warm and fuzzy Cherryh novel, if you ignore the sabotage subplot and some of the political gamesmanship.

Numbers games: 7 total. 4 reread, 3 new; 6 fiction (1 short story collection), 1 nonfiction.

War, 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. )

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. ( Side notes on expanding reading; or, why I'm falling out of contemporary SF/F. )

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? )

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! )

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.

Ha ha ha, guess what? Computer people say I broke the baby laptop's software but good! As in, won't get to the command prompt or autoboot from the CD drive good. I foresee time and money spent to fix this.

Note to self: no, no one wants you to chapter-by-chapter blog Regenesis. It would not be entertaining. Half of your comments would be, "Jesus God, Ari. You are not now and never will be the Holy Ghost!" and an \o/ + /o\ tally for Justin and Jordan fights. The other half would be canon-tracking against the rest of the canon and bad ideas in the margins.

I am not a happy music camper. The last playlist I made had issues: one, it was backwards. After I flipped the order, it sucked only a little. I'm fixing it. Two, I need more music in the vein of Are You Out There and The Mountain. Any recs?

Today I made french toast, and wow, was it ever soggy. Here's what I did:

( Recipe for the curious )

I think I've got the heat too low, but I'm not ruling out other options.

This week I am house-sitting for fans off to Worldcon. You know what this means: car! It also means playing dodge-truck at I-95 speeds during rush hour, but that's what you get when you volunteer to drive people to BWI. Today's other awesome moments were the accidental Home Depot trip (my much-abused mint is finally properly potted, yay) and realizing - 12 hours after my airport adventures - that I had the car keys but not the house-key.

When I am not courting death on the interstates, I'm reading Naomi Novik's latest novel. My first reaction is that I want The Adventures of Perscitia and Iskierka: A Scientific Treatise, because you know what would happen? They would set things on fire. A lot. And this would be awesome. wmslawhorn fake-spoiled me for nuclear bombs, and I almost fell for it. Because it's that sort of crack. I am possibly a little giddy with how many of my buttons are lighting up, ding! ding! ding! as I burn through the book. This is serious emotional manipulation, and I am all for it. Rock on, Novik!

Also, the part of Laurence's scruffy mid-to-late book stubble will be played by Viggo Mortenson's scruffy stubble.

Holy surprise, aCyteen sequel for Christmas! We were wrong! The thing is, I'm not sure I want a second Cyteen novel. The first was pretty much Cherryh's SF masterwork, her Big Statement: how do you top that? I'm not sure anything could live up to that sort of anticipation, not to mention one's uncritical 17-year-old reactions.

The rest of this week: pick-up soccer after work tomorrow, happy hour downtown Thursday (odds of my lateness are sadly high), day trip to Baltimore sometime this weekend. norabombay and I took 1h40m of off-peak time to decide we absolutely must go to Wiscon next year, which memberships I shall be buying August 15th, aka payday. (This may or may not trash any possibility of making Worldcon in Montreal, and that'll be an update for a different day.) Tonight I sleep; I put a baseball cap on my head at 9 for no logical reason and it's still there. The clarion call for sanity-restoring rest is making itself felt.

A Brother's Price (Wen Spencer): Regency romance set in a world where women outnumber men about ten to one. This is a really cool idea; my favorite thing in the world is wacky worldbuilding ideas, which is why I love the sf/f field so much. So why not take a wacky idea, and explore it in the context of a standard plot. Is there any more paint-by-numbers cliche than a regency? However, regencies are implausible and silly, and this is no exception. The plucky grandchild of thieves and army spies marries royalty for Twu Wuv? Um, no. So it's my profound problem: there's this one great worldbuilding thought, and one really clever concept for integrating a novel idea with a cliche plot, but I dislike the Cinderella romance of the plucky country gentry and the dashing, swashbuckling royalty. Also, the secondary effects are incompletely considered. This is one of the books which is lots of fun to talk about, I think, because it's got one really cool idea embedded in workday prose and slightly cracked worldbuilding.

Shiva's Fire (Suzanne Fisher Staples): Children's/YA. Parvati is born on the first day of the life-giving monsoon, the day a tornado wrecks her village. She grows up in the shadow of this tragedy, surrounded by unlikely miracles and her love of dance.

