Author: katenepveu

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Robb, J.D.: (28) Promises in Death

The most recent novel from J.D. Robb, Promises in Death, opens with a murder that strikes close to home: the victim is Amaryllis Coltraine, a cop and the lover of Chief Medical Examiner Morris.

Despite the more personal nature of this case, this book fell somewhat flat for me. It may just have been that, reading it at three in the morning as I did, I couldn’t suspend disbelief enough: I couldn’t pretend that there was a chance that Morris wouldn’t get justice and start healing, and so there wasn’t very much suspense. I realize that this could be said about basically every entry in the series, so it was probably me, not the book.

(Though it didn’t help that the charming quirks of Morris’s personality get suppressed by his role as the grieving loved one.)

Also, apparently this book was not copy-edited, otherwise a sentence like “Art radiated from the walls in an eclectic mix from bold, bright colors and odd shapes to elegant pencil drawings of naked women in various stages of undress” would never have been published.

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Duane, Diane: (108) Wizards at War (audio)

I really enjoy Christina Moore’s narration of Diane Duane’s Young Wizardry series, but didn’t want to listen to the next ones in the series, The Wizard’s Dilemma and A Wizard Alone, for personal reasons. And I didn’t much like the next, Wizard’s Holiday. So I decided to just skip to the eighth and presently-last book in the series, Wizards at War.

Moore does her usual astonishing job of narration, moving effortlessly between distinct and extremely appropriate voices for all manner of species. And I’d remembered almost nothing about this book, so it was also a suspenseful listen. Anyway, after listening and then looking back at what I said on my first read of the book, I stand by those comments, with the additional grump that the ending strikes me as coming at too low a price.

On the other hand, this listen also prompted me to look up what else Moore has narrated (answer: unfortunately not much I want to listen to except maybe Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters; apparently she is also on the new 90210) and what the status of Duane’s writing is (answer: no idea, none of her web pages seem to have been updated for half a year or more), so that was also a plus.

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Ariely, Dan: Predictably Irrational (audio)

Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, is a popular-level look at behavioral economics, the relatively recent field of study that examines how people actually make decisions, instead of assuming, as economics traditionally has, that people act rationally. As numerous behavioral economics experiments have demonstrated, people often act in ways that are, as the title says, both irrational and predictably so. Thus, for instance, people can be shown to buy things they don’t actually want just to get something “free,” or to pay arbitrary amounts for things related to random numbers like the last digits of their Social Security Numbers.

The book is generally a fun, engaging, and convincing description of the research findings regarding people’s irrational tendencies. It is somewhat less successful when it suggests ways to combat those tendencies. The worst of these is when Ariely suggests that to make people keep medical screening appointments, they should be forced to put down $100+ deposits. This strikes me as an incredibly efficient way of making sure that the poor get even worse health care than they currently do, or, put more concisely, my, what astonishing class bias you have.

My annoyance with that particular “suggestion” was probably exacerbated by the reader of the audiobook version, Simon Jones, who is British and whose voice I found just a touch snooty—giving an extra dash of condescension to this American ear. Otherwise, Jones generally gives a smooth and accessible reading, though I probably would have preferred to read this book.

You can find out more about Ariely’s research at www.predictablyirrational.com.

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Liu, Marjorie M.: (02) Shadow Touch

A while back, I read the first of Marjorie M. Liu’s Dirk and Steele paranormal romance series, Tiger Eye. I enjoyed that well enough to stock up on the next several books in the series as light reading during my pregnancy, and then of course never got around to reading any of them. Recently, however, I needed something light, fast, and fun, and picked up the second book, Shadow Touch.

I believe the general consensus is that this is a better place to start the series and a better book generally, and I agree wholeheartedly. Elena’s touch can heal; Artur’s touch forces him to experience the emotional history of people or objects. They meet as captives of a shadowy organization. Together, they try to escape, fall in love, and, yes, fight crime.

