silver

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 )

Books I read this year!

Continuing on my "silver refuses to pay a monthly subscription to continue access to Excel (even though she loves Excel)" journey, I have kept a log of what I read this year in my paper journal. I'm really bad about updating it though, so I know there are books missing, and can't remember...oh well. This only counts books I read cover to cover and for the first time.

I have way more 10/10 books in the beginning of the year than the end. I read a lot more nonfiction this year! I didn't do any reading challenges, I picked up a library summer reading one, but didn't end up doing it. Here are the highlights!

( Non fiction )

In fiction ( fantasy )

( science fiction )

( And other books I read )

Finally books I especially disliked, with very short notes otherwise I could write several thousands of words.
( really didn't like these )

I RETURN to my Dragaera read!! And try not to read everything super quickly.

( Tiassa!! )

Two 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 )

CAN'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 hamsterwoman for getting me copies!!) I'm trying to pace myself but it's hard.

( Athyra )

( Orca )

( Dragon )

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!

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

(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 just finished Royal Airs, the second book in Sharon Shinn's Elemental Blessings series. One of the central conceits is that everyone is one of five types (torz, coru, hunti, sweela, or elay), which have associated elemental and personality traits. There are about fifty blessings also. They are associated with one of the five elements. When you're born, your parents ask strangers to draw blessings for you - the temples all have a big container which are filled with coins stamped with each blessing. People seeking guidance might draw a coin for the day.

The blessings are basically horoscopes, but they are wrapped by the story (characterization, plot points) and I am so into this worldbuilding and I don't even know why! I kinda want to make an art project to create them. I don't have the materials to do metalworking, or the skills, or the patience lol. I don't think clay would look very good in my inexperienced hands. Maybe cards are the closest I can get, though it doesn't seem as neat.

omg I've just googled and discovered that someone's made coins for sale. The whole set for $20. But alas I do not like the design. I'm very picky...I wish that this series were wildly popular, like HP, and I could pick and choose from many artists' work (though admittedly, I've never bought any HP merch.) I'll keep thinking about how I could make them.

And if it wasn't obvious - I really like these novels! They also have a lot of twists and politicking. I really enjoyed them and could nooot put down Royal Airs on Saturday - the second half of the book kept dropping huge twists.

I really wanted to like this book. It's about the Library, which is an organization set apart in time and space, which agents that go out into various alternate universes to retrieve books. Sometimes undercover, sometimes timetravelling. Irene is suddenly sent out to retrieve a dangerous item, accompanied by a rookie agent she's never met.

One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction...

Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it's already been stolen.

London's underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested—the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something—secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself.

Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option—because it isn’t just Irene’s reputation at stake, it’s the nature of reality itself...

(from Amazon's blurb)

( But oh my god, I think my doneness with steampunk is getting to me. )