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Fugitive Telemetry(Martha Wells)(2021): I knew it was ( massive spoiler. )

Continuing the themes of the novel, PresAux is still grappling with Corporation People Do Terrible Things For Money, and Murderbot is slowly, at its own pace, finding different roles it can fill, while remaining Ex-SecUnit Who Likes Media And Sarcasm. A+ mutual loathing between Murderbot and the investigation team lead.

The Lord of the Rings(J. R. R. Tolkien, read by Rob Inglis)(1955 / 2011): Audiobook for several long road trips. Somehow the collective drives managed to touch on both ends of CA-299 without covering most of the middle bits. I listened to Fellowship on 395, Two Towers was I-5 company, I was deep in RotK driving down route 101 and finished it at home while doing some picture-hanging. (Somehow picture-hanging involved both a drill and box cutters, though the box cutters were a workaround for my lack of a wire cutter.) This is the audiobook version where the narrator gets to sing, which either you like or you don't. I enjoyed it.

LotR fandom owes respect to the Peter Jackson films for keeping people interested in LotR, but reading the novels really emphasizes some of the, ah, creative departures in the movies. LotR the movies: "we must have Dramatic Tension by making everything uncertain and desperate!" LotR the novels: "what if everyone does their war prep, keeping stores of food and arms ready for need? What if Theoden never hesitates to ride to Gondor's need? What if everyone's extremely practical planning is well-executed, and it still may not be sufficient for survival? Now that is storytelling!"

Witch King(Martha Wells)(2023): Fantasy, double timeline narrative. Demon Kai awakens from a year of enspelled death and has to grapple with The State Of The Coalition, With Travel; the flashback timeline follows the fall of Kai's first people, the Saredi, and a rebellion against the invading Hierarchy, lead by Oh No He's Hot Prince Bashasa, prisoner of the Hierarchy.

From the blurbs, I thought Kai was out of circulation for considerably longer than a year, but the narrative rapidly disabused me. ( Brief spoiler thoughts. )

If you're reading for someone else's entertaining road trip, this is a good novel for you. Not earth-shattering, but tells the story it came to tell, in a way that I enjoyed.

There's a hook for follow-up with the Hierarchy's southern roots if Tor wants to contract a sequel, but the focus of the story is standalone enough to read as a comfortable one-off. Also, the Immortal Blessed are incredibly annoying, as designed; wouldn't mind follow-ups of Tahren's relatives annoying Our Protagonists.

I'm seeing a lot of reviews that ask for more Murderbot. Not sure if this is a reflection of Murderbot's specific resonance with readers, or a deep craving for sarcasm, or a preference for novella-length stories. I'm neutral on Murderbot vs Not Murderbot; my sarcasm quota is currently acceptably filled through other channels.

Translation State(Ann Leckie)(2023): Let's have a Conclave!

Even better, let's have a Conclave as a background to negotiating our concept of family!

My father passed away recently, at unexpected speed, slipping from complaints about flu-like symptoms to celestial discharge from the ICU in less than five days, at the age of seventy. We had a mildly complicated relationship, which has shaded my interactions with the compassionate and well-intentioned. It was an interesting mindset to be in as I opened Translation State to Enae's tribulations during and after Grandmaman's funeral.

The connecting theme between Enae, Qven, and Reet seems to be family problems. Enae's difficult mother-figure, difficult more distant relations, and difficult will-and-legacy-of-Grandmaman issues are Reddit-worthy; Reet has three loving parents but unmet personal needs; Qven follows the fine Leckie tradition of bonkers Presger Translator mindsets, but more soberly filtered through difficult pseudo-late-adolescent experiences. (Is it still adolescence if you're a Presger Translator? For today's purposes let's go with "yes".) This somehow comes together at the Conclave, arranged to evaluate a question of Significance, but now also called to determine the correct affiliation of at least one character.

This was all a pleasant reading experience, until we got to the Conclave and got some time with Sphene, who says "I don't do things by half measures," and in no way resembles any Cherryh characters ever, nope, not at all. This put me in a good mindset for the ending, plagued with two characters obliviously convinced their opposite number doesn't love them, while also wrapping up at almost Cherryh levels of "falling action is for chumps".

I have no idea what the title has to do with any of the characters or action, but I also finished the novel about an hour ago and will probably think more on it.

SEPTEMBER
The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson): ..meh. Postapocalyptic "what is America" bildungsroman where the protagonist learns that sometimes people lie to you and don't have your best interests at heart. This has some of the elements I like about KSR's other novels - attention to detail, location as almost a character in its own right - but the moral focus is uninteresting to me. The nuclear annihilation and post-nuclear log cabin existence of the new Americans, hemmed in by a UN ban (or forces manipulating the ban on the international scene) almost looks a little post-Iraq, if you squint, and ought to resonate with American challenges thirty years later. But it doesn't, to me. First novel-itis? The narrator's political naivete drove me to distraction, and then to indifference.

