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Fruits of Our Labors (May Reading)
Jun. 3rd, 2010 09:55 pmThis is why I need a job.
The Cherryh Odyssey (Edward Carmien, ed): Nonfiction collection discussing Cherryh's novels and her career as a speculative fiction writer. The essays are arranged in a rough trajectory from personal recollections to more academic work. There's a fair amount of overlap in the recollections, so I was most interested in the critical essays. The essays are geared for a very general audience: in several introductions, Carmien advises readers that the citations need not be read to derive full enjoyment from the essay. The history of post-partition India (extensively endnoted for citations and clarifying details) and I say, "uh, yeah." This is popcorn nonfiction: entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I had hoped for. I learned a few interesting anecdotes, but I wanted something stronger and deeper.
My major takeaway from the personal reminiscence sections were two things: one, Cherryh started writing after Flash Gordon went off the air, and she wanted more; two, Wave Without a Shore was one of Cherryh's "magic cookies" published by DAW in the '80s. I wish she'd done more of those one-off brain puzzles: I liked them.
( Lots of reaction and table of contents under the cut. )
Lifelode (Jo Walton /![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky): Great-grandmother Hanethe comes home. Some really interesting worldbuilding is 90% obscured under a "slice of life" story.
Tangent: my reading expectations are deeply affected by context. I am more forgiving of shaky plotting and derivative worldbuilding if I'm reading on a computer screen. I expect dog-eared '80s paperbacks to approach story differently than the first printing HC I pick up at Border's this week.
With that said, Lifelode feels like a paperback, but I read it in NESFA HC. I didn't like it as much as I would have liked it in paperback. This has an experiemental feel - slippery character PoV; shifting tenses, in keeping with several characters' abilities to percieve past and future events; organization by theme (says Walton), not by chronology; implicit interaction-by-avoidance of epic fantasy tropes - which isn't what I want in my HCs. I also failed the inclue: when Taveth mentioned living in a stable polygamous foursome, when the priests were explicitly stated to be religiously nude, when the Galtis Pedmark showed up, I blinked and said, "wait, what?" (I'm still pretty, "wait, what?" about the priestly nudity. Why?) Walton says in the FAQ (and how can questions in a first printing be frequently asked? Wouldn't "author interview" or "additional Q&A for the interested reader" be a more appropriate format?) that she started with Jankin, and Hanethe took over. I want this to be a story about Jankin and Haneth and how they're foils for each other, and it's a story about Taveth being the rock on which the Applekirk manor is built. I am most intrigued by the worldbuilding that came up in the Q&A. Would that Walton had used that free will / yeya gradient in different ways! It's such a cool idea, acting as a backdrop for something completely different. What Walton's doing here is not in my focus, so I am likely complaining because there is peanut butter in my chocolate. If you want a cozy domestic story, this is about right; if you want a meditation on free will with a revel in a Nifty Worldbuilding Idea, this is going to frustrate you.
The Gate of Ivory (Doris Egan): Reread; escapist comfort fiction. This is a very cozy read for me: Egan has a sense of humor that is very easy for me to fall into.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Toronto hipsters, part two. This is pretty, but not deep.
The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande): I approached this with a management question in mind: how do you get stuff done with a high degree of reliability and consistency? I am a checklist person, so I was gratified to see that checklists helped in critical situations. However, I think Gawande's take-home point was not that checklists are a cure-all, but that checklists, correctly constructed, could foster situations and environments where certain goals (communication and co-operation in ORs, for example) were more likely to be achieved.
( Further reactions, and tangents on keep-on-hand bookcases. )
The first half of a massive Vorkosigan series reread: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, Cetaganda, The Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms (Lois McMaster Bujold): I'm not going to pretend this is anything but denial. One cannot read this much Miles while listening to "Funhouse" on repeat without being aware you are not living up to your expectations.
Shards: On the one hand, it's not as smooth as some of LMB's later novels. On the other hand? Cordelia = AWESOME. tWA:Give me an art metaphor for a moment. Compared to some of LMB's later novels, WA works in primary colors: exhilaration, terror, broad comedy. Death. LMB kills of characters with relative abandon in her early novels: Gottyan, Vorkalloner, Piotr, Bothari. I feel like, by Diplomatic Immunity, there's a lot more... pastel? Old Master palette? Something subtler, anyway. I chafe against some of that, because I am not a particularly subtle person. Cetaganda: I wonder when LMB decided Handmaiden of the Celestial Whatever meant Empress-in-Waiting?
The Spirit Ring (Lois McMaster Bujold): Reread, but not since my teens. I was surprised by how likeable I found TSR: I barely remembered it, and had not until now reckoned up that the bulk of the action takes place in about five days.
