Author: katenepveu

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Clarke, Susanna: (01) Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (re-read)

I am quite sure I did not love Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this much the first time I read it, and I can’t imagine why. This time I basically wanted to roll around in it and never come out again, and indeed ended up immediately re-reading the last third to stave off withdrawal.

The prose is amazing. When I was reading, I couldn’t help posting three characterization-focused quotes from just the first four chapters over at my journal. Even the chapter titles are perfect (“The ashes, the pearls, the counterpane and the kiss”). And both the eerie numinous and the humor are finer than I recalled.

I think I also appreciate more, this time, the argument it’s making about what it means to be English (via the nature of English magic). Granted, I am not English, so it is an argument that I can only look at from the outside, but at least with regard to race and gender, it strikes me as a position worth aspiring to.

Really, I know it’s cliché to say so, but the experience it reminded me most of was the last time I read Pride and Prejudice and made comparisons to chiming crystal—not just regarding the book and its quality, but how it made me feel, like I was vibrating all over with delight. And now, writing it up months after the fact, I am fiercely tempted to go and re-read it all over again. Gosh, I love this book.

(Two minor notes. First, the footnotes are not academic, that is, were not inserted by a present-day editor into a historical text. They were written by the same narrator as the main text, a narrator who is omniscient yet an individual (and female), in the same way that (again) Pride and Prejudice‘s narrator is. See chapter 5, note 4 for the same narrator (who says “why I do not know” in describing Mr Tubbs’ actions (emphasis added); and see chapter 40, note 3 for the furthest specific chronological reference in the entire book, as far as I can tell (1836, the death date of the Duke of Wellington’s horse).

(Second, a minor spoiler (ROT-13, see sidebar): fheryl gur snzvyl va gur ynfg puncgre, jvgu n pyretlzna sngure, guerr qnhtugref (vapyhqvat ng yrnfg bar cnffvbangryl svrepr bar), naq bar fba, ner n ersrerapr gb gur Oebagrf?)

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Brust, Steven: (113) Tiassa

My attitude toward Steven Brust’s Tiassa is pretty mixed. On one hand, it has a great deal of cool stuff in it (Devera POV! Paarfi doing Vlad’s dialogue, which is hilarious! Answers to some long-standing questions!) On the other hand—well, actually, there are two other hands.

The first other hand is that this is another interstitial book and, as with Iorich, I still want forward movement.

The second other hand is that my initial reaction to the events of the book was that they were mildly dissatisfying in and of their own right. rushthatspeaks argued persuasively (link to day view so as to preserve spoiler cut, scroll down) that I was looking at the book in the wrong way. I’ve since re-read with that perspective in mind, and I agree with it, but I’m not sure I would have come to that conclusion on my own—which makes me think that I do not think like a Tiassa, whereas rushthatspeaks does. (I’m not sure what House I think like. You’d think it’d be Iorich, with being a lawyer and all, but I didn’t understand Iorich‘s plot either. Next time I re-read the series it will be fun to look at books with that question in mind.)

At any rate, on the re-read, this was enjoyable, but I continue to be distracted by fretting about the overall direction of the series. Which I freely admit says more about me than anything else, but hey, this is why this is a personal booklog and not a set of formally-published reviews.

And now, to figure out why The Dragaera Timeline keeps hanging Calibre when I try to add it as an e-book.

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Bujold, Lois McMaster: (115) Cryoburn; Ten-Year Anniversary

For quite some time, I thought I might not read Cryoburn, the latest Vorkosigan book by Lois McMaster Bujold, at all.

I managed to spoil myself for it, you see, and not only did I think it might be a difficult read for purely personal reasons, but it sounded very much like not the book I wanted. Which is a problem I’ve been having with the latest books in the Vorkosigan series—as I previously said, I liked A Civil Campaign less after time went by, because it moved too quickly and was too easy; and similarly, Diplomatic Immunity has become less satisfying to me over time, because I really want it to have been a dual-POV book, Miles and Ekaterin. So since I’ve been feeling over the prior two books that Ekaterin has been shortchanged, the news that Cryoburn took place off Barrayar and that Ekaterin was Lady Not Appearing did not thrill me—even before getting into spoiler issues.

But then I was browsing Lightreads’ archives for some reason and came across her assessment of Cryoburn, which called it a romp, and I thought maybe I was in the mood for it after all, now that I’d had time to adjust to the idea that it wasn’t the book I was hoping for.

