I think I'll do this chronologically!
( The Warrior's Apprentice )
( The Mountains of Mourning )
( The Vor Game )
( The Warrior's Apprentice )
( The Mountains of Mourning )
( The Vor Game )
Vorkosigan saga
Feb. 16th, 2025 05:21 pmI'm so incredibly late to reading this and very much should have read it so much sooner, but it's been eating my brain. I read Shards of Honour years ago and enjoyed it, but was stymied by the knowledge that most of the series is about Miles - I generally hate it when book sequels go to the next gen, so I never pursued the further books. I really should have, because it turns out I really like them! I really like space opera/military SF in general, and these are just so good.
I'm in a bunch of book clubs and for one of them we decided to read The Warrior's Apprentice, based on C's recommendation on where we should start. So I read it. And I loved it. A few days later I was getting dinner with another friend in another book club (I have too many book clubs) and was telling K about how much I enjoyed The Warrior's Apprentice & The Vor Game, the next in sequence, and K was like "oh, I love those books!". K is in another book club with C with me, so when we met, we discussed the actual book we had chosen, and then devoted the rest of the time to Vorkosigan. The next meeting is going to be "whatever book I can get to", with K saying she'd like to discuss Memory, but only if I can make it there. Both C and K have read them all, so we tentatively set Memory as a goal, and this book club may temporarily just turn into us discussing Vorkosigan until I suppose I read all of them. As of Feb 15, I am absolutely going to make it to Memory, as I've just finished Mirror Dance. Though I need to force myself to take a break. I finished The Warrior's Apprentice on January 18th, and since then I have read Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Labyrinth, Borders of Infinity, Shards of Honour (having forgotten all the plot from my first reading, this felt just like a new book), Barrayar, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. I took a break in the middle in various places to try to read other books, but it was kind of difficult because I just wanted to keep going with Vorkosigan. I have copies of a bunch of omnibus editions, which also makes it so easy to just keep going.
I have so many feelings.
I'm in a bunch of book clubs and for one of them we decided to read The Warrior's Apprentice, based on C's recommendation on where we should start. So I read it. And I loved it. A few days later I was getting dinner with another friend in another book club (I have too many book clubs) and was telling K about how much I enjoyed The Warrior's Apprentice & The Vor Game, the next in sequence, and K was like "oh, I love those books!". K is in another book club with C with me, so when we met, we discussed the actual book we had chosen, and then devoted the rest of the time to Vorkosigan. The next meeting is going to be "whatever book I can get to", with K saying she'd like to discuss Memory, but only if I can make it there. Both C and K have read them all, so we tentatively set Memory as a goal, and this book club may temporarily just turn into us discussing Vorkosigan until I suppose I read all of them. As of Feb 15, I am absolutely going to make it to Memory, as I've just finished Mirror Dance. Though I need to force myself to take a break. I finished The Warrior's Apprentice on January 18th, and since then I have read Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Labyrinth, Borders of Infinity, Shards of Honour (having forgotten all the plot from my first reading, this felt just like a new book), Barrayar, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. I took a break in the middle in various places to try to read other books, but it was kind of difficult because I just wanted to keep going with Vorkosigan. I have copies of a bunch of omnibus editions, which also makes it so easy to just keep going.
I have so many feelings.
I read A Deadly Education for book club, which was a good thing, because I probably would have DNF'd it about a quarter through otherwise. But by the end of the novel, which I consumed in one sitting, I thought "I'd like to read the sequels", downloaded them from the library, and they sat there for a few weeks. Last night I sat down with my kobo and thought I'd start The Last Graduate.
Reader, I read the Last Graduate through in one sitting, ending at 1:30am, internally screamed at the cliffhanger, and in a fit of madness actually started reading The Golden Enclaves for a few pages, because of that cliffhanger. The next day was a rainy Sunday and I woke up late and did nothing until 4:40pm when I finished The Golden Enclaves.
A Deadly Education starts with El, a student at the Scholomance, a massive deadly magical school. There are no adults or teachers, only the school itself; the school and the students are attacked daily by dangerous maleficaria, "mals", which are attracted to the young students' mana and relatively low power. Students are teleported in with very limited supplies and must survive 4 years before they can graduate, which involves running the gauntlet of mals to the doors. Despite the fatality rate of the school, which is around 50%, it is significantly better odds than growing up on the outside, so parents continue to send their children in.
El is a self-described loser in the school: she has no magical connections like the enclaver kids who have an assured ticket to a safe life after graduation, and she has no social skills or family connections to help her forge an alliance. She is also living with the terrible doom of a prophecy over head: specifically that she's destined to destroy all the world's safe havens, the enclaves. Her penchant for magic is for complete ultra-violent destruction, which only increases her fear.
Spoilery review follows of all three books follows. ( Spoilery review )
Reader, I read the Last Graduate through in one sitting, ending at 1:30am, internally screamed at the cliffhanger, and in a fit of madness actually started reading The Golden Enclaves for a few pages, because of that cliffhanger. The next day was a rainy Sunday and I woke up late and did nothing until 4:40pm when I finished The Golden Enclaves.
A Deadly Education starts with El, a student at the Scholomance, a massive deadly magical school. There are no adults or teachers, only the school itself; the school and the students are attacked daily by dangerous maleficaria, "mals", which are attracted to the young students' mana and relatively low power. Students are teleported in with very limited supplies and must survive 4 years before they can graduate, which involves running the gauntlet of mals to the doors. Despite the fatality rate of the school, which is around 50%, it is significantly better odds than growing up on the outside, so parents continue to send their children in.
El is a self-described loser in the school: she has no magical connections like the enclaver kids who have an assured ticket to a safe life after graduation, and she has no social skills or family connections to help her forge an alliance. She is also living with the terrible doom of a prophecy over head: specifically that she's destined to destroy all the world's safe havens, the enclaves. Her penchant for magic is for complete ultra-violent destruction, which only increases her fear.
Spoilery review follows of all three books follows. ( Spoilery review )
The Wolf Hunt & Passenger to Frankfurt
Feb. 21st, 2023 11:35 pmThe Wolf Hunt - Gillian Bradshaw
A retelling of the Marie de France lai of Bisclavret (werewolf story). I absolutely loved this novel. 10/10. Enjoyment through the roof. I love Bradshaw in general - her Arthuriana is my favourite version - I've basically liked all the books I've read of hers, and this one is no exception.
The novel opens with Marie, a young heiress at a convent, being told her brother has died and that she needs to leave because the inheritance will fall to her next. Owing to the often complicated ties of personal loyalty that structured medieval life, and her personal feelings about breaking her word, she successfully escapes her escort of knights on their way to deliver her to a rival duke, and walks into the forest. In the forest she stumbles across a spring and a wolf napping there, which she scares off with a stick; she's then attacked by outlaws and rescued by Tiarnan, who is nearby. The outlaw and Tiarnan converse in Breton, which Marie doesn't understand at the time, but he uses the word "bisclavret", which turns out to be crucial later.
The plot is quite complicated - Tiarnan is one of Duke Hoel's favoured subjects, and although he is soon blissfully married to Eline, she convinces him to tell her his secret (vanishing for days into the forest). When he tells her he turns into a wolf, she is violently repulsed. She rejects the idea of annulment suggested by the only other person who knows Tiarnan's secret, a hermit, and asks her other previous suitor to steal the clothes and indefinable thing that Tiarnan leaves under a rock when he transforms, which traps him in the wolf form.
Marie's role is woven in well, as is Tiher, who is the cousin of Eline's other suitor Alain. The wolf, having been hunted and brought to bay, unable to outrun or escape the many relays of dogs and hunters, in desperation licks Duke Hoel's boot, and is taken alive as his pet. The account of the wolf's perspective both during and before the hunt are honestly a little harrowing. Tiarnan's consciousness isn't fully subsumed into the wolf, and the wolf is hungry, cold, and afraid. On top of all that is the human's fear, anger at his betrayal. Eline successfully petitions the king of France to be allowed to remarry immediately, and is reluctantly granted Tiarnan's manor and permission to marry. Although Tiarnan is loved by his dependents, they don't recognize him; Eline and Alain, on the other hand, do, and they try their best to kill him.
One ting I have always enjoy about Gillian Bradshaw's novels is her characterization. Without being mushy, a lot of them have noble personalities, often willing to do the right thing no matter what - and this works particularly well considering its basis in the medieval lay and the way art of this time was so centered around chivalry. Tiarnan tries to do the right thing, of course, but so does Marie. Although her escape attempt is eventually unsuccessful and she's recaptured, her quick thinking and ability to think ahead as soon as her first solution fails endeared me immediately. Her declaration at the gate as well as to Duke Hoel, upon being presented, is maybe a little foolhardy - I can certainly see the scene playing out differently, especially since Marie's only leverage is her noble standing, which isn't much when having a heiress as your ward presents such excellent opportunities. Even Eline, who is probably the most cruel, is portrayed sympathetically when it comes to her real revulsion to the wolf reveal - she feels unclean. I think her deliberate cruelty to trap him in wolf form, kill him, and have his estate as her spoils does push her firmly into an antagonist role. Alain is cruel too, but foolish. I also enjoyed a lot of the medieval life woven into this - Alain has a conversation with Duke Hoel, who is his lord, where Hoel advises him strongly to not be stupid: have a Breton speaker not a French bailiff, especially since the French one is already acquiring a reputation for cruelty and stealing; to not raise rents immediately upon inheriting a manor from a beloved former lord, despite what Alain says about rents on his father's land elsewhere being higher, etc. Alain, being a dolt, decides his own judgement is better, and having a weakness for new things and also afraid of Tiarnan's ghost, decides to plunge himself into debt buying horses, clothes, furniture, and so on. To do so, he doubles the price at the mill, and forbids his serfs to go elsewhere to grind grain. Alain's foolishness and unsteadiness - he runs off to try to reason with Eline and literally abandons his actual job of escorting Marie - is initially papered over because his cousin Tiher is there to steady and make excuses for him. As the novel progresses, Tiher - not handsome like Alain, but rueful and reasonably clever - rises in the Duke's estimation, and Hoel plans to grant him land as soon as he can.
