I'm practicing proper touch-typing while writing these up, with mixed results. Retraining my fingers is going to boost my typing score in the long run, but at the moment I am very slow. (At a sprint, 50 - 60 WPM with one or two errors. It's the misstrokes that are killing me.)
The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia (Megan Whalen Turner): In a callback to my March reading, I parse Attolia and Mallory in the same realm of sliding scale morality / monarchy craziness. You would think this would make me 100% uncool with the romance? Well, see, that is where I am like, "that is completely wrong and TOTALLY AWESOME. In a completely wrong way. " The immovable object / irresistible force is so much fun I want to cheer it on, despite the - oh, ( spoiler cut time! )
Also, I think Irene is pretty awesome for seizing and holding power with the odds against her. I really love the characters in these novels: Attolia and Eddis, Gen, Costis, the spymaster, Gen's father the Minister of War, and so on. The plots are not as clever as they want to be, and lean heavily on manipulating the reader's incomplete knowledge of the full picture (why yes, Gen: you do win the prize for Most Unreliable Narrator of the Year), but I am so charmed by the writer's bouncy enthusiasm I can't be bothered to get upset. I am getting my emotional payoff, even when I foresee the plot twists.
Linus Pauling and the Chemistry of Life (Tom Hager): YA bio I picked up for a quick answer to my long-term question "why isn't there a rocking awesome Pauling bio out there?" Couched in easy prose and a lot of author interpretation is a possible answer: Pauling's three careers (chemist, peace activist, self-promoting quasi-dietician) are going to be viewed in different lights, and probably are going to mean hitting up very different research and knowledge bases. This is a pretty short (read: abridged) account of Pauling's life, sort of a Greatest Hits album, but it's the quick overview I was looking for.
The Lucky Strike (Kim Stanley Robinson): Short alternate history story, short essay on alternate history, short Q&A conducted by Terry Bison. I liked the nonfiction parts best, and the story was an interesting thought experiment that let KSR talk about alt history scenarios in the essay. I'm not sure I'd recommend this as an introduction to KSR's work, because I like the cumulative impact of his longer work, but if you want a short sampler, this touches on a lot of the themes that resurface in his novels and other fiction.
Gifts (Ursula K. Le Guin): For two years, teenage Orrec wears a blindfold to protect the people and things he loves from his "gift" of unmaking. This is the story of how the blindfold came off.
In a different writer's hands, this would be 100% "Scots highlanders, with magic!" This is not (entirely) that novel. Le Guin plays this as a story about the power of stories, using the mythology of Blind Caddard, Orrec's ancestor, to set up Orrec's plight and extend that into questioning the stories the uplanders tell about themselves and their way of life. The blindfold-as-metaphor could be really clunky, especially to the jaded YA audience this is pitched for, but I didn't find it overwhelmingly twee, which speaks to Le Guin's skill as a writer.
An Acceptable Time (Madeleine L'Engle): Reread. Polly O'Keefe, living with her grandparents, falls into a time warp with self-absorbed, brooding Zachary Gray and kindly Bishop Colubra, and must help the People of the Wind resolve a dispute with the People Across the Lake - without being sacrificed as a blood offering to end a devastating drought. This is pleasing, bringing together L'Engle's "time" quartet and the Polly-centric novels, but it's more heavily and blatantly steeped in a Christian message than some of L'Engle's other novels, which doesn't work as well for me. Also, An Acceptable Time is the fourth book Zarchary Gray appears in, and also is the fourth time Zachary endangers others, must be rescued, and promises to learn from his mistakes. It would be nice if, just once, he would follow through on that promise.
Don't Bite the Sun (Tanith Lee): You may be reading a Tanith Lee novel if
The latter is why I keep reading: when Lee is on, she writes wonderfully luscious prose. And when she's not, well, you get vivid reminders of how wonderful it is to be out of one's emo teenage years.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Graphic novel about Scott Pilgrim, 23-year-old bassist and member of the band Sex Bomb-omb, in which Scott dates a high schooler, then hits on the amazon.ca delivery girl, and learns he must fight the delivery girl's seven evil ex-boyfriends to earn the right to date her.
If SP weren't a spineless idiot who thinks with his dick, this would be awesome. It's anime meets comics, in Canada. Unfortunately, I want Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers to cut out the middle-man and run off with each other. I have that sort of hate-on for Scott. Seriously, seven evil exes? Maybe that should say something about your crush's taste in men, moron! And yet I have the second book on hold at the library. Apparently, my antipathy toward an an idiot protagonist can be overcome by the suspicion O'Malley's doing it on purpose. Since the non-Scott characters are significantly less obnoxious, and there are footnotes like "Sex Bomb-omb is a sort of lousy band", and the Scott-Matt fight is pretty awesome, I'm holding out some hope.
Numbers game: 8 total finished. 7 new, 1 reread; 7 fiction (1 graphic novel), 1 nonfiction (1.5 counting the mixed KSR).