Unfortunately I both agree with Lightreads and don’t. I agree that “it’s a hundred thousand words of Miles repeatedly happening to people,” but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a bad thing. (Though we don’t agree on this book, I quite recommend Lightreads for book blogging generally.) There’s no jeopardy for Miles, nothing at stake for him, and while I see all the thematic things it’s doing, I don’t want those things as indirect themes while Miles is happening to other people, I want them happening to him. “Remote” is not a quality I prize in a Vorkosigan book.

I also have some issues with the plot; the setup of the planet, where people are cryogenically frozen and leave their voting proxies with the corporations who froze them, seems so obviously ripe for corruption that it’s hard to believe that people didn’t foresee it. And the explanation for the bad guys’ big plan seems to be missing a step somewhere. (Morning ETA: this is what I get for writing quick after a long day. I am also dubious about the planet’s use of Japanese honorifics and other cultural trappings, especially so far in the future and in a place that never had a Time of Isolation and that has such far-reaching and negative corporate involvement.)

So, while I don’t quite wish I hadn’t read it, it definitely lived down to my expectation that it was not the book I wanted.

On another note: Today is the ten-year anniversary of this booklog, which is kind of amazing to me. (Ideally you should here imagine Jeremy Piven’s character in Grosse Pointe Blank saying, “Ten years!”) When I started this, I was in law school, unmarried, and childless; now I’m married, working as a lawyer, half-orphaned, and have one kid and another on the way. I also started a journal (first at LiveJournal and now at Dreamwidth), which means the occasional personal tidbits that appeared here early are elsewhere; and over at Tor.com, I spent a ridiculously long time re-reading The Lord of the Rings one chapter at a time.

I hadn’t planned to do anything particular for the anniversary, but then I realized it was today and that the next post in the mental queue was already about my changing assessments of books, so I couldn’t resist. (I sometimes think about going back and putting “I no longer agree with this” comments on older books, but that seems like a big enough project that I’ve never gotten around to it.) I’m not sure I’m capable of summing up, or even recognizing, all the ways my reading has changed over the last ten years, though I have tried to be more consciously aware of problematic stereotypes and tropes, especially with regard to race and disability.

In any event, even after ten years I still really enjoy writing this and have no intention of stopping, despite the occasional moribund period, of which the most recent was by far the longest. (I did briefly consider moving it to Dreamwidth, for the community norms of increased commenting, but it would be very hard to duplicate all the functionality there, and the back-referencing would be a nightmare. Anyway, I know way more people lurk, and that’s fine, really, I just had to remind myself of that!) I am always writing draft posts in my head after I finish a book, and it’s a genuine relief to get them out on the booklog, both for my own reference and for whatever use they are to others.

In conclusion: Ten years!

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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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Griffin, Kate: (02) The Midnight Mayor: Or, The Inauguration of Matthew Swift

Kate Griffin’s The Midnight Mayor: Or, The Inauguration of Matthew Swift is the sequel to A Madness of Angels. I had been somewhat dubious about the idea, but having read it, I agree that it advances Matthew Swift’s character and story. And as Chad puts it, it’s nice to have an urban fantasy series with no Awesome Werewolf Boy/Girlfriend. [*] On the contrary, Matthew’s most significant continuing relationship is with a woman who spends most of their time together saying that she’s going to kill him (she means it, too). I admit, I find this inordinately amusing.

[*] In fact, I don’t remember seeing anything in this book that would contradict a reading of Matthew as asexual. And I remember reading a review of the first that pointed out that of all the new sensations he was registering and seeking out (long story), anything sexual was conspiciously absent.

At any rate. London’s magical protections have been obliterated: the ravens at the Tower of London are dead, the London Stone has been destroyed, the London Wall has been cursed, and the Midnight Mayor has been killed. Matthew Swift finds himself in urgent need of finding out what’s happening and whether the death of cities really exists:

“Just a rumour, a legend. You hear stories. Stuff like . . . when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a house right in the middle of the blast, at its very heart, untouched while the rest of the city was levelled. They say that there was a man in the house, who had his face turned towards the sky as the bomb fell and who just smiled, smiled and smiled and didn’t even close his eyes. But then again, you’ve got to ask yourself . . . “

” . . . who survived that close to the bomb to tell?”