==
Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie
I hadn't realized this was a thriller instead of a mystery when I picked it up. I've read so many Christie mysteries and they're always great, and I can't say the same of this. It was published in 1970, so very recently, and starts in the Frankfurt airport. Sir Stafford Nye agrees to swap places with a strange woman who says she needs to get to England under a different identity, otherwise she'll be killed. He drinks the drugged glass willingly and after waking up, proceeds with his journey back to England, saying his passport is stolen. He is then dragged into some kind of secret agent plot alongside the strange woman, Renata Zerkowski/Mary Ann. This is where I had trouble. It's all about this world driven by conspiracy, where random movements of armaments, jewels, money, etc are all directed by this big worldwide organization. The youth are rising and are committing mass violence, backed by this shadowy organization headed by Big Charlotte. There's this insane storyline of Hitler not being dead, swapping places with a mental patient who believe he's Hitler; that he had a son in South America and now the son is the golden youth Siegfried, a gifted orator and in peak physical condition, the icon of the movement. It culminates in this climax where - after Stafford Nye's old great-aunt tells this Admiral about a scientist who was able to invent a drug to induce benevolence in people - the scientist and a bunch of governmental ministers assemble and try to convince the scientist to reconstruct his drug work. Lord Altamount is shot and this motivates the scientist to retrieve his supposedly destroyed notes, and work on them again. The novel ends with an epilogue where Stafford Nye marries the strange woman. I honestly didn't even realize this was the end of the book. The next page was headed Murder at the Vicarage (me, brain sluggishly firing: "isn't that the Miss Marple story Agatha Christie wrote? Is this some weird 4th wall break?") and as I paged further on I realized the rest of the ebook was just the endpapers with advertisements for her other books. Baffling. I went back and re-read the last two chapters. I guess Benvo, the drug, was successfully created and distributed, which created "permanent benevolence", a permanent change in people to whom the drug was administered, which stopped the riots. The young Siegfried is being invited to an English church to work as an organist.
What.
1970 is pretty near the end of Christie's career - Passenger to Frankfurt is her 40th novel, which is a huge accomplishment. So some slipping is honestly fair enough, she would have been 80 by then. I think it was conceived with an eye to the youth counterculture movement, but it's just so weird and detached. Most of the danger is conveyed via governmental ministers or (presumably) MI5/6 officers talking about unrest, which isn't exactly scary. Also, I had a hard time keeping all the names and employment straight. I'm really not looking for hard-hitting or grittiness in Agatha Christie, absolutely the opposite, but this was really muddled. It also indulges in what I think is the stupidest part of all conspiracy theories - the presumption that the shadowy leaders are actually competent. When I look at the broad-daylight operations of legitimate entities, who are able to recruit freely, audit, apply for legal/political help, etc, and see how many errors and problems they run into...imagine trying to do that secretly and perfectly. You are talking about organizations numbering in the thousands to do logistics alone, and perfect cooperation, perfect execution and secrecy, etc. But her next novel is Nemesis, which is actually quite good - it's a continuation of A Caribbean Mystery (itself quite good). I don't think I want to read any more of Christie's thrillers.
A retelling of the Marie de France lai of Bisclavret (werewolf story). I absolutely loved this novel. 10/10. Enjoyment through the roof. I love Bradshaw in general - her Arthuriana is my favourite version - I've basically liked all the books I've read of hers, and this one is no exception.
The novel opens with Marie, a young heiress at a convent, being told her brother has died and that she needs to leave because the inheritance will fall to her next. Owing to the often complicated ties of personal loyalty that structured medieval life, and her personal feelings about breaking her word, she successfully escapes her escort of knights on their way to deliver her to a rival duke, and walks into the forest. In the forest she stumbles across a spring and a wolf napping there, which she scares off with a stick; she's then attacked by outlaws and rescued by Tiarnan, who is nearby. The outlaw and Tiarnan converse in Breton, which Marie doesn't understand at the time, but he uses the word "bisclavret", which turns out to be crucial later.
The plot is quite complicated - Tiarnan is one of Duke Hoel's favoured subjects, and although he is soon blissfully married to Eline, she convinces him to tell her his secret (vanishing for days into the forest). When he tells her he turns into a wolf, she is violently repulsed. She rejects the idea of annulment suggested by the only other person who knows Tiarnan's secret, a hermit, and asks her other previous suitor to steal the clothes and indefinable thing that Tiarnan leaves under a rock when he transforms, which traps him in the wolf form.
Marie's role is woven in well, as is Tiher, who is the cousin of Eline's other suitor Alain. The wolf, having been hunted and brought to bay, unable to outrun or escape the many relays of dogs and hunters, in desperation licks Duke Hoel's boot, and is taken alive as his pet. The account of the wolf's perspective both during and before the hunt are honestly a little harrowing. Tiarnan's consciousness isn't fully subsumed into the wolf, and the wolf is hungry, cold, and afraid. On top of all that is the human's fear, anger at his betrayal. Eline successfully petitions the king of France to be allowed to remarry immediately, and is reluctantly granted Tiarnan's manor and permission to marry. Although Tiarnan is loved by his dependents, they don't recognize him; Eline and Alain, on the other hand, do, and they try their best to kill him.
One ting I have always enjoy about Gillian Bradshaw's novels is her characterization. Without being mushy, a lot of them have noble personalities, often willing to do the right thing no matter what - and this works particularly well considering its basis in the medieval lay and the way art of this time was so centered around chivalry. Tiarnan tries to do the right thing, of course, but so does Marie. Although her escape attempt is eventually unsuccessful and she's recaptured, her quick thinking and ability to think ahead as soon as her first solution fails endeared me immediately. Her declaration at the gate as well as to Duke Hoel, upon being presented, is maybe a little foolhardy - I can certainly see the scene playing out differently, especially since Marie's only leverage is her noble standing, which isn't much when having a heiress as your ward presents such excellent opportunities. Even Eline, who is probably the most cruel, is portrayed sympathetically when it comes to her real revulsion to the wolf reveal - she feels unclean. I think her deliberate cruelty to trap him in wolf form, kill him, and have his estate as her spoils does push her firmly into an antagonist role. Alain is cruel too, but foolish. I also enjoyed a lot of the medieval life woven into this - Alain has a conversation with Duke Hoel, who is his lord, where Hoel advises him strongly to not be stupid: have a Breton speaker not a French bailiff, especially since the French one is already acquiring a reputation for cruelty and stealing; to not raise rents immediately upon inheriting a manor from a beloved former lord, despite what Alain says about rents on his father's land elsewhere being higher, etc. Alain, being a dolt, decides his own judgement is better, and having a weakness for new things and also afraid of Tiarnan's ghost, decides to plunge himself into debt buying horses, clothes, furniture, and so on. To do so, he doubles the price at the mill, and forbids his serfs to go elsewhere to grind grain. Alain's foolishness and unsteadiness - he runs off to try to reason with Eline and literally abandons his actual job of escorting Marie - is initially papered over because his cousin Tiher is there to steady and make excuses for him. As the novel progresses, Tiher - not handsome like Alain, but rueful and reasonably clever - rises in the Duke's estimation, and Hoel plans to grant him land as soon as he can.
==
Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie
I hadn't realized this was a thriller instead of a mystery when I picked it up. I've read so many Christie mysteries and they're always great, and I can't say the same of this. It was published in 1970, so very recently, and starts in the Frankfurt airport. Sir Stafford Nye agrees to swap places with a strange woman who says she needs to get to England under a different identity, otherwise she'll be killed. He drinks the drugged glass willingly and after waking up, proceeds with his journey back to England, saying his passport is stolen. He is then dragged into some kind of secret agent plot alongside the strange woman, Renata Zerkowski/Mary Ann. This is where I had trouble. It's all about this world driven by conspiracy, where random movements of armaments, jewels, money, etc are all directed by this big worldwide organization. The youth are rising and are committing mass violence, backed by this shadowy organization headed by Big Charlotte. There's this insane storyline of Hitler not being dead, swapping places with a mental patient who believe he's Hitler; that he had a son in South America and now the son is the golden youth Siegfried, a gifted orator and in peak physical condition, the icon of the movement. It culminates in this climax where - after Stafford Nye's old great-aunt tells this Admiral about a scientist who was able to invent a drug to induce benevolence in people - the scientist and a bunch of governmental ministers assemble and try to convince the scientist to reconstruct his drug work. Lord Altamount is shot and this motivates the scientist to retrieve his supposedly destroyed notes, and work on them again. The novel ends with an epilogue where Stafford Nye marries the strange woman. I honestly didn't even realize this was the end of the book. The next page was headed Murder at the Vicarage (me, brain sluggishly firing: "isn't that the Miss Marple story Agatha Christie wrote? Is this some weird 4th wall break?") and as I paged further on I realized the rest of the ebook was just the endpapers with advertisements for her other books. Baffling. I went back and re-read the last two chapters. I guess Benvo, the drug, was successfully created and distributed, which created "permanent benevolence", a permanent change in people to whom the drug was administered, which stopped the riots. The young Siegfried is being invited to an English church to work as an organist.
What.
1970 is pretty near the end of Christie's career - Passenger to Frankfurt is her 40th novel, which is a huge accomplishment. So some slipping is honestly fair enough, she would have been 80 by then. I think it was conceived with an eye to the youth counterculture movement, but it's just so weird and detached. Most of the danger is conveyed via governmental ministers or (presumably) MI5/6 officers talking about unrest, which isn't exactly scary. Also, I had a hard time keeping all the names and employment straight. I'm really not looking for hard-hitting or grittiness in Agatha Christie, absolutely the opposite, but this was really muddled. It also indulges in what I think is the stupidest part of all conspiracy theories - the presumption that the shadowy leaders are actually competent. When I look at the broad-daylight operations of legitimate entities, who are able to recruit freely, audit, apply for legal/political help, etc, and see how many errors and problems they run into...imagine trying to do that secretly and perfectly. You are talking about organizations numbering in the thousands to do logistics alone, and perfect cooperation, perfect execution and secrecy, etc. But her next novel is Nemesis, which is actually quite good - it's a continuation of A Caribbean Mystery (itself quite good). I don't think I want to read any more of Christie's thrillers.
