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The Cyberiad (Stanislaw Lem) (1965 / English tans. 1974): A collection of short stories about two Constructors, Trurl and Klapaucius, in a parable or fairy tale mode.

Trurl and Klapaucius are robots, by the way. It took me a few stories to figure that out.

(It took me about a story and a half to mentally model Trurl off Rodney McKay and Klapaucius from Radek Zelenka, but that is neither here nor there.)

Works in translation are a tough read for me, as I am generally keeping in my mind two layers of interpretation: what the author is trying to say and what the translator thought the author was trying to say. Add in the complications of '60s writing translated into '70s vernacular read in the 2010's, on a smartphone, and see where that gets you. I found the prose tough going, having been spoiled by recent reading. But what I liked, I really liked. Mad scientist robots! The lurking humor nearly destroyed in translation! Every now and then it would break though. I particularly loved the hypothetical dragons, the treatment which starts "dragons are impossible, of course" and then uses the language of abstract mathematics to bring the hypothetical dragons into the world. I really want to reread this on paper, preferably in a better translation.

Being Mortal (Atul Gawande) (2014): Nonfiction. Dying in America and the first world. The thesis seems to be: the current system for caring for the aged grew out of mid-20th-century hospitalization, and as such answers to the metrics of hospitals. Safety is valued over autonomy. However, studies are showing that self-determination is correlated to better quality of life, and sometimes even longer quality of life, so rearranging The System to allow people to be the "authors of their own stories" as long as possible might correlate with reduced end-of-life costs, better quality of life, and even a bit of an edge on length of life. Some of this is very good, and rings very true to my experiences. Gawande echoes a thirdhand quote that "we want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love," (p106 HC) which seems like a trenchant observation. But sometimes the arguments get a little too tidy, a little too slick, as when Gawande talks about the Ars Moriendi, a guide to an "ideal" death. I detect the whiff of English classism in adherence to this standard, which made me a little more dubious of Gawande's arguments, no matter how compelling.

The Price of the Stars (Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald) (1992): Being, as the cover so flamboyantly proclaims, Book One of the Mageworlds. It's absolutely classic romantic space opera, Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. There's an assassinated Domina, her grieving smuggler-turned-war-leader husband's charge to their free-trader daughter to find the identity of her mother's killer, which eventually draws in psychic Adepts, the Domina's other two children, some dramatic faked deaths, a mysterious and slightly sinister man incongruously known as "the Professor", and, of course, dramatic space-chases.

Stuff blows up really well. I append the stamp of beach reading approval, and look forward to tearing through the rest of the series (long out of print) when I can scrape it up from used book stores.

This 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 / 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.

Two series rereads, one short essays-make-good-chapers nonfiction.

The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming (C. J. Cherryh): Reread. A human staggers into an alien Compact and nearly blows it to pieces. Twice. The Chanur series never clicked with me the way some of Cherryh's other novels have. I always felt the Venture/Kif/Homecoming trilogy was an expansion of the original Pride plot, and didn't do much except make everyone crazy stressed for all of The Kif Strike Back (which always disappoints me when no one's frozen in carbonite). It's a bad sign when you find yourself skimming the part where the protagonist digs information out of people, waiting for her to package it for the benefit of other characters. Lazy and all. I like the mahendo'sat much more than they probably deserve. Note that I said "like", not "trust"; it's Cherryh, there is a difference.

To balance the list of complaints - there's something very intellectually fun about the inversions in the Chanur series. A lone human in a sea of aliens, dominant females, the PoV underdog conservative species in a powerful Compact. There's probably more poking of the tropes than I've noticed, but those are the most obvious to me. It seems to me that the great fun in the Chanur series is noticing stuff like that and discussing it, making it a stronger "ideas" or "plot" book than "character" novel.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Atul Gawande): Nonfiction; loan from one of my school friends. Medicine as seen by a surgical resident. Mishaps, inexplicables, and surprises. Medicine is always improving, but remains a chancy field. The book uses an ice cube/hurricane metaphor: is patient assessment more like diagnosing ice cubes in a fire, or hurricane landfalls? The book rests on this awareness of uncertainty. Where do medical mistakes come from? How do we deal with the surprises patient bodies throw at doctors? And how can patients work through the uncertainties of treatment in an era when ethics places the burden of decision on them? Gawande uses anecdotes and statistics pulled from the medical journals to try to illuminate what's going on in the hospital's collective brain. And what colorful anecdotes. I think the necrotizing fasciitis is going to hold a special place in my memory. Unless the hyperemesis, um, sticks. Though there's always the nasty death-on-a-ventilator... anyway. Very accessible style, and a fast read, but I was squirming a bit imagining the surgical bits.

Further inappropriately lighthearted notes - medical jargon seems to be more hyperspecialized than cell bio jargon. I can generally figure out what article titles in cell bio journals mean at this point, but the medical article cited at one point was entirely past my parsing. Science fiction fans might find themselves in sympathy with "Nine Thousand Surgeons", a chapter on the annual American College of Surgeons convention.

I reread the first two books in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series - The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret - pieces of The Lost Steersman, and most of The Language of Power. If you're playing the "pick more information out of the series" game, it's more effective to just do a search on the series in the usenet archives, but the novels stand up to rereading fairly well. ( Full series spoilers. )

I think the interplay of what the readers know, but the protagonists don't, and what neither readers nor protags know, is one of the niftiest things about the Steerswoman series. My two cents.

Posted and backdated August 4th, 2005