Author: katenepveu

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Pierce, Tamora: (117) Mastiff

One time, after an incredibly nondescript restaurant meal, Chad looked at me and said, “Well, that . . . had calories.”

I finished Mastiff, the conclusion to Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper trilogy, and all I could think was, “Well, that . . . was a book.”

There’s nothing specifically wrong with it that I can put my finger on. But it didn’t provoke any particular feelings in me either, even when it should have.

Maybe it’s because it, like the second book, takes place in yet another location and thus the characters introduced in the first book were largely absent again, though I’d thought they would be important because of the frame story. Maybe it’s because I was badly disoriented when the book opened with the funeral of Beka’s betrothed and I had to go back to the last book and see if I’d forgotten something major. (I hadn’t; it happened between books.) Maybe I liked chase-the-kidnappers better in a different book by Pierce. Maybe it’s just too long. Really, I have no idea.

So, you know. It’s the last Beka Cooper book.

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Chase, Loretta: Silk is for Seduction

Random backlog catchup, while waiting for sleeping baby to wake:

I’ve not been thrilled with Loretta Chase’s recent books. I couldn’t get more than a few chapters into Your Scandalous Ways, the espionage one, because it just wasn’t any fun. Don’t Tempt Me: I’ve already filled my quota of female-virgin-leaves-harem stories with The Ringed Castle, thanks. And I stalled out on Last Night’s Scandal, the Peregine/Olivia story, I think because I couldn’t make sense of why they weren’t talking to each other, though I’d frankly forgotten about it until now and probably will go back.

So when Silk is for Seduction came out, I got it from the library (in e-book form, because the future is awesome) rather than buying it. And it turned out to be actually fun, the way that I look for in Chase’s books. Better, it’s about someone in trade: the female protagonist is a dressmaker and her profession actually matters. This is doubly refreshing in the Regency(-ish) romance genre.

The non-romance plot is pretty thin, but that’s not what you read Chase for anyway. A pleasant surprise; I’ll probably buy the next one (it’s the start of a series).

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Pratchett, Terry: (09-10) Eric; Moving Pictures

I got behind on the Discworld re-read, but the next book was Eric, about which I have almost nothing to say: it’s Rincewind, it’s slight, it’s about bureaucracy, and I haven’t read the version with pictures but didn’t feel the lack (unlike The Last Hero, which has at least one scene that doesn’t make any sense without the pictures). But then, I don’t particularly care for Josh Kirby’s Discworld art.

Next up is Moving Pictures, which kicks off the “invading pop culture” line of stories. (Or, well, is there a line? There’s Soul Music, and I suppose Unseen Academicals to a certain extent. Anyway. This is what series re-reads are for.) These have never been my favorite so I was not particularly enthused to read this one.

The University comes into recognizable form here, with Ridicully (who I do like, which I don’t think I expected at the time), the Bursar (not yet on the dried frog pills, but getting there), the Dean, and Ponder Stibbons. This book also introduces the dog, Gaspode. Otherwise, the only thing I have to say about it is a spoiler, so I will put it behind the jump.

Continue reading “Pratchett, Terry: (09-10) Eric; Moving Pictures“

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Gorodischer, Angélica: Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

It was pure coincidence that I read Kalpa Imperial, written by Angélica Gorodischer and translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, after 1491, but it turned out to be suitable in an odd way.

Kapla Imperial is a set of stories about “The Greatest Empire that Never Was.” It hooked me from the opening of the first story:

The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their hearts into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our lives—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.

If you hate that, then don’t read the book; all the sentences aren’t like that, but I think you need to be able to roll with the language and something of a, hmmm, non-directed approach to storytelling. The stories aren’t in chronological order—I think; I’m not sure because it is not, as far as I can tell, possible to put them all in chronological order. There’s no continuing characters, there’s no timeline or family trees, there’s no obvious arc over the entire book. What there is, are vivid and remarkable short stories about people and cities and ways of living.

When I finished Kalpa Imperial, I almost didn’t want to think of it analytically, because it felt so much its own thing. But I re-read because I was trying to figure out why the last section alone is not told by a storyteller [*], and then I found myself considering the little context I had and feeling the lack of more. Gorodischer is Argentinian, and—here’s where 1491 comes in for me—that gives me a sense that the lengthy and often forgotten history of the Empire, and the Empire’s uneasy relationship with the South, resonate with Gorodischer’s cultural context. But, particularly with regard to the story about the South, I wished I knew more about Argentinian history and culture, because I think it would inform my reaction and understanding. (See also this discussion in comments to Jo Walton’s review).