I am reading the Hugo finalists for Best Novel. So far it's not going so great.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a novel set on the barren planet of Gora, which has a small waypost for travellers to fuel up mid-journey. Owing to a Plot Event of the satellite fleet crashing into each other, a half dozen different aliens are stranded together on the planet for a few days. This is very much supposed to be a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one.
I didn't like it very much.
( more review )
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a novel set on the barren planet of Gora, which has a small waypost for travellers to fuel up mid-journey. Owing to a Plot Event of the satellite fleet crashing into each other, a half dozen different aliens are stranded together on the planet for a few days. This is very much supposed to be a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one.
I didn't like it very much.
( more review )
Two non-fiction books which I had very different reactions to.
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
( Entangled Life )
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
( Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction )
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
( Entangled Life )
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
( Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction )
Cinderella Is Dead - Kaylnn Bayron
Feb. 21st, 2022 11:50 pmAn awful book I read for book club. I say this upfront because I am pretty sure I would never have picked up this book in the first place - I hate fairytale retellings, I last enjoyed a YA book in 2011, it was not fated to be - but also if I had, I'd have dropped it immediately, within the first two pages. Not angrily, like throwing it against the wall. Just the first few pages would have hit me, and then I'd have thought "well I think that's enough for now" and never picked it back up again.
However.
I had to read it, I hated it, I dissected it for book club, I still hate it.
I think the main problem with this book is it that it is just not very well done. Just mechanically, the author can't pull it off. She doesn't seem to know how to construct the story in a way that makes you feel for the protagonist, she doesn't know how to make setting that's interesting or well thought out, her writing on the prose level is tedious to read because she won't stop demonstrating and then re-telling what she wrote. The book has a high concept premise and then utterly fails to execute because the author doesn't have the chops. All my problems with it came down to this.
The plot basically boils down to a kingdom where girls, once they turn sixteen, are mandated to go to a ball where the men choose them as brides. This ball is in celebration of the first Cinderella, who existed, and who met Prince Charming at the ball. Sophia doesn't want to do any of this, she's in love with her friend Erin. But none of them have a choice. She goes to the ball but flees in the middle of it, meets an outlaw girl who is descended from the stepsisters, and they flee into the woods and meet a witch. They come up with a plan to kill Prince Charming.
( Spoilers and more discussion )
1/10
However.
I had to read it, I hated it, I dissected it for book club, I still hate it.
I think the main problem with this book is it that it is just not very well done. Just mechanically, the author can't pull it off. She doesn't seem to know how to construct the story in a way that makes you feel for the protagonist, she doesn't know how to make setting that's interesting or well thought out, her writing on the prose level is tedious to read because she won't stop demonstrating and then re-telling what she wrote. The book has a high concept premise and then utterly fails to execute because the author doesn't have the chops. All my problems with it came down to this.
The plot basically boils down to a kingdom where girls, once they turn sixteen, are mandated to go to a ball where the men choose them as brides. This ball is in celebration of the first Cinderella, who existed, and who met Prince Charming at the ball. Sophia doesn't want to do any of this, she's in love with her friend Erin. But none of them have a choice. She goes to the ball but flees in the middle of it, meets an outlaw girl who is descended from the stepsisters, and they flee into the woods and meet a witch. They come up with a plan to kill Prince Charming.
( Spoilers and more discussion )
1/10
Dzur and Jhegaala
Nov. 9th, 2021 09:42 amTwo very different books set at rather different times!
I realized when I was reading Jhegaala that I have no idea what a jhegaala is like, and honestly...I'm still confused. All I'm clear on is the metamorphosis but um, I'm not even sure what the bodyplan is like. Some of the animals are just regular Earth animals, some are analogous, some are mythical creatures, and the jhegaala is just confusing.
Also, I've come to realize that the omnibuses really change my behaviour when it comes to reading. I get what I think of as book hangovers, so consumed with the just-read book that I don't want to start another book, even when I know I'll enjoy it. I also definitely have this inertia where I'll keep reading something even though I don't like it that much, but I'm making progress and every time I open my reading app, it's already open and it's not that bad. (This is how I read all the Michael Scott Rohan books. My opinion kept sliding but I was midway through the book and trilogy already...) I also sometimes feel like I need a certain emotional energy to get started on a new book - to get accustomed to and learn the characters and setting. But when it's an omnibus, I don't even have to open a new file. It doesn't feel like a new book, really. I feel the pressure of "just finish the book" push me over the threshold of energy required to start the new book.
Which is to say, I read Dzur and Jhegaala in two days because they were in one volume. I do like them a lot but I also think the omnibus structure is pushing me to read them faster!
( Dzur )
( Jhegaala )
I realized when I was reading Jhegaala that I have no idea what a jhegaala is like, and honestly...I'm still confused. All I'm clear on is the metamorphosis but um, I'm not even sure what the bodyplan is like. Some of the animals are just regular Earth animals, some are analogous, some are mythical creatures, and the jhegaala is just confusing.
Also, I've come to realize that the omnibuses really change my behaviour when it comes to reading. I get what I think of as book hangovers, so consumed with the just-read book that I don't want to start another book, even when I know I'll enjoy it. I also definitely have this inertia where I'll keep reading something even though I don't like it that much, but I'm making progress and every time I open my reading app, it's already open and it's not that bad. (This is how I read all the Michael Scott Rohan books. My opinion kept sliding but I was midway through the book and trilogy already...) I also sometimes feel like I need a certain emotional energy to get started on a new book - to get accustomed to and learn the characters and setting. But when it's an omnibus, I don't even have to open a new file. It doesn't feel like a new book, really. I feel the pressure of "just finish the book" push me over the threshold of energy required to start the new book.
Which is to say, I read Dzur and Jhegaala in two days because they were in one volume. I do like them a lot but I also think the omnibus structure is pushing me to read them faster!
( Dzur )
( Jhegaala )
Athyra, Orca, Dragon
Sep. 29th, 2021 04:39 pmCAN'T STOP WON'T STOP
I think since I read Phoenix I have read the next seven books in a row, and it's only taking this long because I couldn't get hold of these four for a bit (thanks again![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hamsterwoman for getting me copies!!) I'm trying to pace myself but it's hard.
( Athyra )
( Orca )
( Dragon )
I think since I read Phoenix I have read the next seven books in a row, and it's only taking this long because I couldn't get hold of these four for a bit (thanks again
hamsterwoman for getting me copies!!) I'm trying to pace myself but it's hard. ( Athyra )
( Orca )
( Dragon )
Book of Jhereg
Sep. 22nd, 2021 12:24 amI finished the Book of Jhereg (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla) a few weeks back and just realized I forgot to post about them here.
The library does not have books 6,7,8 or 9, despite having all the books around it, neither ebook nor print. I'm not sure why and this isn't the first time this library system (big city decent budget) has had these kinds of issues - their SF/F acquisitions seems to be very patchwork. I'm not expecting them to have super obscure or old titles, but this is neither. Also they got all the other books around them! I put in a request for the two as omnibuses and they were approved right away, so I'll read them soon.
On to the thoughts! I really enjoyed them, one of the reasons I'm mad again at acquisitions is I wanted to just keep reading, damn it.
( spoilers for Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla )
This entry took ages, I read Athyra last night (thanks tohamsterwoman!) But I'm too tired to write up thoughts about that. Next time!
The library does not have books 6,7,8 or 9, despite having all the books around it, neither ebook nor print. I'm not sure why and this isn't the first time this library system (big city decent budget) has had these kinds of issues - their SF/F acquisitions seems to be very patchwork. I'm not expecting them to have super obscure or old titles, but this is neither. Also they got all the other books around them! I put in a request for the two as omnibuses and they were approved right away, so I'll read them soon.
On to the thoughts! I really enjoyed them, one of the reasons I'm mad again at acquisitions is I wanted to just keep reading, damn it.
( spoilers for Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla )
This entry took ages, I read Athyra last night (thanks to
hamsterwoman!) But I'm too tired to write up thoughts about that. Next time!On Looking - Alexandra Horowitz (3/?)
Feb. 13th, 2021 11:51 pmOn Looking is an exploration of what the world looks like through different experts' eyes - the ability of one's perceptions and interests, training and background, shape how we see the same scene. Written by Alexandra Horowitz, an expert in dog cognition, she explores (mostly) the same block of NYC through many different people's eyes.
I picked up the book because I am also personally fascinated by how we perceive the world around us, and especially I am fascinated by the idea of the secret things lying in plain sight. It's not a question of the perception of our rods and cones and how wide you are physically keeping your eyelids - there's just too much visual (and other) information to appropriately or reasonably process it all, and we pick and choose, often completely unconsciously, what to actually perceive. It's a question of focus and conscious/unconscious attenuation to different things, and Horowitz shares this interest, and takes a walk with many different people - first, by herself; then with her young toddler, with a typographer, with a doctor, with an entomologist, a sound designer, with someone who went blind in middle age, with her dog, etc.
