ase: Book icon (Books 2)
First, some winter that I missed: Victoria Goddard's The Game of Courts (2023) and Derring-Do For Beginners (2023). The Game of Courts is Conju gap-filler / prequel for The Hands of the Emperor. If gap-filler is your thing, and people making friends with Cliopher Mdang is your thing, this will be enjoyable. Derring-Do For Beginners is Red Company pre-story, around the meetings of Damian Raskae, Jullanar Thislethwaite, and Fitzroy not-yet-Angursell. It's pleasant enough, but I was really struck by Damian's difficult relationship with his mother and brother. "How interesting," I thought, "if Goddard has decided to write this character, the leader of the Red Company, as someone who has difficulty reading and understanding others' emotions; with very limited and obsessive interests in swordsmanship; to the point that his brother and mother think hard on how to adapt to the challenge of a family member that doesn't recognize their social cues..."

...and then it turned out Damian's "just" so farsighted he needs glasses to see anything less than six feet from his face. That wasn't the invisible disability I was expecting, so I've had to adjust my reactions from what I thought I read (neurodivergence) for what the author intended (physically can't see indoors without glasses).

So it's another case of "if you liked everything before, you'll probably like this," with the corollary also applicable.

Wheel of the Infinite (Martha Wells) (2000): Audiobook, narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. Cranky middle-aged Maskelle and the performance troupe she is traveling with bend their steps for the holy capital Duvalpore, Maskelle's once-home, on the eve of a ceremony of renewal. Dark omens shadow Maskelle's path, as she is forced to make alliance with the wandering swordsman Rian, fleeing his own distant troubles, to renew the Wheel of the Infinite before the world is plunged into the chaos the Wheel protects it from.

If you've read Wells, you know the themes and tropes that appeal to her, and either you are along for that or you're not. If you haven't, tthere's an author's revised / updated edition coming out this November. I'm curious to see what gets tweaked, to be honest.

Iron Flame (Rebecca Yarros) (2023): Violet Sorrengail, Most Special Protagonist of Fourth Wing, beat the 75% fatality odds seen in Rider's Quadrant first year cadets, falling into Most Eligible Bachelor Xaden Riorson's passionate embrace along the way... but now it's second year, and Violet faces new challenges. Can she survive the pitfalls of Basgiath War College's secrets, or the dangerous callings of her ladybits heart?

So. Well. How does one say this?

Google "reylo", hold it up against Iron Flame, and then google "corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture."

Reylo is pretty much a big list of "nope" for me, which is too bad for anyone trying to get me to read, well, any romance novel ever.

There are some other romance tropes in play, but it's really clear I am not the target audience for a single thing this series is doing.

I guess it's spoilers. )

Project Hail Mary (Andrew Weir) (2021): Protagonist Ryland Grace wakes up alone, in something almost but not entirely like an automated hospital, with no idea who he is or how he got there. He has to solve those questions, plus the questions and hands-on problems that unfold in response to the answers to who he is and why he is where he is.

A straight up Weir engineering scramble. As mentioned by others, strong on the hard science "what if" ideas, weak on anything other than theoretical physics, applied physics, software, or math. If you like your biology, the softer sciences, or the humanities evoked with accuracy, seek elsewhere.

The older I get, the easier applied science problems seem, and the harder anything to do with getting groups of thinking organisms to act cooperatively seems, so this was fun escapist literature for me. Picking apart all the ways the underpinning assumptions don't work is part of the fun, really.

One thing that gets particularly shafted by the weakness on things Not Physics Or Software is that the protagonist has, either intentionally or unintentionally, the personality and social background of someone with weak personal social structures, which could be played up as a personal arc, but it's sort of a bonus concept thrown in late in the novel, when he has some go / no go decisions to make. Not to mention the final scene is stupid cute and also plays to sentiment rather than any deep interrogation of [redacted] neuropsychology and applied pedagogy. Still, it was a fun Saturday fluff read.

Currently reading Shannon Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, in ebook, for the Hugos. I made it through all of two-thirds of the audiobook dedication - the dedication! Not even the prologue! - before giving serious thought to chucking my phone at an open car window (walls being in limited supply on an I-80 San Francisco to Reno run). The written version is going more smoothly.
ase: Book icon (Books)
Games Wizards Play (Diane Duane) (2016): Nita, Kit, and Dairine mentor younger wizards in a wizardly science fair: Dairine's mentee presents a spell that can stop earthquakes... if she can work through a few issues with her large and wizardly connected family... while Nita and Kit struggle with a mentee whose personality is even more flamboyant and flawed than his ambitious solar spell.

