ase

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.