[*] I didn’t come up with any ideas. Nor was I able to figure out why the stories told in this section were adaptations of the Trojan War in which, among other things, the Achaeans and the Trojans are houses called saloon and the charge of the light brigade. It is extremely weird and massively distracting and, thankfully, not at all typical of the book.

There are two excerpts linked at the publisher’s webpage for the book, which will almost certainly be more useful to you than this booklog entry in telling you whether you want to read this book.

Finally, I’m putting this under “sf and fantasy” on the Swordspoint principle.

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Mann, Charles C.: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, is a fascinating, important, and extremely readable nonfiction book. It summarizes recent scholarship to argue that the general understanding of the Americas pre-Columbus is erroneous in three significant ways: first, the Americas were heavily populated prior to the introduction of European diseases (no empty Americas); second, the Americas were populated for far longer and by far more developed peoples than generally thought (no noble savages); and third, those peoples actively managed their environments on a large scale (no pristine wilderness). Mann clearly makes the case for each of these propositions, but also makes a point of presenting counterarguments in a way that, to my reading, does not rely on rhetorical tricks to minimize their force.

This is also a really fun book. Just the early section on the life of Tisquantum, usually known as “Squanto,” the friendly Indian who taught the Pilgrims how not to starve, would make an awesome standalone historical novella. Some of the other histories are, as Mann observes, downright Shakespearian. And Mann’s prose is clear, approachable, and lively.

I don’t read a lot of history or nonfiction but I was transfixed by this and think it has enough of interest to be enjoyed by almost everyone. And it convincingly and thoroughly presents its fundamental premise, that the inhabitants of the Americas before 1492 (and after!) were people just as the inhabitants of Europe were, and accordingly should be granted the same agency, judged by the same standards, and given as much attention as the people of Europe—which may sound self-evident when stated baldly, but as Mann highlights and a cursory examination of history and pop culture makes clear, is very far from being widely accepted.

Seriously, just read it.

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Pratchett, Terry: (08) Guards! Guards! (re-read)

I am skipping to the next Discworld re-read book, Guards! Guards!, because I have only a few minutes before the Pip wakes up and I have only two things to add to my older post and Becca’s observations:

One, from now on, I will probably never stop wanting to immediately re-read Night Watch after this book to try and reconcile them, but I will most likely never actually do it because my brain isn’t good at that kind of extrapolation.

Two, literally one paragraph after the one containing this footnote,

The pronoun [him] is used by dwarfs to indicate both sexes. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

Carrot refers to the dwarf with whom he had an understanding as “she” and does so consistently throughout the book. Whee, heteronormativity. (Something the series has recently gotten better about, though.)

(See also Modern Love by Penknife.)

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Pratchett, Terry: (06) Wyrd Sisters, (07) Pyramids (re-read)

It’s kind of a mixed blessing that Wyrd Sisters was up next in the Discworld re-read. On one hand, it’s the first of the Discworld books that I felt like I would wholeheartedly recommend as a starting place for someone new, so it was welcome reading. On the other, I read it in the hospital while recovering from the birth of our second child by C-section (who is currently asleep across my left arm and lap as I type on my netbook perched on my knees), which means I was not in any state to note anything useful about it other than “hey, that was good.”

(I had thought that I also read a Witches book, Lords and Ladies, when in the hospital after our first child, but on checking the relevant entry, I only brought it with, and did not re-read until we were home.)

In a sign that I am still not fully adjusted, I’d completely forgotten that I re-read Pyramids, the next book in the series, also relatively recently, until I checked the index looking for the link above. Beyond what I said there, what I noticed this time is the extent to which Pyramids is a precursor to Small Gods, what with the gods walking around and the parody of classical Greece—I think some of the philosopher jokes may even reappear. Which is interesting from a series-development perspective, but unfortunately Pyramids does not do well by the comparison.

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Valentine, Genevieve: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

I read Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti after The Sacred Band because I was certain it would be very different, which it definitely was, and because it seemed massively unlikely to give me the same kind issues with its treatment of gender, which it did not.