I pretty much found them all really interesting. Horowitz devotes a chapter to each person and writes engagingly, wrapping transcribed dialogue with her perception as it changed, description, and context, which is always valuable. I really enjoyed several chapters - the one that talked about how we walk on crowded sidewalks, the city animals that live among humans, with an illustrator (and an interesting diversion into meeting the gazes of strangers - one of the first things you learn to NOT do in a city). The most engagingly written, though, was the one with Horowitz's dog, which I guess is unsurprising. The conceit is always engaging for me to read (I like dogs!), they've become integrated with humans for thousands of years and dogs can do things like actually follow our gazes, and that's Horowitz's specialty. Maybe also because the other chapters are from other human's perception - with the exception of the woman who went blind, we're all really visual based, but dogs aren't. It
My main objection to the book is just the constant evocation of various savannah hypotheses - the one where we attempt to explain why our ability to concentrate or some other psychological phenomenon comes directly from avoiding lions trying to eat us for dinner. It's not that I have any specific objection, I think, yet - just that I've watched so many eg evo-psych theorists propound hypotheses that they have not tested, and nor do they ever think they might be fallible and steeped in their individual culture. Why, for example, do all the gender norms you propose originated from paleolithic living end up perfectly fitting into 1950's American middle-class roles? A lot of those questions about how our concentration work are still inadequately answered, as far as I know. I don't think Horowitz is necessarily going too far, I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's distracting and always kicks me out. There is also one walk with a doctor who specializes in diagnosing issues visually - contrasting with doctors who make an estimate based on symptoms, examination, and then order tests. I don't mean to downplay this skill but I think there are definitely a lot which cannot be easily visually identified, a lot of misdiagnosis that has happened in the past before we developed sensitive tests, and also, on these walks, it's hard to check the answer. So-and-so says they have this, and you can't just run up to that perfect stranger and ask (or have it found out). You just have to rely on reputation, and your perception rests on their authoritativeness and substitutes for truthful or accurate diagnoses. Maybe this is also driven by the knowledge that so many people go through so much effort to get their complex medical issue diagnosed properly. The doctor is compared explicitly to Sherlock Holmes and I can't say I like that much either. There were so many where I just wanted to then go and fact-check.
8/10
I picked up the book because I am also personally fascinated by how we perceive the world around us, and especially I am fascinated by the idea of the secret things lying in plain sight. It's not a question of the perception of our rods and cones and how wide you are physically keeping your eyelids - there's just too much visual (and other) information to appropriately or reasonably process it all, and we pick and choose, often completely unconsciously, what to actually perceive. It's a question of focus and conscious/unconscious attenuation to different things, and Horowitz shares this interest, and takes a walk with many different people - first, by herself; then with her young toddler, with a typographer, with a doctor, with an entomologist, a sound designer, with someone who went blind in middle age, with her dog, etc.
I pretty much found them all really interesting. Horowitz devotes a chapter to each person and writes engagingly, wrapping transcribed dialogue with her perception as it changed, description, and context, which is always valuable. I really enjoyed several chapters - the one that talked about how we walk on crowded sidewalks, the city animals that live among humans, with an illustrator (and an interesting diversion into meeting the gazes of strangers - one of the first things you learn to NOT do in a city). The most engagingly written, though, was the one with Horowitz's dog, which I guess is unsurprising. The conceit is always engaging for me to read (I like dogs!), they've become integrated with humans for thousands of years and dogs can do things like actually follow our gazes, and that's Horowitz's specialty. Maybe also because the other chapters are from other human's perception - with the exception of the woman who went blind, we're all really visual based, but dogs aren't. It
My main objection to the book is just the constant evocation of various savannah hypotheses - the one where we attempt to explain why our ability to concentrate or some other psychological phenomenon comes directly from avoiding lions trying to eat us for dinner. It's not that I have any specific objection, I think, yet - just that I've watched so many eg evo-psych theorists propound hypotheses that they have not tested, and nor do they ever think they might be fallible and steeped in their individual culture. Why, for example, do all the gender norms you propose originated from paleolithic living end up perfectly fitting into 1950's American middle-class roles? A lot of those questions about how our concentration work are still inadequately answered, as far as I know. I don't think Horowitz is necessarily going too far, I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's distracting and always kicks me out. There is also one walk with a doctor who specializes in diagnosing issues visually - contrasting with doctors who make an estimate based on symptoms, examination, and then order tests. I don't mean to downplay this skill but I think there are definitely a lot which cannot be easily visually identified, a lot of misdiagnosis that has happened in the past before we developed sensitive tests, and also, on these walks, it's hard to check the answer. So-and-so says they have this, and you can't just run up to that perfect stranger and ask (or have it found out). You just have to rely on reputation, and your perception rests on their authoritativeness and substitutes for truthful or accurate diagnoses. Maybe this is also driven by the knowledge that so many people go through so much effort to get their complex medical issue diagnosed properly. The doctor is compared explicitly to Sherlock Holmes and I can't say I like that much either. There were so many where I just wanted to then go and fact-check.
8/10
Arrow of the Mist, Christine Mercer (2/?)
Feb. 7th, 2021 06:09 pmI should mention up front that I hated this book, I think it's incompetent in the extreme, and if it were just regular reading, I'd have DNF'd within a few pages. Not an angry DNF, just that for me, at a certain number of eyerolls, it becomes difficult to read a book. However, this was a book club book, so I read it from cover to cover.
It is TERRIBLE.
( Wherein I detail how much I hated this book. )
In short, 1/10. If I wanted to read a spellchecked first-draft nanowrimo manuscript written by a seventeen-year-old, I own one!
It is TERRIBLE.
( Wherein I detail how much I hated this book. )
In short, 1/10. If I wanted to read a spellchecked first-draft nanowrimo manuscript written by a seventeen-year-old, I own one!
Noah's Garden - Sara Stein (1/?)
Jan. 24th, 2021 11:05 pm
Published to rave reviews in 1993, Noah's Garden shows us how our landscape style of neat yards and gardens has devastated suburban ecology, wiping out entire communities of plants and animals by stripping bare their habitats and destroying their food supplies. When Stein realized what her intensive efforts at making a traditional garden had done, she set out to "ungarden." Her book interweaves an account of her efforts with an explanation of the ecology of gardens. Noah's Garden has become the bible of the new environmental gardening movement, and the author is one of its most popular spokespersons.
I picked up the book because of
tkingfisher mentioned it influenced her, and I've always enjoyed hearing her talk about her garden, although our viewpoints differ a little.Noah's Garden was published in 1993, and in its advocacy for restoring the previous ecology of America's now developed land, struck some very similar chords to Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 nonfiction book that called attention to the vanishing birds, including the bald eagle, caused by massive nationwide DDT spraying. Indeed, Stein calls the effect of Silent Spring "[galvanizing]...so powerfully that my children's generation, too, reverberates with alarm". I think that is what Stein herself is setting out to do in the book.
Through tracing her own journey in re-planting/landscaping her garden, which is a plot of land in upstate New York, Stein argues for a new gardening philosophy, or outlook, one that is focused on making gardens for native fauna and flora, and not for purely human ornamental purposes (i.e. the ubiquitous, inescapable flat green lawns that characterize suburbia). She argues that to do so - to bring back the former inhabitants which are adapted to this climate and soil - also lessens the burdens of the gardener. To plant exotics and our selected-for juicy vegetables, so appetizing to all kinds of pests, lays a tremendous amount of labour on the gardener to weed, fungicide, till, herbicide, fertilize, prune, pesticide, transplant and thin, hand-pollinate, mow, etc. Restoring the native flora and the other creatures that lived there creates a system where the inhabitants keep each other in check, rather than have to rely on external energy and resources like constant watering and fertilizer. She argues that the current fashion of suburbia supports very little, and because of the lack of diversity, also allows certain populations to become wildly overpopulated (such as deer). Much of the book also has quite strong patriotic overtones as well, to prefer the previous native plants as well as a broader sense of duty towards the other life forms that live/d on this continent.
On a more personal level, I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about the concepts that Stein argues for, and I fall pretty close to her on many of the subjects she touches on - gardening to support more animals (mammals, insects, birds, amphibians, worms and grubs, etc), the hope that a shift in gardening can create corridors of life for wildlife that can't just exist on a little quarter-acre plot, a general preference for native flora and fauna over the exotic, however it has arrived, accidental or deliberate. But I feel like I'm a little less along the native > exotic purity scale . To be fair, Stein, too, isn't that extreme - she will plant or not uproot well-behaved exotics where natives can't be found or survive well anymore. Stein recognizes that the ecology of the storied American past is gone, and I agree. Over the last few hundred years, we have destroyed what was there. Most of it just does not exist any more. Even reclaimed farmland that has been repurposed to suburbs is no longer - where she and I both live - the old broadleaf forest, which was cut down several centuries ago. So many of the species are simply gone, the many immigrants catching a journey here via ship ballast & accidental plantings & deliberately planted ornamentals have arrived, and it's futile to turn back the clock. You can't. It doesn't matter that you want to. And there are new biomes: the city, which many species have learned to successfully navigate and profit from. On the bird side, pigeons, house sparrows, European starlings and grackles, gulls, all do very well; on the plant side, the verges and unused lots aren't barren, they're full of weeds - i.e. plants that do very well without human assistance or even notice.
I can't quite go that far down that line regarding native and exotic plants, because I keep getting caught up short by natural history. Species try to expand wherever they can, it's what they do, and there's constant competition. If an exotic species rafts across the Atlantic and establishes itself, that's just what they have done since the Atlantic first opened up. But then I think about it personally: I have no doubt whatsoever that after we are gone, speciation will happen again (and it's happening now, really), we can't hope to extinguish life and its variety ever - but it will take tens of millions of years, and I, personally, would hate to live in a world that didn't have tigers and elephants, or snotty hagfish, or puffins, or or or a million species we are helping to exterminate by our many activities. So I'm torn. I think Stein argues convincingly that keeping biodiversity is itself a desirable goal, and I agree. But I feel sometimes, there isn't any holding back of the sea. Some species truly have naturalized so well that they are just part of this land. It reminds me also of the interesting way we regard "weed" - a category that separates out desirable and undesirable plants based on our utility. Some of the categorizations are irrelevant to the suburban yard-owner.
The book is also written very engagingly, and the prose itself was unexpectedly very enjoyable. I don't know botany well at all, so I mostly just let the species names wash over me, and enjoy all the common names, which tend to be colourful and interesting - the kind of evocative names that usernames try to be, honestly. I also thought Stein used unusual though perfectly fitting verbs, which I do love. The structure of the paragraphs are a bit dramatic, but I don't mind.
9/10
The Goblin Emperor: Katherine Addison
Oct. 17th, 2019 11:19 pm
The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.
Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.
Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend . . . and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne–or his life.
Summary taken from GoodReads
The summary is pretty much bang on in terms of the novel's set up, but what it misses is the fact that Maia is upset, awkward, afraid, and uncomfortable for every single page except maybe two in the end. I have scrolled past discussions of TGE on meme for years and it's been on my reading list that long too. But I found it to be rather tedious, and one of the reasons is because characters like Maia don't appeal to me.
