January reading is not going so well

[silverflight8]

Ratings out of 5

Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer - 0.5 stars
Divine Rivals - Rebecca Ross - 1.5 stars
Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr Crippen - Hallie Rubenhold - DNF ugh
On Basilisk Station - David Weber - 2.25 stars
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith - 4 stars (phew)
My Inconvenient Duke - Loretta Chase - 2.25 stars
Tooth and Claw - Jo Walton - 3.25 stars (recovering)

Comments

[queenlua]

It's been some time since I read it but I really loved I Capture the Castle <3

I'm curious to hear why Too Like the Lightning didn't work for you! It really does seem to be a love-it-or-hate-it-no-in-between read for most people. (I happened to love it but enjoy hearing other opinions haha)

[silverflight8]

I Capture the Castle has been on my "I should read this sometime (I immediately forget)" list for so long, since I started doing yuletide a decade or more ago, and kept seeing it show up in the Books category. I really like the narrator and her honesty and cheerfulness.

I have a longer rant about it on storygraph but the problem is I found the worldbuilding ultimately disappointing and glaringly eurocentric, and Palmer was really condescending throughout. I guess she was trying to be ambitious but it really didn't work, and I don't share her kink for the 18th CE Enlightenment and yet somehow know facts about it, so it also irritated the crap out of me.

[queenlua]

Fair enough, yeah; can see how all that would grate. Thanks for sharing & may your February book selections be more favorable...!

[silverflight8]

Haha thanks! Hope your reading has been going well!

[hamsterwoman]

I was also curious about your thoughts on TLTL, so thank you for answering (I am very used to bimodal reactions :)

I will say that I think it's really hard to tell, from book 1, what is authorial kink/bias/etc. vs what is Mycroft's deep POV, but ultimately the experience for the reader is basically the same regardless, so, fair enough for sure :) (Based on what bugged out about book 1, I'm pretty sure the series would continue to bug you.)

[silverflight8]

Haha sorry I know you really liked them and thank you for sending them to me, but they are not for me XD I did struggle all the way through because I was like...hamsterwoman likes them, I gotta give it a fair shake!! We will just have to fall back on all the other books that we have in common. I feel like other than this book we have a very very overlapping taste in books...just not this. (I have another friend whose book tastes overlaps heavily with mine and we split on Seanan McGuire - she loves McGuire, I do not).

Yeah I don't think I should read the other books. I did look up the plot and it sounds like the Bridger part will also not mesh well with what I like so...RIP. On to other books!

[hamsterwoman]

Haha, no worries at all -- I do love this series and think it's brilliant, BUT I also know a lot of people who bounced HARD off the first book, including at least two people with whom I generally have very good overlap in what kinds of books we like (you'll be data point #3 in that regard, heh) -- and just very objectively there's lots to bounce off. Making it through book 1 is definitely a fair shake :)

[spiralsheep]

Oh, wow. I'm afraid to ask about the the Ada Palmer. But congrats on the dnf because slogging through is a no. I hope February's books are more satisfactory. Big hugs?

[silverflight8]

HAHA no hugs needed! There's more books to read which are good. I'm just kind of amazed at how bad some of the selections have been.

I wrote a little about it but it just didn't work for me either as a novel, science fictionally, etc.

[sholio]

OH NO, that is definitely not going well! Hopefully things improve from here.

[silverflight8]

It can only improve!
Though Iron Flame is testing my patience 😅

[pauraque]

I think 3.25 is a very fair rating for Tooth and Claw. I had fun reading it, but a lot of things about it don't bear much scrutiny.

I read your comment above about Too Like the Lightning, but now I'm curious what it did to earn that half a star!

[silverflight8]

In many ways I thought it was an interesting concept and I do love dragons, and I really like and respect Jo Walton (especially her analysis of books actually, but also Among Others) so I was hoping for better.