Mechanique is a fantasy novel about a circus that travels through what the A.V. Club neatly sums up as “an indeterminate near-Earth that exists not so much in a post-apocalypse as in a frozen, perpetual mid-collapse.” There’s magic in the circus, but what is only slowly revealed over the course of the book (and how is almost entirely left aside, which is fine with me but may annoy others). Also revealed non-linearly is the history and relationships of the circus’s members, which then shapes their reaction to the plot, which admittedly takes a while to manifest.

The thing about this book is the prose, which the sample chapters give a very good sense of. I could never quite fall through it, myself. This is mostly personal taste, though on reflection, the fact that I liked somewhat better several short stories about the Circus (particularly “Study, for Solo Piano”) suggests that the stylization in the novel may be a little more heightened than optimal. However, despite that, I still read it twice and found that a lot of it lingered in my mind. So if the sample chapters interest you at all, I would say it’s worth trying. As Abigail Nussbaum’s more critical review in Strange Horizons puts it, the book “reaches for wonder and horror,” and even though I was not perfectly compatible with its style, for me it succeeded in attaining both.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend.

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Durham, David Anthony: (03) The Sacred Band

I have wildly mixed feelings about David Anthony Durham’s The Sacred Band.

On one hand, The Sacred Band is the end of the Acacia trilogy, which is now an epic, literally world-changing fantasy series that is complete in three volumes. That is rather ridiculously rare these days. (Sanderson’s Mistborn books, which I haven’t read? Other than that, I’m drawing a blank.) It has good momentum. There are moments that I found beautiful or moving, even when I didn’t actually like the surrounding context. And I am satisfied by the very broadest level of resolution.

On the other hand, I am not satisfied by many of the more specific resolutions, and my lack of satisfaction has been growing as I re-read and thought and mentally drafted this post. Some of them may well be the kind of thing that only bother me, but they’re keeping me from feeling that I really liked the book as a whole.

To start with something more concrete (a spoiler post will follow), this book spends a lot of time revisiting the first book, with mixed success. My reactions to these range from, “Well, I guess, but it would really have helped if there had been even the tiniest hint in this direction at the time,” to “Yeah, no, that’s a retcon, I see what you did there,” to “I don’t care how authoritatively the narrative asserts this, I will never ever believe it and nothing can make me, so there.” (Yes, my reader reactions are very mature sometimes.) There’s also more ambiguity about some of the resolutions than this analytic reader would like (though I may be overanalyzing or expecting too much internal consistency).

Another factor is more subjective and harder to explain. Let me try and back into it: the theme of this book is revenge versus forgiveness, or at least letting go. And there is something to be said for people who have access to power in an unjust system recognizing that injustice and using their power to change the system (especially when, as is so often the case in fantasy, magical ability is heritable).

But it is still a very awkward and delicate thing to have the non-elite characters fall away in this book and have most of the significant action be taken by the royal heirs. This is especially true in the Ushen Brae (Other Lands) sections, where despite all the above I am still not sure that Dariel doesn’t turn into the honky that those people needed, but I also had an issue with the way another character wielded supreme executive power on behalf of a whole lot of voiceless-by-fiat people.

Finally, though I realize it seems unfair to complain about this while simultaneously praising the book for completing the trilogy, a few things seem to be dealt with far too quickly. A couple of these are plot, and I think I would have preferred that the problems never be introduced rather than disposed of so offhandedly; one of them is one redemption too many, which made me feel that several chapters of character development had fallen on the cutting room floor. (Not that I wanted to spend more time with that character. Left unredeemed would’ve been just fine, too, and arguably more consistent with the series as a whole.)

I think the most accurate thing I can say about my reaction to this book is that I did not feel that it lived up to the potential, the promise, and the problems of the prior two books. Durham has admitted that he didn’t know how he was going to get to the end while he was writing the first two, and though I didn’t know that when I first read The Sacred Band, I was, unfortunately, not at all surprised to hear it. (I was, however, surprised to hear that he thought the ending might though be controversial or genre-defying, as I thought the overall direction was clear throughout.)

So do I recommend the trilogy? There is a lot of good about the series, which I hope the posts about the first two books adequately conveyed. But for those who were waiting to see if the series stuck the landing: I think it wobbled pretty significantly, but my opinion is based on issues that, again, often bother me more than other people. However, since it’s not the kind of series where the ending is deeply polarizing yet completely impossible to explain without massive spoilers (see: Baker’s Company series, King’s Dark Tower series), I hope that even these necessarily-oblique comments give new readers an idea whether they are likely to have the same reaction.

A spoiler post (which will assume familiarity with the book) follows.

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