To TGE's credit, the novel starts at the beginning of the excitement, at the moment when a courier arrives at the remote estate exile Maia lives at, with the news that his father and all his older brothers have been killed in an airship explosion, and now he's the emperor. Maia's the youngest son and moreover the son of his elfin father's marriage to a goblin woman. His mother died when he was young, while they were both in exile, and he's been under the guardianship of his cousin Setheris, who dislikes Maia and loses his temper at him often. So he has had no teaching about the court at all.
I think that Maia's response to being emperor is quite realistic, generally speaking, though I have more specific objections about characterizations later. He's afraid to speak out, he doesn't want to be seen, he resents the loss of privacy, he feels awkward because he doesn't feel like he belongs and doesn't know how to handle the many complex personal interactions he will have to have as emperor. But as a reader, I found the whole novel dragged miserably. I can feel awkward and exhausted all on my own, thanks! It is not really interesting to explore it all in a massive fantasy tome format. Maia continually feels guilty, or sleepless, or flat-footed, or tired, or afraid, or determined to push past the awkwardness (unsuccessful) or any of the many unpleasant adjectives you can think of, and so spending all four hundred pages with this kind of attitude gets tedious.
I think there's a lot of people on meme who like woobies - and of course, except for venting, people generally want to talk about what they like, so the fans of course are loudest there. I just really don't like them. They don't appeal to me. I can see why they ship Maia with Csevet (his competent secretary/courier), Maia has to trust at least one person if he's not to completely collapse and it is Csevet.
Another issue - I found that a lot of the names were really similar. So many characters that started with C! Then there were many prefixes/titles that I didn't realize were titles, so I swam through the novel mostly vaguely confused about who they were speaking about. This does not improve my engagement with a book, because I like characters and tend to care about them, and it's hard to build up caring when you can't remember interacting with them before. And again, there's plenty of political camps, and I couldn't remember which collection of e's and z's were in which political camp.
Also, I think the final thing that bothered me, kind of like a tag that keeps chafing your neck and always reminding you of its small yet incredibly irritating presence, is the feeling that this novel is so...2010's. Almost as if it's tumblr-esque. Not overtly - I wouldn't say the prose imitates tumblr, for example. But the way Maia feels and reacts, it read so modern. It reminds me of those over-excited, poorly-researched GUYS LISTEN posts, where the poster then goes on to excitedly talk about how the Vikings were very feminist in this very specific vein of third wave feminism (without any awareness of any of this). The worldbuilding otherwise tries very hard to get out of Tolkien's shadow, and does try to use non-human signals to indicate mood, like ears flicking and such, which I did think was cool, but it makes an even stronger contrast.
I think this sense of modernity spilled into characterization, where it often felt like there were some characters bent into unnatural configurations to satisfy the plot. Maia's pretty believable, and some of the closer characters are. But others just seem to be warped towards one particular character shape. Idra is Maia's heir, his nephew. His mother hates Maia and schemes to get rid of him by going so far as kidnapping him - Maia thinks she'll exile him and then kill him, and I'm inclined to agree with his assessment. Idra is sixteen. His reaction to the attempted assassination is horror, which is understandable as he was not in on the plan. But later he has all these weird conversations with Maia where he's preternaturally understanding, and mild, and seems to have neither ego nor ambition nor sense of preservation in maneuvering. This is a sixteen-year-old growing up in a court full of political games and very close to the seat of power, with a very, very ambitious mother. But in order to clear out some space where not all characters are horrible, it's like Idra is - surprise! - quite nice. In, again, a really modern way. The society of TGE is pretty paternalistic in ways that resemble ours. There are a few female characters who are political barter (again, standard). But Maia is perfect of course, and draws them out, trying to figure out what they want. And one of them comes out and says (eventually) that they correspond with all these other female characters who are doing work like research on genetics (based on horses, a nod to Mendel's peas), or translating famous works of poetry. While I think these are all very interesting characters in other contexts, I found the way this was presented to be so reminiscent of the endless, lazy, and shallow depictions of Strong Women. I have come to loathe that term. And finally, I can just see the reams of dutiful fanart of those side characters sandwiched between 5870 posts with lovingly drawn art of Csevet/Maia. It's just so tumblr to me that it's hard to stay in the novel and stay engaged. 5/10
Archangel series by Sharon Shinn
Feb. 28th, 2019 11:25 pmI have to review some of Sharon Shinn's Samaria novels. I both enjoyed them and am loling greatly.
Here's the series description from her website:
I read Archangel, which is about the archangel Gabriel on the eve of his becoming archangel, and he's looking for a wife, who will sing next to him on the Plain of Sharon. Every year the disparate nation tribes gather in harmony and the archangel and spouse open the ceremonial singing. If the singing does not happen, Jovah will first smite the mountain, then the rest of Samaria. His Kiss, which is a crystal embedded in his arm that speaks to Jovah, says his wife is Rachel, who is one of the Edori, who live nomadic lives almost completely separate from Jovah. And she does not want to involve herself in the politics of the angels.
I also read Angelica set before Archangel, which gives strong hints about what Jovah is. There are mysterious strangers that are able to appear and disappear with unnatural speed, and can cause huge destruction with flame. It's about Archangel Gabriel (another one) and Susannah, his wife, and then Miriam, Gabriel's sister, who meets one of the strangers while running away with the Edori.
Finally I read Angel-Seeker, which is two stories. One is about Elizabeth, who takes off from being a housekeeper in her relative's home, where she's treated as a poor dependent, and tries to make her fortune in the city by birthing an angelic child. Mothers of angel children are mostly set up for life, because of how rare the angels are. Then it is the story of Obadiah, one of the angels, and Rebekah, who is a Jansai woman who lives under the extremely restrictive conditions all Jansai women do.
This is the mainstream published wingfic, I swear. It's never been a genre that particularly appeals to me, but lots of the hallmark traits (the temptation that angels present to writers?) is right there and it was incredible to read it in published fiction and have tag names float through my mind. The wings are of course sensitive to touch and angels are twitchy about people (especially clueless humans) touching them. Their metabolism burns hot so they only wear leather. All the angels are beautiful. It followed fandom's wingfic in so many ways - Sharon Shinn's novels are in the fantasy and romance junction, except I would say she leans more fantasy - that I was frequently pulled out of the narrative to laugh. Not that there's anything wrong with wingfic. Iddy stuff is iddy, and I obviously enjoyed the books enough to read three of them in a row! But it made me wonder if theyr'e tropes that just seem to evolve out of angelic literature, or if liking these tropes makes wingfic more appealing, or what. I don't think Shinn is involved in fandom, though I could be wrong.
What I think is a super interesting aspect of the books is the science fiction part. The world of Samaria is like a pre-industrial world, but there are lots of hints that there are more advanced societies. For one, even the religion records that they were not from Samaria originally, that they were carried there "in Jovah's hand" to a new place where there was not so much conflict and strife. The angels, who are able to fly, are able to make intercessions - they can fly up and sing and cause the weather to change, they can ask for rains of medicine to fall, and the medicine that falls are clearly pills. Most fun of all is Angelica. As Miriam first nurses and then starts to teach the stranger how to speak the common language of Samaria, she discovers that they have some words with the same roots, and eventually finds out that he arrived in a spaceship of some kind. And then, when the strangers are trying to destroy Samaria, Susannah can't sleep one night at the oracle's place. Believing herself to be sleeping, she walks to the place where there's an odd interface, and is told to close her eyes for a minute (while Jovah beams her up inside - Jovah is an orbiting spacecraft). She has to reposition Jovah's artillery, which destroys the spacecraft of the strangers who are waging war on Samaria with vastly more advanced weapons. I found this personally super interesting. It's something about the contrast of the deeply fantasy setting and the science fiction. Though Jovah is obviously AI - it speaks, it understands - I don't see why it couldn't reposition its artillery itself.
Personally, I probably dislike Angel-Seeker most. I like that Shinn just took head-on the subject of Elizabeth going to the city to get pregnant with an angel baby. It's an interesting story and also has plenty of terribly prosaic and unromantic attempts - angels are encouraged to be licentious in the hopes that one of their children is angelic, because they're so rare, and they play pretty important roles; in a world so dependent on fairly un-technological agriculture (this is not a world with the Fritz-Haber process), weather control is pretty important, among other things. But Rebekah's society, arrgggh. Men and women live in separate parts of the house, the men have all the outward facing roles and tasks and all the power, the fathers choose marriage and the women aren't even allowed to meet the men they marry. All women are veiled outside the house. And if you are caught outside, the women get thrown into the desert to be stoned, and then die of exposure. It's not enjoyable reading and the women around Rebekah aren't very pleasant to her either; her mother regards her as useless (except Rebekah has to do all the baby-caring because her mother's just "too tired") and the children with her current husband the much more important offspring. It was not fun to read. I hate these plotlines.
I read these three because they were borrowable at the library. Actually that's true of plenty of my reading. I really need to read Alleluia Files, which goes much more into detail of what people believe Jovah is - and some being to suspect it's a ship.
Here's the series description from her website:
In Samaria, angels raise their beautiful voices to intercede with the god Jovah on behalf of humans. Because their ancestors fled centuries ago from the violence of a war-torn planet, harmony is prized among all people. But sometimes the divine music of the angels is not enough to prevent conflict among mortals—and sometimes the god can’t even hear the angels singing.
I read Archangel, which is about the archangel Gabriel on the eve of his becoming archangel, and he's looking for a wife, who will sing next to him on the Plain of Sharon. Every year the disparate nation tribes gather in harmony and the archangel and spouse open the ceremonial singing. If the singing does not happen, Jovah will first smite the mountain, then the rest of Samaria. His Kiss, which is a crystal embedded in his arm that speaks to Jovah, says his wife is Rachel, who is one of the Edori, who live nomadic lives almost completely separate from Jovah. And she does not want to involve herself in the politics of the angels.