This is full of fierce funny characters, fast-paced cracktastic action, and tasty tasty angst: just the thing for taking one’s mind off other stuff at three in the morning. It also has the start of a long-term plot arc that opens up the world established in the first book, which now seems rather like a series prologue to me. I had altogether too much fun reading this, and while some of that may be the delight of finding exactly what I was in the mood for, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. I look forward to reading more of Liu’s work as the mood calls for.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc.

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Fox, Daniel: Dragon in Chains

I have extremely mixed feelings about Daniel Fox’s Dragon in Chains, the first book of a fantasy trilogy. A teenaged emperor flees from a rebel army all the way to an island at the edge of his empire. However, the island is the source of the empire’s jade and thus vital to control of the empire. Meanwhile, a dragon lies chained under the straits separating the mainland from the island—but her chains have been broken and only hastily and weakly reforged.

On one hand, I found the book’s prose lovely, much more distinctive than many books I enjoy. (An excerpt is on the author’s website.) The prose, situations, and many of the characters kept me reading steadily, to the point that, three-quarters of the way through, something happened and I said, “Oh! There’s the plot!”—but I hadn’t missed it until then. And it’s nice to have something other than a bog-standard medievaloid European world.

On the other, the author is a British writer who fell in love with Taiwan and wanted to write about Taiwan’s history and relationship with the People’s Republic of China, except with empires and magic (see this interview). First, this immediately raises questions of cultural appropriation in my mind, and I just don’t know enough about Chinese culture generally or Taiwan specifically to spot anything subtly problematic. I do think that there’s a good range of characters and a distinct lack of outside saviors; the portrayal of the dragon strikes me as possibly unusual for Chinese-derived mythologies, but there may be more about her in the next books that would clarify.

Second, my first reaction to the story, prior to knowing the author’s inspiration, was that the political aspects were disappointingly black-and-white. The emperor is benevolent and tolerates a great deal from his peasant concubine, while the rebel leader is mustache-twirlingly ruthless; I felt that they collectively were the least nuanced characters in the book and drained the overall plot of complexity. Now I’m wondering if I was supposed to bring real-world politics into the story and view it through that lens, and indeed if the story only works for readers who do that.

Another issue I had is that there are at least three major relationships where one person had no choice about entering into the relationship. Two of these are sexual, and all of them, to me, display varying degrees of Stockholm syndrome—which I don’t feel the narrative presents as being as much of a problem as I consider it. Again, this may be resolved by later books, but I don’t know how much trust to place in this new-to-me author.

Finally, there are several points at which the trilogy-opening nature of the book is quite apparent. There’s one excellent sequence of a woman trying to get her family out of a city that’s being overrun by soldiers, which I found hard to look away from and harder to shake mentally, and which then more-or-less vanishes in what I hope is a “watch this space for the sequel” kind of way. The book also ends by wrapping one arc and diving headlong into another. Your tolerance for this kind of thing may vary.

So, like I said, very mixed feelings. There’s much that’s good about this book, and there’s much that could be good or could be awful, depending. I guess I’ll just have to see what my tolerance for risk is like when the sequel is published, or maybe just wait for the whole thing to be done and decide then.

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Christie, Agatha: Elephants Can Remember (radio play)

I’d gotten so far behind in logging BBC radio play adaptations of Agatha Christie novels that I just gave up and stopped putting them on the blog. But I just finished Elephants Can Remember, an adaptation of the Poirot novel where a prospective mother-in-law asks Mrs. Oliver whether her god-daughter’s mother killed her father and then committed suicide, or was it the other way around? And I had to warn people that it contains not only an absolutely infuriating view of adoption, but a remarkably stupid position on nature v. nurture, not that any of the characters seem to notice. Emphatically not recommended.

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Buckell, Tobias S.: (03) Sly Mongoose

Tobias S. Buckell’s Sly Mongoose is set after Ragamuffin and is perhaps a bit more of a series book than previous installments. Like Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose is a solidly fun SF story with some interesting things to say about power, prejudice, and responsibility.