The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia (Megan Whalen Turner): In a callback to my March reading, I parse Attolia and Mallory in the same realm of sliding scale morality / monarchy craziness. You would think this would make me 100% uncool with the romance? Well, see, that is where I am like, "that is completely wrong and TOTALLY AWESOME. In a completely wrong way. " The immovable object / irresistible force is so much fun I want to cheer it on, despite the - oh, ( spoiler cut time! )
Also, I think Irene is pretty awesome for seizing and holding power with the odds against her. I really love the characters in these novels: Attolia and Eddis, Gen, Costis, the spymaster, Gen's father the Minister of War, and so on. The plots are not as clever as they want to be, and lean heavily on manipulating the reader's incomplete knowledge of the full picture (why yes, Gen: you do win the prize for Most Unreliable Narrator of the Year), but I am so charmed by the writer's bouncy enthusiasm I can't be bothered to get upset. I am getting my emotional payoff, even when I foresee the plot twists.
Linus Pauling and the Chemistry of Life (Tom Hager): YA bio I picked up for a quick answer to my long-term question "why isn't there a rocking awesome Pauling bio out there?" Couched in easy prose and a lot of author interpretation is a possible answer: Pauling's three careers (chemist, peace activist, self-promoting quasi-dietician) are going to be viewed in different lights, and probably are going to mean hitting up very different research and knowledge bases. This is a pretty short (read: abridged) account of Pauling's life, sort of a Greatest Hits album, but it's the quick overview I was looking for.
The Lucky Strike (Kim Stanley Robinson): Short alternate history story, short essay on alternate history, short Q&A conducted by Terry Bison. I liked the nonfiction parts best, and the story was an interesting thought experiment that let KSR talk about alt history scenarios in the essay. I'm not sure I'd recommend this as an introduction to KSR's work, because I like the cumulative impact of his longer work, but if you want a short sampler, this touches on a lot of the themes that resurface in his novels and other fiction.
Gifts (Ursula K. Le Guin): For two years, teenage Orrec wears a blindfold to protect the people and things he loves from his "gift" of unmaking. This is the story of how the blindfold came off.
In a different writer's hands, this would be 100% "Scots highlanders, with magic!" This is not (entirely) that novel. Le Guin plays this as a story about the power of stories, using the mythology of Blind Caddard, Orrec's ancestor, to set up Orrec's plight and extend that into questioning the stories the uplanders tell about themselves and their way of life. The blindfold-as-metaphor could be really clunky, especially to the jaded YA audience this is pitched for, but I didn't find it overwhelmingly twee, which speaks to Le Guin's skill as a writer.
An Acceptable Time (Madeleine L'Engle): Reread. Polly O'Keefe, living with her grandparents, falls into a time warp with self-absorbed, brooding Zachary Gray and kindly Bishop Colubra, and must help the People of the Wind resolve a dispute with the People Across the Lake - without being sacrificed as a blood offering to end a devastating drought. This is pleasing, bringing together L'Engle's "time" quartet and the Polly-centric novels, but it's more heavily and blatantly steeped in a Christian message than some of L'Engle's other novels, which doesn't work as well for me. Also, An Acceptable Time is the fourth book Zarchary Gray appears in, and also is the fourth time Zachary endangers others, must be rescued, and promises to learn from his mistakes. It would be nice if, just once, he would follow through on that promise.
Don't Bite the Sun (Tanith Lee): You may be reading a Tanith Lee novel if
- the protagonist is a teenage girl.
- with emo girlpain.
- and a decadent lifestyle.
- as well as some really over-the-top purple prose.
The latter is why I keep reading: when Lee is on, she writes wonderfully luscious prose. And when she's not, well, you get vivid reminders of how wonderful it is to be out of one's emo teenage years.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Graphic novel about Scott Pilgrim, 23-year-old bassist and member of the band Sex Bomb-omb, in which Scott dates a high schooler, then hits on the amazon.ca delivery girl, and learns he must fight the delivery girl's seven evil ex-boyfriends to earn the right to date her.
If SP weren't a spineless idiot who thinks with his dick, this would be awesome. It's anime meets comics, in Canada. Unfortunately, I want Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers to cut out the middle-man and run off with each other. I have that sort of hate-on for Scott. Seriously, seven evil exes? Maybe that should say something about your crush's taste in men, moron! And yet I have the second book on hold at the library. Apparently, my antipathy toward an an idiot protagonist can be overcome by the suspicion O'Malley's doing it on purpose. Since the non-Scott characters are significantly less obnoxious, and there are footnotes like "Sex Bomb-omb is a sort of lousy band", and the Scott-Matt fight is pretty awesome, I'm holding out some hope.
Numbers game: 8 total finished. 7 new, 1 reread; 7 fiction (1 graphic novel), 1 nonfiction (1.5 counting the mixed KSR).