Numbers game: 12 total finished. 4 new, 8 reread; 10 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
The Cherryh Odyssey (Edward Carmien, ed): Nonfiction collection discussing Cherryh's novels and her career as a speculative fiction writer. The essays are arranged in a rough trajectory from personal recollections to more academic work. There's a fair amount of overlap in the recollections, so I was most interested in the critical essays. The essays are geared for a very general audience: in several introductions, Carmien advises readers that the citations need not be read to derive full enjoyment from the essay. The history of post-partition India (extensively endnoted for citations and clarifying details) and I say, "uh, yeah." This is popcorn nonfiction: entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I had hoped for. I learned a few interesting anecdotes, but I wanted something stronger and deeper.
My major takeaway from the personal reminiscence sections were two things: one, Cherryh started writing after Flash Gordon went off the air, and she wanted more; two, Wave Without a Shore was one of Cherryh's "magic cookies" published by DAW in the '80s. I wish she'd done more of those one-off brain puzzles: I liked them.
( Lots of reaction and table of contents under the cut. )
Lifelode (Jo Walton /
papersky): Great-grandmother Hanethe comes home. Some really interesting worldbuilding is 90% obscured under a "slice of life" story. Tangent: my reading expectations are deeply affected by context. I am more forgiving of shaky plotting and derivative worldbuilding if I'm reading on a computer screen. I expect dog-eared '80s paperbacks to approach story differently than the first printing HC I pick up at Border's this week.
With that said, Lifelode feels like a paperback, but I read it in NESFA HC. I didn't like it as much as I would have liked it in paperback. This has an experiemental feel - slippery character PoV; shifting tenses, in keeping with several characters' abilities to percieve past and future events; organization by theme (says Walton), not by chronology; implicit interaction-by-avoidance of epic fantasy tropes - which isn't what I want in my HCs. I also failed the inclue: when Taveth mentioned living in a stable polygamous foursome, when the priests were explicitly stated to be religiously nude, when the Galtis Pedmark showed up, I blinked and said, "wait, what?" (I'm still pretty, "wait, what?" about the priestly nudity. Why?) Walton says in the FAQ (and how can questions in a first printing be frequently asked? Wouldn't "author interview" or "additional Q&A for the interested reader" be a more appropriate format?) that she started with Jankin, and Hanethe took over. I want this to be a story about Jankin and Haneth and how they're foils for each other, and it's a story about Taveth being the rock on which the Applekirk manor is built. I am most intrigued by the worldbuilding that came up in the Q&A. Would that Walton had used that free will / yeya gradient in different ways! It's such a cool idea, acting as a backdrop for something completely different. What Walton's doing here is not in my focus, so I am likely complaining because there is peanut butter in my chocolate. If you want a cozy domestic story, this is about right; if you want a meditation on free will with a revel in a Nifty Worldbuilding Idea, this is going to frustrate you.
The Gate of Ivory (Doris Egan): Reread; escapist comfort fiction. This is a very cozy read for me: Egan has a sense of humor that is very easy for me to fall into.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Toronto hipsters, part two. This is pretty, but not deep.
The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande): I approached this with a management question in mind: how do you get stuff done with a high degree of reliability and consistency? I am a checklist person, so I was gratified to see that checklists helped in critical situations. However, I think Gawande's take-home point was not that checklists are a cure-all, but that checklists, correctly constructed, could foster situations and environments where certain goals (communication and co-operation in ORs, for example) were more likely to be achieved.
( Further reactions, and tangents on keep-on-hand bookcases. )
The first half of a massive Vorkosigan series reread: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, Cetaganda, The Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms (Lois McMaster Bujold): I'm not going to pretend this is anything but denial. One cannot read this much Miles while listening to "Funhouse" on repeat without being aware you are not living up to your expectations.
Shards: On the one hand, it's not as smooth as some of LMB's later novels. On the other hand? Cordelia = AWESOME. tWA:Give me an art metaphor for a moment. Compared to some of LMB's later novels, WA works in primary colors: exhilaration, terror, broad comedy. Death. LMB kills of characters with relative abandon in her early novels: Gottyan, Vorkalloner, Piotr, Bothari. I feel like, by Diplomatic Immunity, there's a lot more... pastel? Old Master palette? Something subtler, anyway. I chafe against some of that, because I am not a particularly subtle person. Cetaganda: I wonder when LMB decided Handmaiden of the Celestial Whatever meant Empress-in-Waiting?
The Spirit Ring (Lois McMaster Bujold): Reread, but not since my teens. I was surprised by how likeable I found TSR: I barely remembered it, and had not until now reckoned up that the bulk of the action takes place in about five days.
Numbers game: 12 total finished. 4 new, 8 reread; 10 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
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