The book opens with Pepper, a character in the prior two books, de-orbiting the planet Chilo with nothing more than a spacesuit and a personal heatshield. He brings warning of the Swarm, which he calls “groaning, stumbling, dumb-as-fuck, old-school zombies.” Except, well, they’re actually even more dangerous than that.

The other point of view character is Timas. Chilo’s population live in cloud cities, floating above the killing temperatures and pressures at the surface of the Venus-like environment. His ancestors were Azteca on New Anegada who Reformed (disavowed human sacrifice) and left when it was revealed that their gods were actually aliens. Timas’s city survives on materials mined from the surface, but because they’ve fallen on hard economic times, they cannot afford new powered suits for the surface work. Only young men like Timas can fit into the equipment that remains, a position of honor, privilege, and overwhelming responsibility. But that doesn’t ensure that anyone in his xenophobic society will listen when he thinks he sees an alien on the surface.

So: deorbiting without a spaceship, cloud cities, zombies, Reformed Azteca, and mysterious hidden aliens—and that’s just in the first two sections. There’s lots more fun SFnal goodness along the way, plus the aforementioned thematic considerations, and a sense that the universe is continuing to expand and complicate. And lest this summary give the wrong impression, there are two major female characters whose portrayal I was eventually quite pleased by.

My only negative comment is that Pepper occasionally gives me an appeal of the lawless elite twinge of misgiving. Yes, it’s quite clear that he’s not a nice person, but I think it’s also clear that he’s supposed to be cool, so . . .

I’d say read Ragamuffin first, but if you liked that, definitely read this one too.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc, a LiveJournal community for people who are attempting to read fifty books by people of color in a year. My reasons for participating are the same as Rachel M Brown’s, given here. I will tag books read for the challenge and also provide links to the cross-postings, because I am anal-retentive like that.

Also, I have decreed that this series is to be known as the Forty-Eight Worlds series, because I have to file it under something, until the author says differently.

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Brockmann, Suzanne: (14) Dark of Night

Suzanne Brockmann’s latest hardcover, Dark of Night, finally wraps a long-running arc in a way that I enjoyed quite a bit. It is a tight follow-up to Into the Fire, and as a result, I’m not sure how much to say about it. I mean, yes, its jacket copy does contain the big spoiler from the end of Fire—so don’t read it if you haven’t read Fire yet!—but Fire only came out last summer and isn’t out in paperback yet. I think I can say that the arc in question is the one that started in Flashpoint, which, really, is probably sufficient for fans of the series. And the action plot is very hard to put down, even though I suspect it doesn’t actually make sense in spots. (Also, I didn’t believe that certain characters were in genuine jeopardy, because the number of pages devoted to said jeopardy was not proportional to the characters’ importance in the series, which is one of the downsides of long open-ended series.)

As for non-plot issues: I was impressed that I finally liked Decker, who I’ve previously found tedious. I think the prologue is one of Brockmann’s more effective pieces of writing. And even though this is the book in which Dave gets to be a bad-ass, I wish all the characters didn’t take it on faith that he would never betray anyone under torture, since it’s my understanding that no matter how bad-ass you are, eventually you talk, whether or not you actually have the information being sought.

I suspect Brockmann is getting a lot of flack over certain developments in this book, but I thought they worked very well and continue to appreciate her determination to write the stories she wants, rather than the ones she thinks people expect.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (18) The Yellow Admiral (audio)

I returned to listening to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series with the eighteenth book, The Yellow Admiral. This is a relatively low-key standalone episode, with an extensive land-based section early that sets up the plot for the rest of the book. The characters continue to change in response to personal obstacles, there’s a few nice set-pieces, and the ending promises interesting things to come. (Since I only have two full books left in the series, I exercised willpower and did not immediately start the next one.) I will say, though, that the extensive speeches in praise of a particular kind of traditional English life struck me as unusual for the series, almost intrusively so. But then, I tend to be suspicious of nostalgia.

A spoiler post follows.

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