Climax destroying spoilers. )

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love (David Talbot) (2012): Popular history of San Francisco from the Summer of Love through the HIV crisis. The focus is the welter of conflict that gripped the city through the '70s, culminating in the devastating two weeks of November 1978 when the Jonestown deaths rippled through the Bay area and Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot by Milk's fellow supervisor Dan White in city hall.

Talbot's uplifting redemptive finish is Feinstein's nine-year mayoralty. The HIV crisis is presented as San Francisco getting its act together, compared to what came before, which strikes me as a little off-base.

The Martian (Andy Weir) (2011): Fictional account of the survival of an astronaut stranded on Mars.

Spoilers, I suppose. Spoilers of meh. )

Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home (Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, 1990) (trans. Aliyu Kamal, 2012): a littattafai na soyayya novel, one of the occasional series I think of as "NPR books", ie, books I read becuase NPR made it sound interesting. This is a story of virtue rewarded and misdeeds punished: the wife and mother Rabi is thrown out of her husband's home at the insistence of a new wife, and must support herself and her nine children in Kano, Nigeria. The bad behavior of spouses is the recurring theme of this novel, as Rabi's oldest daughter Saudatu catches the eye of a wealthy businessman and finds her virtue rewarded with a loving and wealthy husband, Abubakar. Alhaji Abubakar casts off his previous wives as their flaws come to light. Greed, selfishness, and irreligiosity play their roles in revealing who is moral and upstanding and who is not. Ultimately, Abdu's fortunes crumble and he is forced to take back the hardworking Rabi, though now Rabi is in charge. "She was the one who handed out the day's provisions, who distributed the detergent and soap. She was the one responsible for giving the house a lick of paint when needed, and deciding what should go where."

To say this is outside my usual reading is an understatement. And I love that! Sin is a bit of a soap opera and a bit of a romance and perhaps a bit chicklit, or at least the story of dense community. Rabi appeals to her siblings for support, her brother-in-law chastises her husband, her children pitch in, her neighbors are part of her support network. Saudatu is able to catch Abubakar's eye when she is visiting with an aunt. But it's also threaded through with profoundly Islamic and Nigerian ideas: routine polygamy, separate spaces for men and women - when Rabi begins selling food from her house, the novel casually mentions her sons helping to take food outside to adult male customers, since of course these men cannot step foot in her house, it would violate purdah - the routine Islamic prayers, woven into the fabric of the characters' lives. It's a short, fascinating look into someone else's culture.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (Nathalia Holt) (2016): Pop sci history. The JPL computer department, founding to its transition from "computer" to "engineer".

This is a little more memoir than I like my pop sci. Rise of the Rocket girls is descriptive. It's subjective. It recounts women coming to JPL, their experiences in and outside the computer department. It doesn't go the extra step to correlate this to wider trends. It mentions that the JPL computers hired a black women, it doesn't explore the link that to a century of racial discrimination in the sciences. It passes over the the hiring of a first generation Chinese woman without thought. It mentions that the JPL computer department consciously and consistently hired only women for decades, from almost its inception until its dissolution, and treats this lightly, rather than turning it around from all its fascinating angles: is this a form of affirmative action? Is this a variation of reverse discrimination? Did this impact the payment, the structure, the labor assigned to computers at JPL, compared to mixed or male-only computer groups? There's recounting that women left to get married, left for their first child, came back because they missed working, came back and got divorced, left to salvage their marriages, and the creeping change from "babies end careers" to "single mother supporting her family" happens utterly unremarked, it's just another variation in anecdotes. JPL launched a rocket, so and so got hired, JPL proposed a space mission, so and so left right before the birth of her child, and so forth and so on. It doesn't put in the work to step from fluffy to significant. And that's a shame. This book about these women, and this moment in the history of space exploration, of women's involvement in the military-industrial complex, of women as computer programmers and engineers and mentors and advocates for their junior colleagues, is so slight it's going to slip right out from notice and take these stories with it. Rise suffers a lot from failing my hopes; it disappointing and frustrating that such an interesting topic is not assayed with more rigor and depth.

Profile

ase: Default icon (Default)
ase

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  123 45
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags