Month: July 2011

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Resnick, Laura: (03) Unsympathetic Magic

Here’s the thing about Laura Resnick’s Unsympathetic Magic. I decided to read it because I needed something entertaining but undemanding. And when I’m in that kind of mood, I usually read very quickly indeed: skimming over the top, as it were, because I don’t have enough brainpower to go more deeply.

It is therefore a problem when I, reading in this mode, nevertheless spend a quarter of the book yelling at the characters to pay attention to a blatantly obvious threat. And that’s putting aside my spotting the villain immediately, because that involved metatextual reasons that I can’t properly attribute to the characters.

(I also have issues with a key scene between Esther and her on-again, off-again love interest, but by that point I was pretty much just trying to get to the end, already.)

In short, this series is now on probation: if the next book has the same issues, I’m dropping the series.

Finally, I should note that this book is about Haitian Vodou, and while its treatment of the religion seemed balanced and respectful to me (including some extensive conversational infodumps—hooray skimming!), it’s not my tradition or culture and there may well be subtleties that escaped me.

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Pratchett, Terry: (37-38) Unseen Academicals; I Shall Wear Midnight

A mix of catching up and new reading, this time, with Terry Pratchett’s two most recent Discworld books, Unseen Academicals and I Shall Wear Midnight. I read the first when it came out, but hadn’t gotten around to the second until just now. My reaction to both of these is pretty similar: they don’t quite hang together, but are nevertheless very hard to put down and have a more than sufficient proportion of awesome things.

Unseen Academicals is trying to do too much at once: football (soccer, to Americans), Unseen University politics, the fashion industry, and another take on species-ism. The fantastical bits regarding football seem entirely superfluous, and attempting to relate the book’s storylines to our world’s issues regarding racism and LGBTQ issues is not recommended. But I still like it for its treatment of class, which seems to me a bit more complex than usual, and because all of a sudden Pratchett can write these delicate touching romances—which I absolutely would never have expected after Carrot/Angua and Sam/Sybil, but there is it, Nation was not a fluke.

I also listened to Stephen Briggs read this, and he does his usual impeccable job. In fact, I’m pretty sure I listened to it first and then read it, because I remember thinking that when I got to a particular line in text, I was glad I had Briggs’ reading because otherwise I wouldn’t have got it “right” in my own head (oblique spoilers at most, but it is at the climax, so ROT13’ed (see sidebar): “pbzr ba vs lbh guvax lbh’er uneq rabhtu.”).

I Shall Wear Midnight, the fourth Tiffany Aching book, doesn’t feel terribly new after the other books about witches, Tiffany included, and has one thread that is both amazingly welcome and yet weirdly disconnected from the rest (spoilers, again ROT13’ed: vg’f ybiryl gb frr rfx ntnva, juvpu v arire gubhtug jbhyq unccra, ohg gur gvzr geniry ovg bgurejvfr frrzf, uzz, bayl gurzngvpnyyl arprffnel gb gur obbx, ng irel zbfg). But it has some great creepy moments, it surprised me in a few small ways, it has loads of momentum, and it feels like a good place to leave Tiffany and the rest of the witches.

Oh, and another format note: since this book had chapters, I wish the e-book put the footnotes at the end of the chapters rather than the end of the file; it would make it easier to see how much actual story was left when looking at the page X of Y status bar. (Also this book seemed to have more footnotes than necessary, but I suppose that may have been a concession to its nominal YA nature.)

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Caudwell, Sarah: (04) The Sibyl in Her Grave (re-read)

So I did eventually get around to re-reading the last of Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar books, The Sibyl in Her Grave, and was immediately sorry I hadn’t done it sooner. I’d been thinking that it was much drearier, longer, and less good than the others, but I was entirely wrong: I think it’s probably the best of the four [*], and though there is a thread that I find very difficult to read, it’s like Frodo and Sam in Mordor in that it takes up much less of the book than I’d remembered.

Also, when I said the first time through that I was “rather tempted to read as a meditation on chronic illness”? Apparently I missed the bit where that comparison is explicitly drawn (the letter in chapter 21).

[*] It’s the kind of jump that I imagine Harriet Vane’s novels taking post-Have His Carcase, if that helps. (Apparently I am feeling very literarily-referential tonight.)

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Turner, Megan Whalen: Thief, The; The Queen of Attolia; The King of Attolia; A Conspiracy of Kings

It is quite difficult to coherently explain why I like Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia series (The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, A Conspiracy of Kings) so much, because most of those reasons involve enormous spoilers for the first two books. On the other hand, this problem would have been more vexing before the fourth book, because I didn’t like that nearly as well and as a result am less enthusiastic about recommending the entire series to people.

These are published as YA, though the first is the one that fits most comfortably in that genre. They are fantasies mostly in the same way that Swordspoint is, that is, they are deliberately set not in our world in an ahistorical and nonmagical time and place. They do weave in many recognizable historical elements, mostly Greek history and mythology (regrettably, it appears the principal bad guys are Persian-analogues). However, a small but significant strand in the series involves deities in a way that I found really cool and unusual.

Structurally, it may be useful to think of The Thief as a prologue. I enjoyed it, because it’s the kind of first-person narration that is right up my alley, but it is very different from the rest of the books and is probably not necessary to read first. Of the rest, Queen and King are reasonably described as younger cousins of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: not nearly as formidably complex, but with something of the same slightly distant, yet highly Id Vortex-y, approach to complex characters and their relationships, politics, and revelation of plot. I didn’t like King as much at first, because I found it disorienting to have a new character as a narrator, but it definitely grew on me, so if you like Queen, it’s definitely worth reading all of King as well.

Unfortunately, then there’s Conspiracy, about which I have two criticisms. One is that the first-person sections don’t work as what they are purported to be; this only shows up in small ways but it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. The other is an enormous spoiler for the book’s end, which I discussed back in the day over at LiveJournal (which link shows just how backlogged I am here). Upon re-reading, yes, I still don’t like it; worse, it makes me very dubious about the direction of the series.

So if these sound appealing, to the limited extent I can convey their appeal without spoiling them (and they really are best read without spoilers), you might consider reading through King and then stopping for the moment: it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and that way if the rest of the series doesn’t redeem itself, then you won’t have spent the time. But the first three are definitely worth reading.

(Series name note: the fan-created consensus appears to be “Queen’s Thief,” which I don’t like. “Attolia” isn’t really accurate either, but at least has the virtue of being in two of the book titles.)

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