Staples seems to have written the bharata natyam equivalent of a "go to ballet boarding school" book, and manages a nice fusion of "go to dance school" with South Indian culture. Miraculous events are presented as Things That Happen, which are often two-edged. I've been reading Staples since Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind provided a vivid demonstration that first person present tense can be used to really suck readers in, so I may be a bit biased toward her writing. With that in mind, I think she approached the material in an interesting fashion: Parvati's surprising episodes with dance and music are presented in a matter-of-fact way that reminds me of magical realism. I don't think that's the genre Staples is trying to write; I'd say she's going for a child's novel infused with the feel of Hindu religious epics. She scores fairly well on that front. The late-novel romance is resolved in a way that works very well on the story level, but that annoys me slightly in a larger context.

( Spoilers. I prove I should never have been allowed to take that Intro to Women's Studies class. )

The Ghost Sister (Liz Williams): First contact with a long-lost Earth colony, complicated by the crippling disability one of the natives is burdened with. There is a heavy-handed subplot about inflexible religious conservatives which drags down the worldbuilding, which isn't bad. The plot with the older woman as open-minded adventurer is a gentle departure from the sf/f norm. This is the sort of book that's okay for an afternoon, but that would be greatly enhanced by tipsy 2 AM IM chats about feminist motifs and fake sci-fi illnesses.

I finally finished The Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh, which is about what you'd expect from Cherryh: trust no one; keep your family close; outlive the bastards. Your perception is wrong, always, but if you are bold and desperate, you may bring your enemies to ruin.

I also reread Green Mars and Blue Mars, the back two-thirds of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and The Martians, which reads as if someone had pulled out the "work in progress - does this fit?" drawer and dumped it into book form. I will never stop quibbling with the educational system as presented: how do your offspring of back-to-nature hunter-gatherers compete with the pampered urban youth? And what about the descendants of those asteroid exiles? How much of your history do you get to shed when your parents are Martian exiles? KSR presents a glowing vision of the unified Martian culture, but the writing doesn't entirely bear out authorial intent. Possibly I am missing something, but from my perspective, Blue Mars fails to carry the second-order worldbuilding effects to a logical conclusion. This drives me nuts because the first two books are awesome, and the third comes out a little cute in comparison. (I am looking at Sax and Ann as I say this. Yes, high "awwwww, sweet!" factor, but a little convenient.) There is a book I like a lot more hiding in the BM worldbuiling.

The Martians includes the novella "Green Mars" (not to be confused with the novel of the same name), which somehow makes mountain climbing the most awesome thing that I am too chicken to do, and "A Martian Romance", which is not elegiac.

I love Green Mars with all of my heart. The revolution sequence is awesome. Definite desert island book.

Instead of reading books I read the paper and did logic puzzles. I am hopeless at Sudoku, so my reading list lost a lot of ground to the numbers 1-9.

Garlic and Sapphires (Ruth Reichl): LA Times restaurant reviewer switches coasts to become the NY Times restaurant reviewer. ( If books could be foods, this might be a meringue. ) Recommended for light reading.

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin): Reread. ( But this time, I got it. )

Califia's Daughters (Leigh Richards/Laurie R. King): ( I didn't like it. )

In related news, King is working on a Kate Martinelli/Sherlock Holmes novel. I'm desperately trying to reserve judgment until I've actually read the book.

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (Ursula K. Le Guin). Reread. I vaguely recalled some short stories about FTL in the Hainish universe, eventually remembered which volume I'd read them in, and finally got a copy via ILL. It's a short, small collection, so rereading the entire thing wasn't too time-consuming. Le Guin was herself; "The Rock that Changed Things" is a nice, rock-ish parable. "Newton's Sleep" fails to move me. It's the triumph of the Message over logic, plot, and simple coherence. "The Shobies' Story" and "Dancing to Ganam" need to be remixed for increased perception screwiness and didactism effacement. "Another Story"/"A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" is fairly minor, but pleasant. The remaining stories failed to move me to more than passing irritation or fleeting amusement.

And, like, wow. Cyteen sequel in the works. Original announcement on Cherryh's journal/ progress report,
August 25 '05. Given the decade of rumors preceding this, I'll believe it when I am holding the hardcover. (And yet. Posting about it - you really can't kill hope.)

You may all mock me, because the first thing I finished in June was the Revenge of the Sith novelization (Matthew Stover). No real comments, other than noting extended universe nods (and I actually noticed. Paraphrasing other people's words, I have hit the rock bottom of embarrassment and am drilling for humiliation oil) and admitting I was still desperately trying to force a convergence on the movie in my head and Lucas' script and failing miserably.

The novelization is slightly kinder Padme's character than the movie, because Padme gets to do a little - a very little - backstage political maneuvering, and sort of encourage the nascent Rebellion. But she's still a fool for love whenever Anakin's around. Also, the opening battle takes even longer than it does in the movie. At least, it feels that way.