I also read Angelica set before Archangel, which gives strong hints about what Jovah is. There are mysterious strangers that are able to appear and disappear with unnatural speed, and can cause huge destruction with flame. It's about Archangel Gabriel (another one) and Susannah, his wife, and then Miriam, Gabriel's sister, who meets one of the strangers while running away with the Edori.
Finally I read Angel-Seeker, which is two stories. One is about Elizabeth, who takes off from being a housekeeper in her relative's home, where she's treated as a poor dependent, and tries to make her fortune in the city by birthing an angelic child. Mothers of angel children are mostly set up for life, because of how rare the angels are. Then it is the story of Obadiah, one of the angels, and Rebekah, who is a Jansai woman who lives under the extremely restrictive conditions all Jansai women do.
This is the mainstream published wingfic, I swear. It's never been a genre that particularly appeals to me, but lots of the hallmark traits (the temptation that angels present to writers?) is right there and it was incredible to read it in published fiction and have tag names float through my mind. The wings are of course sensitive to touch and angels are twitchy about people (especially clueless humans) touching them. Their metabolism burns hot so they only wear leather. All the angels are beautiful. It followed fandom's wingfic in so many ways - Sharon Shinn's novels are in the fantasy and romance junction, except I would say she leans more fantasy - that I was frequently pulled out of the narrative to laugh. Not that there's anything wrong with wingfic. Iddy stuff is iddy, and I obviously enjoyed the books enough to read three of them in a row! But it made me wonder if theyr'e tropes that just seem to evolve out of angelic literature, or if liking these tropes makes wingfic more appealing, or what. I don't think Shinn is involved in fandom, though I could be wrong.
What I think is a super interesting aspect of the books is the science fiction part. The world of Samaria is like a pre-industrial world, but there are lots of hints that there are more advanced societies. For one, even the religion records that they were not from Samaria originally, that they were carried there "in Jovah's hand" to a new place where there was not so much conflict and strife. The angels, who are able to fly, are able to make intercessions - they can fly up and sing and cause the weather to change, they can ask for rains of medicine to fall, and the medicine that falls are clearly pills. Most fun of all is Angelica. As Miriam first nurses and then starts to teach the stranger how to speak the common language of Samaria, she discovers that they have some words with the same roots, and eventually finds out that he arrived in a spaceship of some kind. And then, when the strangers are trying to destroy Samaria, Susannah can't sleep one night at the oracle's place. Believing herself to be sleeping, she walks to the place where there's an odd interface, and is told to close her eyes for a minute (while Jovah beams her up inside - Jovah is an orbiting spacecraft). She has to reposition Jovah's artillery, which destroys the spacecraft of the strangers who are waging war on Samaria with vastly more advanced weapons. I found this personally super interesting. It's something about the contrast of the deeply fantasy setting and the science fiction. Though Jovah is obviously AI - it speaks, it understands - I don't see why it couldn't reposition its artillery itself.
Personally, I probably dislike Angel-Seeker most. I like that Shinn just took head-on the subject of Elizabeth going to the city to get pregnant with an angel baby. It's an interesting story and also has plenty of terribly prosaic and unromantic attempts - angels are encouraged to be licentious in the hopes that one of their children is angelic, because they're so rare, and they play pretty important roles; in a world so dependent on fairly un-technological agriculture (this is not a world with the Fritz-Haber process), weather control is pretty important, among other things. But Rebekah's society, arrgggh. Men and women live in separate parts of the house, the men have all the outward facing roles and tasks and all the power, the fathers choose marriage and the women aren't even allowed to meet the men they marry. All women are veiled outside the house. And if you are caught outside, the women get thrown into the desert to be stoned, and then die of exposure. It's not enjoyable reading and the women around Rebekah aren't very pleasant to her either; her mother regards her as useless (except Rebekah has to do all the baby-caring because her mother's just "too tired") and the children with her current husband the much more important offspring. It was not fun to read. I hate these plotlines.
I read these three because they were borrowable at the library. Actually that's true of plenty of my reading. I really need to read Alleluia Files, which goes much more into detail of what people believe Jovah is - and some being to suspect it's a ship.
(and I'd like to say that I have my computer screen half-and-half with this Create Entries on the right, and an Excel spreadsheet of this year's reading on the left, for reference).
*I think I talked about Mary Beard's SPQR and...uh...I just went back. No, I did not talk about that.
Mary Beard - SPQR
- I really liked this. I only have a glancing, overview knowledge of classical antiquity, so this was extremely helpful. It's a very high level overview, starting all the way from the mythical beginnings of Rome.
- One of the things I really appreciated about SPQR is how clear Beard was about presenting the evidence (this is the observations we have from archaeology) and then presenting her interpretation, as well as other scholars'. I can turn off my brain for fiction, mostly, but it's hard to do in non-fiction that wants to teach, so I appreciate how she really laid out the evidence. Not to mention it's interesting to me to see what kind of evidence exists, how we use it, etc.
Robin Lafevers - Dark Triumph
-This is a YA about young women in a convent dedicated to Mortain, the god of death. They are trained as assassins, and play silent roles in the medieval Brittany in which they live. This is basically so many things I love all bundled up.
- Alas that it is YA. I don't know what it is, but it's some combination of this writing style that seems to be so uniform across the genre, and shallow treatment of everything. I've spilled enough e-ink on how I don't think grittier = realer, but I feel like maybe the length isn't enough, or there just isn't enough treatment, because everything feels superficial. I've mostly given up on YA at this point.
- Also. ( SPOILERS as this is the third book )
- However. Obviously, considering that I read all three books....Can we make these medieval assassination convents a trope themselves? I would read so many...
Seth Dickinson - The Traitor Baru Cormorant
- One of the best fantasy novels I've read this year. Baru Cormorant sees the invaders come to her island as a little girl, sees her mother and two fathers torn apart, goes to the colonists' boardingschool at her island. And she scores exceptionally, and is granted a post as Imperial Accountant at distant Aurdwynn. Aurdwynn is full of rebellion, and she intends to forment it, and use her position to destroy the Empire of Masks.
- It's hard to describe all the things I loved about this novel, not least because there are a lot of twists, and it would ruin the novel if I talked about them in my enticement.
- I thought it was a very clear, unflinching look at imperialism and its expansion. Baru herself is clear-eyed too, and pretty much prepares herself to be just as hard. Such a good character - it's from her perspective, but you don't get that softening as you see the internal thoughts the way you do with a lot of "from the perspective of villain" stories. Which isn't to say Baru is a villain. It's complicated.
- It's also quietly beautiful in prose. It was written in a way that induces rapid page turning because OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED i can't turn pages fast enough, but there was an understated, unshowy gorgeous prose.
- That ending was hard to read. It hurt.
- I'm a huge nerd and enjoyed that monetary policy got a look in. Though...if your economy isn't very developed (as Aurdwynn's is, because it's still mostly agrarian without a ton of loans, the loans are to the nobility mostly), I'm not sure how much of a lever monetary policy is. But I digress. The one part I totally call BS on is Baru reconciling the accounts of a country in one day. I'm sorry HAHAHAHAHA NO. oh my god especially since they're all on paper do you know how long those columns of numbers to add up are?
- But really. I loved the politicking, the characters, the plot, the writing, solid 10/10 would recommend.
Elizabeth Wein - The Winter Prince
- About Medraut, and his relationship basically to Arthur's son.
- Somehow my copy had these illustrations at the heading of every chapter, and they were distracting; they were black and white pen drawings, and they looked amateur. The net result on me was that I would go from emotionally quite engaging and fraught scenes, to un-skippable drawings that reminded me of angsty teenagers, which meant I got taken out of the novel every chapter.
- There's more incest than I expected. And it being Arthurian lit, I expected incest.
- I don't know. I don't feel very motivated to read more Elizabeth Wein, to be honest. I know people rave about Code Name Verity, but meh.
Chris Hadfield - An Astrounaut's Guide to Life on Earth
- Chris Hadfield - Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS - wrote an autobiography.
- Mostly what I've come away with is that I would love to meet Chris, he really does come across as an incredibly good and humble and persevering person. I also enjoyed learning about what kind of training the astronauts get, mentally and physically, in the real world. I like space opera! It's neat to see what actually happens outside stories. It's as much a story about what happens before anyone can go to space as it is about the fun quirks of what life in space is like. Staggering amounts of work.
Dorothy Dunnett - Niccolo Rising
- Historical novel about Nicholas de Fleury, a dyer's apprentice, set in 15th century Bruges to start. It's part of an eight-novel series that follows him - mind like a whip, full of schemes and ambitions, but irrepressibly cheerful despite the beatings.
- One reviewer described it as "pungently historical" (paraphrase) which I agree with. It's obvious Dunnett did her research. There are also real life figures that appear as minor characters - I saw one of them's portraits in the Met on Saturday! That was like an unexpected Easter egg in real life.
- I also found this to be a slog initially. Until about 40%. You're left to draw your own conclusions a great deal, and there are a lot of names and places and relationships to keep track of, and if you read it piecemeal like at lunch in 5 min snatches between getting distracted, it's kind of hard to enjoy. But then the plot picked up and it flew. Some very good twists, especially with Katalina.
- On the other hand, the next seven books are daunting. I'm not sure I want to start one any time soon...
- These also tie into her more famous Lymond series. Niccolo is an ancestor, I believe.
Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
- Murder mystery, where ten guests are summoned to an island, each by a different person they'd answer a summons for, to attend a party. The host just doesn't show up and the whole party is marooned on the island - deliberately, apparently. And then one by one, they all begin to die...
- I am a wimp and it totally gave me the creeps. It's very much the locked room mystery - one of those characters is a murderer!!!
- If you read too many Christie mysteries (actually, golden age mysteries in general) you notice a lot of character archetypes that crop up frequently. Young society miss, red-faced colonel who rather wishes he was still in the war, the misfit only American there, etc. I offer this observation not as an insult or accusation, but just as an observation.
all of Prospero's War, Dirty Magic to Volatile Bonds by Jaye Wells
- Think police procedural except in novel form, and instead of the war on drugs, potions and magic have taken the place of cocaine and heroin. Kate Prospero is a beat cop that patrols the magic side of the city, but her position is somewhat precarious and unusual; she grew up as the niece of Abraxas Prospero, who was gang leader of one of the three strongest covens that operated in the city. Abraxas is in prison now, she refuses to touch potion cooking, and is raising her younger brother. But her strong desire to do right by the city draws her into conflicts about all this.