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh): Nonfiction. Sociological study of the Robert Taylor Homes Project in Chicago from its inception to the '90s, looking at the goals and failures of the project. From almost the start, underfunding and over-subscription to services plagued individual buildings and the project as a whole. Venkatesh examines strategies residents devised to survive: under-the-table jobs and businesses, networks and favoritism, relationships with "legitimate" authorities. I found this interesting, and illuminating, but dry. Ventakesh makes evident in the use of theory and endnotes that he's writing a scholarly book first, and only secondarily for a lay audience. It's readable, but I suspect some of the theory went right over my head.

The Steerswoman's Road (Rosemary Kirstein): Reread. Collection of The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret; contains my favorite eyewitness description of a mass non-natural disaster.

OCTOBER
Continued Kirstein re-read: on to The Lost Steersman and The Language of Power. There's something subtle and unexpected going on with gender and worldbuilding; consider this a holding place for a longer examination of the question.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (J. R. R. Tolkien): Reread. When you don't know what else to read... Tolkien. "The Grey Havens" gets me every time.

Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold): New Bujold is always awesome, but this one hit me in unexpected places. I sulked for a week after I finished this. I may still be sulking. Spoiler item was inevitable, but it ruined the last chapter for me, because I saw it coming. I'm also not pleased with other parts of the structure: I think A Civil Campaign's plot-with-a-bow-on-top structure spoiled me for novels of less artifice (Diplomatic Immunity, Cryoburn). The beautiful theme / plot dovetailing in Mirror Dance and Memory didn't help. I'm not sure if LMB is getting subtler, and I'm missing things because I'm not paying attention, or if there's another reason I'm not as happy with this book.

I also have very firm associations with the word "drabble" which completely threw me out of the last 500 words of the novel. Am I the only one?



Tongues of Serpents (Naomi Novik): Fifth in the series, following Victory of Eagles: Laurence and Temeraire, branded traitors to England, arrive at an Australian exile that is anything but settled, or restful.

( This got long, as well as mixed. )

I think my real problem is that I want the series to be something it's not. Novik's not writing about major aerial actions, and she's not writing an alternate universe English Dragon Revolution informed by 21st century social justice activism. That's okay, but it pops the sequels to the "beach and brainless" reading list.

The Honor of the Queen (David Weber): Second Honor Harrington novel; reread. The last time I touched anything Weber-authored was 2003; the last time I read a full HH novel must have been 2001 or earlier. This wasn't a particularly well-written novel in my memory, and rereading did not help its case. The plot's direct, but the writing rambles to the point of tediousness. I don't care how many kilometers per second your missile travels, evading penaids and point defenses; I care how much story-propelling boom it makes when it hits something.

Apparently, I absorbed the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Honor Harrington novels (War of Honor, At All Costs, and Mission of Honor, all written by David Weber) in a two-day electronic binge. Does it count as power-skimming when you keyword-search to the characters you care about?

( My infodump about my reaction to infodumps, let me show you it. )

Numbers game: 15 total finished. 7 new, 8 reread; 14 fiction, 1 nonfiction

Explaining why I was awesome this afternoon involves tedious backfill regarding sample handling and how much I miss people who are on vacation (one more day! One more day of trying to be two people!) but today I rocked the fast turnaround. And then I made "experiment with margarine" chocolate chip cookies and had roommate hang-out time. Go me!

Also, my desire to cope with the less than 10 hours of daylight thing and rock my errands correlates wonderfully well with the day's high temperature breaking 35 F.

I'm rereading The Fellowship of the Ring at night and on the bus this week (and last week, and for several weeks to come), and having lurched out of Bree I think I'll manage to finish the book. However, reading it in winter at 25 instead of August at a still-new-to-me 14 is a very different experience: much more implicit grappling with despair (and losing all the time, real subtle, JRRT!) and much more awareness of how wavering and uneven Fellowship is, and such a fit for the weather it's not a pleasant resonance. And yet - still reading.

This month's theme: the reread. I don't think I read a single new novel the entire month.

There was, however, a lot of fanfic. Fanfic's easier to deal with during exam stress.

( I started the month with fast skims of the last two books in the 'Children of the Star' trilogy. )

( Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian. )

( Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian. )

( Patriotism, Yukio Mishima. )

( The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien. )

( The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien. )

And that's 2003. By my count, I read 56 books between May and December, and I know I read more before May that didn't make it onto an organized list. So on average I finished a book every. . . 4 and 3/8 days in the last 245 days of the year, and every three days in September, when I finished ten novels in thirty days. (Some of them were very short novels.)

This year's reading goal, I think, is nonfiction. It'll kill my rate, but I need to get out of my predominantly SF rut, and learn a bit more about the world.

(So what am I currently reading? J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Thomas Shippey.

I'll be good. I'll read The Origin of Species that's been kicking around my room next. Promise.

If I'm not seduced by Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien first, of course.)