(Do you know what's kind of ironic? The natural pool of rebel talent is - the Separatists. Who many of those high-level someday-Rebel leaders just spent two or three years fighting. That this isn't noted at all in the movie or novelization is an interesting oversight.)

To expiate my trashy novelistic sins, I plunged back into Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Richard Dawkins), Dawkins' attempt to explain the beauty of science. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy totally got that point across to me when I was young and feckless - okay, younger and feckless - so the book sort of undershot me*. Rainbow still a rainbow after Newton, gotcha. I'm still likely to remember this book fondly for Dawkins' candor about statistical analysis and errors: the common type 1 and type 2 and Dawkins' type 3 error, "in which your mind goes totally blank whenever you try to remember which [kind of error] is of type 1 and type 2." (Chapter 7, "Unweaving the Uncanny", p171 HC). So been there.

*KSR has a talent for describing things in ways that mesh with how I make the text visualize. Red Mars made me desperately want to see sunset on the red planet. "The Scientist as Hero" in Green Mars just makes me happy. Science = things making sense.

"However many ways there may be of being alive, there are almost infinitely more ways of being dead." (Chapter 8, "Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance", p206 HC)

I was pretty bored by the end, because I know this stuff, but if you were any sort of geek other than a science or science ficton nerd this might be a more enlightening and entertaining book.

Then the library called to say Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi) was on hold for me, and would I like to pick it up sometime in the next seven days? I went to a talk Nafisi gave last October, and decided I sort of had to read her book. I really liked it. Nafisi is an English professor at Hopkins, and loves the field so passionately even I begin to appreciate its merits. The narrative's discussion of what it's actually like to live under a crushing totalitarian regime is also enlightening.

Continuing my penance for my earlier novelistic sins, I jumped into Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Brenda Maddox). Franklin gets a fairly bum rap in The Double Helix, James Watson's account of the heady DNA days, and Maddox tries to redress things. ( Many tangential and subjective comments on on Wilkes, working women and the process of science. )

Thus ends the science rant. Back to the bio.

Maddox convincingly draws a picture of Franklin as a tough, complex woman - a meticulous scientist, a loving daughter and sister, a fierce opponent. I think some of her evocations of other personalities are a little weaker (at least, I occasionally forgot who someone was), but she does a great job of fleshing out a scientist who seems to have been at her most unhappy during the DNA years. I'd recommend the bio in a flash.

Work Clothes: Casual Dress for Serious Work (Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone, text J. Scott Omelianuk, photos Robert Tardio): Useless fluff. I wanted a book on how to keep ironed shirts unwrinkled and what a basic work wardrobe should include, and I got fashion advice circa 1996. Pretty clothing pictures, but not a good resource.

City of Diamond (Jane Emerson/Doris Egan/tightropegirl): reread. Not quite as clever as I recall, but still good stuff. If you haven't read it, CoD is a fun little 500-odd page novel of political intrigue and romance as two religious city-state starships search for a McGuffin that will give the owner major points with the general population. This lets the good guys prove their goodness, the bad guys torture people and be self-serving, and the reader enjoy the ride. Stands alone well, for the first of a never-completed trilogy.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke): Clarke revels in novel-expanding tangents and embedded stories. Somewhere within JS&MN's 782 pages, a really excellent 500 page novel is struggling to get out. There are fantastic moments, but the book entire needs someone to edit it with a machete. Possibly I missed some subtle, clever play on Regency novel conventions, but the first quarter of the book dragged. I was ( spoilers. )

Once Strange is onstage, things move much more nicely. Norrell and Strange are foils, so this is as it should be. It's a shame it took Clarke 250 pages to even introduce the guy. And after that the magic system is clever in vague ways, the visual moments of magic at work are startlingly clear, and I like the novel much more.

But I still miss that editorial machete.

Finally, I skimmed large parts of Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh) after getting some paperwork from my mother. Cyteen has held a special place in my heart since the events preceeding the 2000 Chicago Worldcon, when I got to a stopping point, put the book down, and thought, "I'm not letting my mother screw up my Worldcon plans." And since then, it's been my dealing-with-craziness book. It's dense, distracting and speaks to my Inner Bitch. Other than that, almost everything that can be said about Cyteen has been said elsewhere: anyone who thinks it's a murder mystery isn't paying attention (and that said, we'd still like to know who the murderer was), intelligence vs. happiness, wow those are some screwed up interpersonal relationships (why don't more characters try to run away to Novgorod and get away from their parents?), character studies of Amy Carnath might be interesting. Nevertheless, comments encouraged, because I missed most of the rec.arts.sf.* discussions. Darnit.