Here is my whole review on storygraph:

This was a very ambitious but overall very frustrating book. I think Ada Palmer was trying to do a lot - worldbuilding about a planet 400 years later, with very different tech and more importantly, very different method of organizing social bonds and nation-states. Transport is absolutely transformed, making the world even more global. It's told from an unreliable narrator's POV, which can be very interesting, and it's a very awful person's narration. But it really doesn't execute well.

One of SF's strengths is seeing how changes in technology spill over into human lives, social change, and at its best, exploration of how a setting or an environment shapes individuals and societies. When the rules are different, personalities are molded to or form against them. I was really disappointed to find that it wasn't done here at all. I found the bashes to be not that different, even though the change in how we define family relationships changed so drastically. The nation-states which no longer exist, but still have legacy rulers with their old titles, just didn't feel any different. The lives of the characters didn't feel much different. Except maybe the set-sets, most of the characters acted just like contemporary people, with similar morality and reactions to stuff, and called these cars just like Ubers. This change in social set up, in gender expression, would remake our social lives tremendously, and this novel did not go into any of it. It's so disappointing. The choice of what to do with criminals, the Servicer program, is very different from what we have; there wasn't much of that, despite Mycroft being one, since he is so special. So many opportunities to explore things in an interesting science fictional angle, this novel chose to skip.

The biggest elephant in the room is however Palmer's clear fixation on the 18th century European Enlightenment - everything to do with it. Its dress, its fashions, its philosophy, its writers, its role in shaping our current society (and, presumably, theirs). Palmer attributes everything to this section of time and this small coterie of French men. In a world that is so purportedly global it was glaringly Euro-centric. Somehow despite much larger populations elsewhere, the thinkers of now 600 years ago have huge sway; cities in Europe are still central. That's not even true today, where you could argue there's frankly far more American imperial power. The inclusion of the Mitubishis and name-checking Indian and Chinese cities, instead of feeling global, felt like token inclusion. A lot of SFF is American/Eurocentric, being published in English, and it doesn't bother me usually, but not when there is so much emphasis on very interconnected, frankly incestuous global politics. The non-gendering of people is not well conveyed either, since Mycroft is a very unreliable narrator and already assigns people gender arbitrarily - the reveal of the brothel where everyone just conforms to 18th century fashions and gender expression is just not very notable in that light. There is no contrast.

The assertion that all of the global leaders all go to this Gender Brothel of French 18th Century Fashion is also hilarious for its absurdity and its sweep. What, all of them? They're all meeting there?

Bridger, the child who can make things come alive, felt very poorly incorporated in. He was very detached from the rest of the action, his powers felt entirely different, and it felt like he had come from a totally different novel.

Several writing choices I feel made this book more difficult to enjoy or appreciate:
1) The Latin which was given sentence by sentence, and sandwiched between, an English translation. Why was this necessary? There were better ways of conveying the distance created by translation, or the ambiguities of translation. (Which, by the way, when the Latin + English glosses were being given on page, there was very little ambiguity expressed.) This just came off as pretentious.
2) The choice to infodump paragraphs every time an Enlightenment philosopher or figure was mentioned. Have the confidence to assume a reader knows who Voltaire is. We do not need paragraphs and paragraphs, starting Dear reader, to bludgeon us over the head. You are not the only person aware of the Enlightenment. Yes, this was from an unreliable narrator POV, but Palmer made the choice for Mycroft to do it this way.
3) The constant addresses to the reader became very tiring. Jane Eyre lands a bombshell by putting in one at the end. This was constantly every chapter and very tiring, especially since again, it was Palmer telling us things a reasonably well-educated person reading in English probably already knows. Yes I am aware of the Marquis de Sade! Good grief!

This took me a very, very long time to read, because I just kept picking it up and then sighing and then putting it back down.

Finally I would like to say I suggested this for a real life book club without having read it first, and I would like to apologize to the book club for having subjected them to it. So sorry!