- I actually really like Kate as a character. She's complicated and has a lot of conflicting loyalties. She's very against using magic - she attends an AA style magic-rejecting group (people get addicted to potions) - she was a very talented potion cooker as a girl - the police force use 'clean' magic to operate more effectively - 'clean' magic is just what mainstream drug companies use, 'dirty' is street, there's regulation but really it's magic anyway. And her little brother wants to cook potions...
- The internal police politicking sounds quite realistic. And exhausting.
- But let's be real. I am desperately awaiting the next book because I am so interested in Volos/Kate becoming a thing. It's the emotional core of all this, and it's a hell of a magnet.
Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise
- Non-fiction, about statistical modelling. Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, which rose to fame during the 2008 American presidential elections run-up; his modelling of the electoral college was both very accurate and fairly precise.
- It is a book written to appeal to a broad base of people, so there really was not much math in it. Some graphs, which was nice, but I wanted more statistical treatment (ugh go read a textbook.) He focuses heavily on Bayesian statistics, which, to prosify and simplify hard, means you should make a prediction initially based on your knowledge, then incorporate further evidence and weigh it more heavily depending on how confident you were in your initial prediction and how un-like your initial prediction was.
- Some of the cases, like epidemiology and economics, I found much more interesting than the poker and baseball bits. I just don't care that much about poker and baseball...but Silver does, and sabermetrics is how he got interested in statistics in the first place.
- Silver also references some very random things, and will allude at intervals to isolated historical facts or incidents or pop culture, and I don't really think it adds much to the credibility of the book. It doesn't discredit but I've always hated the way that introductions to subjects - like accounting - must always dive into a poorly researched and not terribly interesting historical diversion to pull as an example 15th c Italian double-bookkeeping as The First Accounting, or worse, pull even more loose examples like shopping lists etched on stone tablets... Stick to your own damn expertise, I am not interested in Your Thoughts On Something You Do Not Study.
Michael Scott Rohan - The Hammer of the Sun
- The third book of the original trilogy, it's a high fantasy set in an interglacial period. The protagonist is Elof Valantor, a smith, and other than the interglacial setting, it's otherwise quite standard high fantasy in technology levels, magic presence, fantastical species, etc. It picks up seven years after the previous Forge in the Forest - I do love the evocativeness of the titles - and Elof tries to chain his love to him. Oh, he has his justifications, he fears the influence of an evil Louhi over his wife, but that's what he tries to do, and it backfires on him spectacularly. She shapeshifts into a bird and flies away, and he takes a boat and pursues...
- This is the third book that I read, so obviously it was not intolerable. But I read this book in a fit of apathy. By which I mean, I would open up Moonreader on my phone, and The Hammer of the Sun would be already loaded and open to the last page, and I wasn't feeling like reading it but also without enough emotional energy to start something new...so I kept reading.
- Seriously, the part where he tries to chain Kara bothered me so much. Obviously the narrative doesn't agree with his decision, since she kind of just flees, but...he also just goes and pursues her, which was eyeroll-inducing.
- The most interesting thing about these books is actually the glaciers and their inexorable advance. It's weird to read it today, because climate change seems to be happening also inexorably, in the other direction, and it's been hot, and in temperatures like this I feel like packing up and moving to Nunavut.
- I do not like Elof. He has never interested me in the slightest. I wish there was a more personable and interesting character to center the books around. I can't believe I read three books' worth of mediocre fantasy for glaciers...
- The prose, bless it, tried so hard. It used big words and grown-up constructions, but it never actually clicked properly. There's an incredibly satisfying feeling you get when you read someone like Diana Wynn Jones' writing, for example - it's a little tongue in cheek, but not arch, and the words and descriptions fit so perfectly, and so unerringly describe sensations and sights that it's a pleasure to just take in the words. Or authors who can give their work a sweeping depth that transports you. This was none of this, and the subtly not quite there constructions were distracting instead.
- It's so trying after Tolkien it's just embarrassing instead. After I finished the book, I went onto Goodreads. I didn't mean to - I just googled first. There's a reason I'm not on Goodreads, and I speedily remembered why. There are many people that I would sincerely like to take a look out their eyes sometime, because I don't understand. So many white men writing glowing praises of the prose and how it's like Tolkien and I think we have read different copies. Oh yes, it's like Tolkien, in that it's a heavily watered down attempt.
- Oh my god it was so slowwwww, the first half, the sea-journey. I just did not care for Elof. I did not care for his journey. I thought his companion Roc was a fool for coming with him. I thought Elof's total fear for the Ice vaguely ridiculous.
OK, I've done a bunch. Gotta sleep. Still a few more to go, including DOROTHY SAYERS ♥
*I think I talked about Mary Beard's SPQR and...uh...I just went back. No, I did not talk about that.
Mary Beard - SPQR
- I really liked this. I only have a glancing, overview knowledge of classical antiquity, so this was extremely helpful. It's a very high level overview, starting all the way from the mythical beginnings of Rome.
- One of the things I really appreciated about SPQR is how clear Beard was about presenting the evidence (this is the observations we have from archaeology) and then presenting her interpretation, as well as other scholars'. I can turn off my brain for fiction, mostly, but it's hard to do in non-fiction that wants to teach, so I appreciate how she really laid out the evidence. Not to mention it's interesting to me to see what kind of evidence exists, how we use it, etc.
Robin Lafevers - Dark Triumph
-This is a YA about young women in a convent dedicated to Mortain, the god of death. They are trained as assassins, and play silent roles in the medieval Brittany in which they live. This is basically so many things I love all bundled up.
- Alas that it is YA. I don't know what it is, but it's some combination of this writing style that seems to be so uniform across the genre, and shallow treatment of everything. I've spilled enough e-ink on how I don't think grittier = realer, but I feel like maybe the length isn't enough, or there just isn't enough treatment, because everything feels superficial. I've mostly given up on YA at this point.
- Also. ( SPOILERS as this is the third book )
- However. Obviously, considering that I read all three books....Can we make these medieval assassination convents a trope themselves? I would read so many...
Seth Dickinson - The Traitor Baru Cormorant
- One of the best fantasy novels I've read this year. Baru Cormorant sees the invaders come to her island as a little girl, sees her mother and two fathers torn apart, goes to the colonists' boardingschool at her island. And she scores exceptionally, and is granted a post as Imperial Accountant at distant Aurdwynn. Aurdwynn is full of rebellion, and she intends to forment it, and use her position to destroy the Empire of Masks.
- It's hard to describe all the things I loved about this novel, not least because there are a lot of twists, and it would ruin the novel if I talked about them in my enticement.
- I thought it was a very clear, unflinching look at imperialism and its expansion. Baru herself is clear-eyed too, and pretty much prepares herself to be just as hard. Such a good character - it's from her perspective, but you don't get that softening as you see the internal thoughts the way you do with a lot of "from the perspective of villain" stories. Which isn't to say Baru is a villain. It's complicated.
- It's also quietly beautiful in prose. It was written in a way that induces rapid page turning because OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED i can't turn pages fast enough, but there was an understated, unshowy gorgeous prose.
- That ending was hard to read. It hurt.
- I'm a huge nerd and enjoyed that monetary policy got a look in. Though...if your economy isn't very developed (as Aurdwynn's is, because it's still mostly agrarian without a ton of loans, the loans are to the nobility mostly), I'm not sure how much of a lever monetary policy is. But I digress. The one part I totally call BS on is Baru reconciling the accounts of a country in one day. I'm sorry HAHAHAHAHA NO. oh my god especially since they're all on paper do you know how long those columns of numbers to add up are?
- But really. I loved the politicking, the characters, the plot, the writing, solid 10/10 would recommend.
Elizabeth Wein - The Winter Prince
- About Medraut, and his relationship basically to Arthur's son.
- Somehow my copy had these illustrations at the heading of every chapter, and they were distracting; they were black and white pen drawings, and they looked amateur. The net result on me was that I would go from emotionally quite engaging and fraught scenes, to un-skippable drawings that reminded me of angsty teenagers, which meant I got taken out of the novel every chapter.
- There's more incest than I expected. And it being Arthurian lit, I expected incest.
- I don't know. I don't feel very motivated to read more Elizabeth Wein, to be honest. I know people rave about Code Name Verity, but meh.
Chris Hadfield - An Astrounaut's Guide to Life on Earth
- Chris Hadfield - Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS - wrote an autobiography.
- Mostly what I've come away with is that I would love to meet Chris, he really does come across as an incredibly good and humble and persevering person. I also enjoyed learning about what kind of training the astronauts get, mentally and physically, in the real world. I like space opera! It's neat to see what actually happens outside stories. It's as much a story about what happens before anyone can go to space as it is about the fun quirks of what life in space is like. Staggering amounts of work.
Dorothy Dunnett - Niccolo Rising
- Historical novel about Nicholas de Fleury, a dyer's apprentice, set in 15th century Bruges to start. It's part of an eight-novel series that follows him - mind like a whip, full of schemes and ambitions, but irrepressibly cheerful despite the beatings.
- One reviewer described it as "pungently historical" (paraphrase) which I agree with. It's obvious Dunnett did her research. There are also real life figures that appear as minor characters - I saw one of them's portraits in the Met on Saturday! That was like an unexpected Easter egg in real life.
- I also found this to be a slog initially. Until about 40%. You're left to draw your own conclusions a great deal, and there are a lot of names and places and relationships to keep track of, and if you read it piecemeal like at lunch in 5 min snatches between getting distracted, it's kind of hard to enjoy. But then the plot picked up and it flew. Some very good twists, especially with Katalina.
- On the other hand, the next seven books are daunting. I'm not sure I want to start one any time soon...
- These also tie into her more famous Lymond series. Niccolo is an ancestor, I believe.
Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
- Murder mystery, where ten guests are summoned to an island, each by a different person they'd answer a summons for, to attend a party. The host just doesn't show up and the whole party is marooned on the island - deliberately, apparently. And then one by one, they all begin to die...
- I am a wimp and it totally gave me the creeps. It's very much the locked room mystery - one of those characters is a murderer!!!
- If you read too many Christie mysteries (actually, golden age mysteries in general) you notice a lot of character archetypes that crop up frequently. Young society miss, red-faced colonel who rather wishes he was still in the war, the misfit only American there, etc. I offer this observation not as an insult or accusation, but just as an observation.
all of Prospero's War, Dirty Magic to Volatile Bonds by Jaye Wells
- Think police procedural except in novel form, and instead of the war on drugs, potions and magic have taken the place of cocaine and heroin. Kate Prospero is a beat cop that patrols the magic side of the city, but her position is somewhat precarious and unusual; she grew up as the niece of Abraxas Prospero, who was gang leader of one of the three strongest covens that operated in the city. Abraxas is in prison now, she refuses to touch potion cooking, and is raising her younger brother. But her strong desire to do right by the city draws her into conflicts about all this.
- I actually really like Kate as a character. She's complicated and has a lot of conflicting loyalties. She's very against using magic - she attends an AA style magic-rejecting group (people get addicted to potions) - she was a very talented potion cooker as a girl - the police force use 'clean' magic to operate more effectively - 'clean' magic is just what mainstream drug companies use, 'dirty' is street, there's regulation but really it's magic anyway. And her little brother wants to cook potions...
- The internal police politicking sounds quite realistic. And exhausting.
- But let's be real. I am desperately awaiting the next book because I am so interested in Volos/Kate becoming a thing. It's the emotional core of all this, and it's a hell of a magnet.
Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise
- Non-fiction, about statistical modelling. Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, which rose to fame during the 2008 American presidential elections run-up; his modelling of the electoral college was both very accurate and fairly precise.
- It is a book written to appeal to a broad base of people, so there really was not much math in it. Some graphs, which was nice, but I wanted more statistical treatment (ugh go read a textbook.) He focuses heavily on Bayesian statistics, which, to prosify and simplify hard, means you should make a prediction initially based on your knowledge, then incorporate further evidence and weigh it more heavily depending on how confident you were in your initial prediction and how un-like your initial prediction was.
- Some of the cases, like epidemiology and economics, I found much more interesting than the poker and baseball bits. I just don't care that much about poker and baseball...but Silver does, and sabermetrics is how he got interested in statistics in the first place.
- Silver also references some very random things, and will allude at intervals to isolated historical facts or incidents or pop culture, and I don't really think it adds much to the credibility of the book. It doesn't discredit but I've always hated the way that introductions to subjects - like accounting - must always dive into a poorly researched and not terribly interesting historical diversion to pull as an example 15th c Italian double-bookkeeping as The First Accounting, or worse, pull even more loose examples like shopping lists etched on stone tablets... Stick to your own damn expertise, I am not interested in Your Thoughts On Something You Do Not Study.
Michael Scott Rohan - The Hammer of the Sun
- The third book of the original trilogy, it's a high fantasy set in an interglacial period. The protagonist is Elof Valantor, a smith, and other than the interglacial setting, it's otherwise quite standard high fantasy in technology levels, magic presence, fantastical species, etc. It picks up seven years after the previous Forge in the Forest - I do love the evocativeness of the titles - and Elof tries to chain his love to him. Oh, he has his justifications, he fears the influence of an evil Louhi over his wife, but that's what he tries to do, and it backfires on him spectacularly. She shapeshifts into a bird and flies away, and he takes a boat and pursues...
- This is the third book that I read, so obviously it was not intolerable. But I read this book in a fit of apathy. By which I mean, I would open up Moonreader on my phone, and The Hammer of the Sun would be already loaded and open to the last page, and I wasn't feeling like reading it but also without enough emotional energy to start something new...so I kept reading.
- Seriously, the part where he tries to chain Kara bothered me so much. Obviously the narrative doesn't agree with his decision, since she kind of just flees, but...he also just goes and pursues her, which was eyeroll-inducing.
- The most interesting thing about these books is actually the glaciers and their inexorable advance. It's weird to read it today, because climate change seems to be happening also inexorably, in the other direction, and it's been hot, and in temperatures like this I feel like packing up and moving to Nunavut.
- I do not like Elof. He has never interested me in the slightest. I wish there was a more personable and interesting character to center the books around. I can't believe I read three books' worth of mediocre fantasy for glaciers...
- The prose, bless it, tried so hard. It used big words and grown-up constructions, but it never actually clicked properly. There's an incredibly satisfying feeling you get when you read someone like Diana Wynn Jones' writing, for example - it's a little tongue in cheek, but not arch, and the words and descriptions fit so perfectly, and so unerringly describe sensations and sights that it's a pleasure to just take in the words. Or authors who can give their work a sweeping depth that transports you. This was none of this, and the subtly not quite there constructions were distracting instead.
- It's so trying after Tolkien it's just embarrassing instead. After I finished the book, I went onto Goodreads. I didn't mean to - I just googled first. There's a reason I'm not on Goodreads, and I speedily remembered why. There are many people that I would sincerely like to take a look out their eyes sometime, because I don't understand. So many white men writing glowing praises of the prose and how it's like Tolkien and I think we have read different copies. Oh yes, it's like Tolkien, in that it's a heavily watered down attempt.
- Oh my god it was so slowwwww, the first half, the sea-journey. I just did not care for Elof. I did not care for his journey. I thought his companion Roc was a fool for coming with him. I thought Elof's total fear for the Ice vaguely ridiculous.
OK, I've done a bunch. Gotta sleep. Still a few more to go, including DOROTHY SAYERS ♥
Ancillary Justice: Anne Leckie
Dec. 3rd, 2017 11:49 pmHelp help these books omg.
It's space opera with the main character a space ship's AI, a cog in the machine for a massive, ever-expanding galactic empire, except this is now the last annexation. The AIs use humans that have been harvested for use as ancillaries, bodies to carry out tasks. It is probably the best SF novel I've read all year, and it plays with a lot of interesting concepts.
(NOTE: I read them all the way back in August, wrote most of this in September, and have posted it now. I think there are things I didn't get around to writing about, but this covers a lot of it. And I'm still catching up on book reviewing, eek.)
( spoilers all the way up to Ancillary Mercy )
I really, really liked these novels. I thought they were a finished trilogy too, but I hear rumours they aren't? Certainly they're not wrapped up.
It's space opera with the main character a space ship's AI, a cog in the machine for a massive, ever-expanding galactic empire, except this is now the last annexation. The AIs use humans that have been harvested for use as ancillaries, bodies to carry out tasks. It is probably the best SF novel I've read all year, and it plays with a lot of interesting concepts.
(NOTE: I read them all the way back in August, wrote most of this in September, and have posted it now. I think there are things I didn't get around to writing about, but this covers a lot of it. And I'm still catching up on book reviewing, eek.)
( spoilers all the way up to Ancillary Mercy )
I really, really liked these novels. I thought they were a finished trilogy too, but I hear rumours they aren't? Certainly they're not wrapped up.
Walden/On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Oct. 30th, 2017 10:56 pmI considered writing a review of Walden and On The Duty of Civil Disobedience by Thoreau, but I've decided I'm just going to link this: Pond Scum, by Katheryn Schulz, who says it far more eloquently than I do.
But I struggled (and snarled) through it, so I'll say it as succinctly as I can: what a hypocritical, narcissistic, uncharitable and self-righteous worm. How dare you preach from above what you don't even adhere to (hungry, so walk to your mother's place half mile down the road?) How could you even dredge up the self-importance to say humanity's life is meaningless and worthless when you refuse to even live among people, to learn anything about humanity and civilization? How self-absorbed can you be to think living without a doormat makes you more "pure"? Did you lose your empathy, to say "I have tried [Doing-good] fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution", and feel proud of putting those words down?
You idolize subsistence farming because you never had to live it; you don't put manure down because you only expect to plant and harvest once. You look down on young people who have to go off to make their fortunes before they can "go up to the garret to write their poetry", because you're so myopic you can't understand not only poverty, but not even the whole class of people who have to make a living. You draw out sums that feed a single man in good health in good weather who owns his own property, but since everyone else is deaf and blind to all the truths you see, surely this is enough for all other lives and families. And there isn't even internal consistency! Is having an editor also impure, Thoreau?
P.S. a hundred Romantic poets, novelists, and essayists did nature writing better.
But I struggled (and snarled) through it, so I'll say it as succinctly as I can: what a hypocritical, narcissistic, uncharitable and self-righteous worm. How dare you preach from above what you don't even adhere to (hungry, so walk to your mother's place half mile down the road?) How could you even dredge up the self-importance to say humanity's life is meaningless and worthless when you refuse to even live among people, to learn anything about humanity and civilization? How self-absorbed can you be to think living without a doormat makes you more "pure"? Did you lose your empathy, to say "I have tried [Doing-good] fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution", and feel proud of putting those words down?
You idolize subsistence farming because you never had to live it; you don't put manure down because you only expect to plant and harvest once. You look down on young people who have to go off to make their fortunes before they can "go up to the garret to write their poetry", because you're so myopic you can't understand not only poverty, but not even the whole class of people who have to make a living. You draw out sums that feed a single man in good health in good weather who owns his own property, but since everyone else is deaf and blind to all the truths you see, surely this is enough for all other lives and families. And there isn't even internal consistency! Is having an editor also impure, Thoreau?
P.S. a hundred Romantic poets, novelists, and essayists did nature writing better.
So I am grumpy tonight, but man, Every Heart A Doorway. I should have a tag that simultaneously expresses my love for libraries and annoyance: #backtothelibrarybin #wouldhavethrownagainstwall #exceptlibrarybook #nextreaderbeware #wouldveburnt #exceptlibrarybook
(camelcase, what's camelcase? it doesn't look as good, ok)
(camelcase, what's camelcase? it doesn't look as good, ok)
