silver

I’m going to put my reviews of these two together because to me, although they’re very different in tone and in novel structure (and intent), the introduction of Ekaterin and the change in Miles’s life make them two halves of a heterogenous whole. I’m going to skip back and forth a bit.

( First, Komarr )

A Civil Campaign puts us back on Barrayar, with a full cast of characters from previous books.

( A Civil Campaign )

Immediately starting the entry with spoilers, so it all goes under the cut.

( Mirror Dance )

Continuing through Cetaganda and two short stories:

( Cetaganda )

I would first like to say, I should have read these YEARS AGO, I only read Shards, and somehow didn't go on. But now I have read everything except Ethan of Athos/Falling Free. My friend C proposed The Warrior's Apprentice for one of my small book clubs back in January. C is not only very thoughtful about figuring out whether so-and-so might like a book, she and I overlap in book tastes the most of anyone I know, with only one or two exceptions (only really notable because of how rare this is). She just scored 58 on the 100 formative novels list I posted, ha. Flist, I lost my mind. I feel like I've been thinking about these books, and/or flat out reading non-stop, for about two or three months. I pulled my other small book club into reading these, too, since both C and the third person love the series, and I sat down at book club and monologued like a villain (from my copious notes) about all the things I liked.

While I'm babbling about the series as a whole - I guess I'll do a full summary afterwards - I read a lot of the commentary on Reactor formerly Tordotcom, which start here: https://reactormag.com/tag/vorkosigan-saga/?sort=newest¤tPage=17

Jo Walton does a post per book plus a couple character posts, and I really like her analysis. Well worth reading, and the link above starts from her summation. She did finish up the whole thing prior to Gentleman Jole & the Red Queen (the only book I do not like) and she doesn't have a post about that novel, but her posts are insightful, enjoyable, and very, very worth reading. Reactor also has Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer do a full read-through. Her posts are the vast majority of the posts about Vorkosigan on the site, and...well, I have reached a level where I am scrounging for any kind of discussion/commentary, but in many places I disagreed with her take, felt she went on not just unnecessary but dumb tangents, and sometimes she was flat out factually wrong, even about facts she had just read. I am a little irritated by that; forgivable in whole-novel/series summations, but surely you can recall the fact from the chapter you just read. Also - this offends me most, I think - she flies through Mirror Dance's juiciest and most important parts by just doing chapters 9-17 in one post, then 18-33 in a second. Other works like 'Winterfair Gifts' short story she did in three separate posts, and C-M simply elides all the yes painful, yes difficult, but really good stuff in Mirror Dance, one of the best of the series. So it offends me. There is both interesting comments and stupid comments in the re-read as well.

With that being said! Shards of Honor and Barrayar!

( Shards of Honor )

( Barrayar )

The 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.

Some short reviews of books I read. Also I would like to point out that a lot of these I did read for book club - if it's really low rated I probably read it for book club. Life is too short, I usually ditch stuff I don't like.

City of Bones - Martha Wells
( review - 10/10 )

A College of Magics - Caroline Stevermer
( review - 6/10 )

I read several books about the southwestern deserts - A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the North American Deserts by Edmund C Jaeger. Actually I guess I mostly just browsed the second, but the first was a whole collection of essays on all aspects of the Sonoran desert: the geology, weather, physics, and biological life, flora and fauna (reptiles, insects, fish, mammals, birds). Of course, I read the bird section with greatest interest, but a lot of the essays were very interesting and informative. I read it after I came back from Arizona, in true myself fashion, but that helped make the facts stick better and it was nice to re-visit some of the birds I saw.

Light from Uncommon Stars - Ryda Aoki
( review - 4/10 )

Hickory Dickory Dock - Agatha Christie
( review - 9/10 )

Hench - Natalie Zina Walschots
( review - 7/10 )

OK I didn't get through as many as I wanted, more to come.

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 )

An 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

Another one I really enjoyed. Attempting to talk about involves so many spoilers though so:

( Issola!! )

I finished the first half of Book of Taltos which (after some wikipedia-ing) I think was originally published as a novel, and I've got the omnibus, where Taltos is paired with Phoenix. Normally you can just tell from the whole outside packaging but when I read in ebook I have no idea how long anything is and I skip the frontismatter anyway :P

I enjoyed it a lot! It's about Vlad, an Easterner (human) who lives in Dragaera (elf city) and who gets roped into a very dangerous rescue mission with someone he's basically just met.

One thing I really enjoyed is the utter deadpan of the narration, which is first person from Vlad. Especially because he's an assassin. There's so much where Vlad is describing what's going on, and what he thinks is going to happen, it's a ridiculous situation and very dangerous, and then he just goes, "So then I just nailed [killed] him." Everything is so casual, even when it's clearly a ton of work to go about killing his target, or it's life-or-death. I really am into super competent characters, so this was Excellent. Vlad also has a way of understatement at all times, so it's fun to read between the lines and think about what he's actually saying. A lot of what he says isn't what he feels - either because he doesn't want to admit it or he just wants to tell you something entertaining, I suppose. The prose is otherwise pretty light on description and the writing is very transparent/modern - there's not a lot to look at there. The interest is mostly in what happens and how Vlad talks about it, and it was really entertaining.

The other interesting thing was the three storylines - past, present, future. Each chapter is fairly short and mostly has all three happening. It took me until awhile into the book to realize the 'past' parts were gonna show up in each chapter, and then near the end I realized how the 'future' sections linked in. Eventually the 'present' and 'future' sections joined up, and I really enjoyed that. It's gave the book a different dimension and I also think it was a great way to explain something (magic working) which is hard to explain without infodumping and not have it bog down the action, which is reaching a climax at that particular point. I also quite like the device generally - I think the last time I read it was Ancillary Justice (which is exceptional), but where the two lines of the story met was such a great moment, and you really understood what was going on.

Also for some reason I kept reading this at the very end of the day when I was almost asleep so I probably will find a lot more to enjoy in the re-reads. Now reading Phoenix!