“Right. It’s always the problem with these sorts of stories. Or they say that when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there was a man who walked through the flooded streets and laughed and the water could not buffet him, or when they firebombed Dresden there was a guy untouched by the flames, or when the child tripped running into Bethnal Green station during the Blitz, that there was someone who knocked her down and climbed over the bodies piled up in the stairway. Myths. That’s all. Rumours and myths. And just in case these things aren’t scary enough on their lonesome, they just had to go and give this smiling, laughing, burning man a name, and call him the death of cities. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of it. And yes, of course I’m scared. Just in case.”

(If someone makes a “Sympathy for the Devil” joke in the book, I missed it.)

Like A Madness of Angels, this splashy high-stakes magical plot nevertheless rests on a rather intimate, personal foundation, which I enjoyed seeing unfold and resolve. I guessed the direction of the plot completely wrong, in fact, because I was working on high fantasy assumptions and this isn’t that kind of book.

If you liked the first book, I see no reason you shouldn’t like this book. It has the same great setting and inventive magic. It builds on the last book, but lightly and with plenty of reminders of what happened for those of us who didn’t re-read recently. (Also, it revisits one of my favorite scenes from the last book, the subway scene in the Prologue, in a way that made me wriggle with delight.) And it may be better at evoking emotional reactions than the last book; there were some aspects of the ending that made me sadder than aspects of the last book that were objectively more serious. (Really big spoilers, ROT-13: cbbe ybera. v qba’g xabj vs jr’yy frr ure ntnva, ohg bqn arrqf gb pbzr onpx naq trg orggre! rira gubhtu v ernyyl yvxr gung qrirybczrag, sebz n punenpgre-tebjgu fgnaqcbvag, gurer unq orggre abg or nal pbafreingvba bs xvpx-nff oynpx jbzra tbvat ba.) I look forward to the forthcoming third book (The Neon Court, March 2011; ‘ware spoilers for this book in the description of the next one, if you go looking).

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Jordan, Robert, and Brandon Sanderson: (13) Towers of Midnight

So I have finally carved out enough time to finish the latest Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight. This is the penultimate book in the series and the middle book of the three that Sanderson is completing from the work Jordan left behind, and it really feels it, in ways that makes it hard for me to give a coherent evaluation of it as a single book. In fact, my dominant impression is that this book, far more than the previous one, brings home to me just how difficult it is to conclude this series.

One of the difficulties is pacing. This book starts a little slow in that its early sections are more concerned with personal interactions than major plot events. This is entirely welcome—indeed, my mental designation for this book is “the one where people finally talk to each other, already”—and I didn’t notice it while I was reading, because it mostly flowed smoothly [*] and I was pleased at the substance, but still, from a step back, the book does take a while to get going. Similarly, Perrin’s arc, which is central to this book the way that Egwene’s was to the last, has a wheel-spinning quality early.

[*] There are still some jarring prose bits, though I noticed fewer of them here. In particular, no-one in a quasi-medieval society should ever think, “She’d been played,” when realizing that she’s been manipulated.

Yet, paradoxically, many of the events in this book also felt ever-so-slightly rushed. While it feels entirely ungrateful to complain about this when I actually stopped reading the series earlier because everything was so drawn out, I’m still not quite satisfied with the balance struck here. Which brings me back to the difficulty of concluding the series, especially one where many resolutions have been anticipated for so long. This book also stands alone less well than The Gathering Storm, which is not a surprise given that the next volume is the last and that it is effectively the middle book in the concluding trilogy.

To conclude my list of things that make me feel a little removed from the book as a whole, I think neither Jordan nor Sanderson is the writer to pull off the characterization of Rand in this book. I can see the logic behind it, but I don’t feel it emotionally, because it’s a heck of a difficult thing to convey and that level of delicacy is not something I associate with either of them.

All that said (and note I am very, very busy and sleep-deprived right now): there was a lot of really good stuff in this book. I don’t want to get too specific here, but I was very pleased with various character developments, I sniffled on occasion, I was genuinely surprised at some points [**] and creeped out at others, and I stayed up too late reading it when I really couldn’t afford to. I’m glad I read it and I’m eager for the last book, though I lean toward recommending that someone wait until next year and read the final two books back-to-back, because I suspect this one might work better that way.

[**] And not just the appearance of a very, very minor character named after me, though that was extremely surprising (and pleasing!) when people told me about it. (Early in Chapter 5, page 104 of the U.S. hardcover; Sanderson was picking some names from a list of charity donors.)

A spoiler post follows.

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