Books read, November (defined broadly). Possible spoilers for Ilario and Unseen Academicals.
Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace was fun to read, but it felt like cotton candy: family relationships and magic horses and some connection to the world the Vlad books are set in, but Brust has done much better. For Brust completists, and I suppose if you're particularly enamored of buildings as symbolism.
Mary Gentle: Ilario: the Stone Golem is the second of two closely-connected books (the sort where the break point, while logical, seems to owe as much to the realities of bookbinding, rather than this and Ilario: the Lion's Eye being two connected books about the same person. Books are a large part of what this one is about, books and libraries and the effort to preserve knowledge, while other people are studying new things: new ways of painting, golems, and the printing press. I had an ongoing discussion with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel while I was reading this, odd because rysmiel hasn't read this and isn't likely to, but was interested in what I was saying about the ways Gentle was doing not-exactly-alternate history. Gutenberg is a major character, and Zheng Ho turns up in the Mediterranean and is persuaded to present himself as a new and powerful ally of the Pharaoh-Queen of Alexandria-in-Exile (a.k.a. Constantinople), and Iberia is fragmented in a way that makes sense in a world where there's no Reconquista because there is no Islam. At the same time, there's an unexplained curse of eternal night over a part of North Africa, with strange stars seen when it is day outside the Penitence; and the Catholic Church manages as best it can without a pope, decade after decade, because the office is cursed; and the major doctrinal dispute in Christianity seems to be over whether Judas should be revered as a saint or vilified as a traitor.) I have no idea of whether anyone else will like this; it resembles Ash, and not just in the background/world, but is less bloody and has no framing story linking it to our reality.
Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals: another Discworld book, a reasonably good one, but not a place to start unless you think football (soccer) improves any story. In between the "hey, let's put on a football match!" stuff (with a completely arbitrary reason for reviving a sport banned because of hooliganism) and cameos by huge numbers of characters from previous books, there's a self-made orc trying desperately to avoid anyone noticing that he's an orc, or otherwise standing out. There are two women who work in the kitchen, one of whom spends a lot of time running her very small corner of things, regretting the lack of pies or other cooking in formula romance, and reflexively squashing her own and her friend and co-worker's impulses to do anything interesting or that might get them out of where they are.
About 90 minutes after finishing this one, I wandered over to Tor.com, read Arachne Jericho's review, and left a comment disagreeing with large parts of it. Unlike Arachne, I don't think Pratchett meant us to think of Glenda is incredibly smart, but as a reasonably intelligent woman fighting umpteen years of "it's not done" and "be reasonable" and "that's not for the likes of us." Both she and Trevor Likely, a working-class man who is devoted to football and promised his mother he wouldn't play because it killed his father, have definite "I don't have to stay in this rut" realizations, which Pratchett handles well, I think. And the character who could be read as "pretty airhead" isn't stupid, it's just that any time she tried to learn anything some well-meaning person said "let me do that for you" instead of letting her try. She's smart enough to take a better job when it's offered, and not be completely swept away by glamor.
Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking: Quick, often funny, memoir of a celebrity upbringing with an absent father and of mental illness, addiction, and treatment. There's a "did that happen to you?" joking no-of-course-not on things like "seeing my father more often on television than in real life." The book includes some good serious lines as well as the funny: for example, that the difference between a problem and an inconvenience is that a problem derails your life, and an inconvenience is not getting a good seat on the derailed train. Fisher also notes that being awake for several days (in her case because the doctors decided to take her off her meds) can lead to paranoia, and if you must watch television in that state, avoid CNN at all costs. We also get the idea of people being "related by scandal." (I grabbed this more or less randomly from the "new books" display at my library, because I'd heard good things about the stage show version.)
Aaron Elkins, Uneasy Relations: series mystery of the amateur detective sort, in this case a forensic archeologist. This book takes Dr. Oliver and his wife to Gibraltar to attend a conference celebrating and discussing the fifth anniversary of a major discovery about Neandertals; fairly early, Oliver suspects someone is trying to kill him, and becomes suspicious of the accidental death of another archeologist working on the site a couple of years after the major discover. I enjoyed this and will likely read more.
Mike Carey, The Devil You Know. Noir detective fiction, a slightly-alternate world in which ghosts, and other dead, have started appearing in our world; the hero is an exorcist. Except, it being noir, a wants-to-be-retired exorcist, with strong emotional reasons for that retirement. Good, and not just "if you like that sort of thing" because neither noir fiction nor ghosts, demons, and such are my usual thing.
Patricia Wrede, Dealing with Dragons: A YA novel about a princess, Cimerene, in a fairy-tale world full of tiny kingdoms, princes and princesses and advisors, and rigid expectations. For starters, she was supposed to be blond, because all princesses are. And she's not interested in any of the extremely limited things she's expected to do, including etiquette and embroidery, and every time she tries to learn anything she finds interesting, from sword-fighting to Latin to cooking, someone stops her, explaining "It's not done." Rather than marry a boring prince someone has selected for her, Cimerene runs off and becomes a dragon's princess, which, oddly, is respectable for a princess, though volunteering is unusual and she has to stop the prince from rescuing her.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrian_turtle read this aloud to me, a chapter at a time, over a few months. Wrede has a lot of fun with this; it's full of places with names like The Caves of Fire and Night, and a witch who we first meet when Cimerene borrows her saute pan. (Adrian has started reading me the sequel, which I'm not enjoying as much, I think because as of two chapters, there's no sign of Cimerene, only a mention of Kazul, the dragon whose princess she is.)
Emma Lathen, Sweet and Low, series mystery from a second-hand shop; this time the amateur detective is a banker. I read a chunk of these a few years ago. They're from the 1960s and 1970s, and it shows, both in obvious ways of cultural change, and odd moments. In a previous book, set in the late 1960s, the banker (Thatcher, a name with no specific resonance when Lathen was writing, in the U.S.) calls the police to report a bomb threat, and is surprised at the matter-of-fact "you'll want the bomb squad," because he hadn't known there was such a thing. This time, I almost bounced right off the book in paragraph 2, because Lathen is talking about mountains impressing people very differently than even the largest of artificial structures: "But mountains have a better reputation than other high rises. Say Everest or Jungfrau, and you conjure up men to match them; say World Trade Center, and you evoke automatons mistaking profit for enrichment." Entirely reasonable for her to have written, in 1974, but startling in 2009. That aside, it's reasonably crafted, and plausible, though I wouldn't suggest reading it for the characterization; even the continuing characters are cardboard.
Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace was fun to read, but it felt like cotton candy: family relationships and magic horses and some connection to the world the Vlad books are set in, but Brust has done much better. For Brust completists, and I suppose if you're particularly enamored of buildings as symbolism.
Mary Gentle: Ilario: the Stone Golem is the second of two closely-connected books (the sort where the break point, while logical, seems to owe as much to the realities of bookbinding, rather than this and Ilario: the Lion's Eye being two connected books about the same person. Books are a large part of what this one is about, books and libraries and the effort to preserve knowledge, while other people are studying new things: new ways of painting, golems, and the printing press. I had an ongoing discussion with
rysmiel while I was reading this, odd because rysmiel hasn't read this and isn't likely to, but was interested in what I was saying about the ways Gentle was doing not-exactly-alternate history. Gutenberg is a major character, and Zheng Ho turns up in the Mediterranean and is persuaded to present himself as a new and powerful ally of the Pharaoh-Queen of Alexandria-in-Exile (a.k.a. Constantinople), and Iberia is fragmented in a way that makes sense in a world where there's no Reconquista because there is no Islam. At the same time, there's an unexplained curse of eternal night over a part of North Africa, with strange stars seen when it is day outside the Penitence; and the Catholic Church manages as best it can without a pope, decade after decade, because the office is cursed; and the major doctrinal dispute in Christianity seems to be over whether Judas should be revered as a saint or vilified as a traitor.) I have no idea of whether anyone else will like this; it resembles Ash, and not just in the background/world, but is less bloody and has no framing story linking it to our reality.Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals: another Discworld book, a reasonably good one, but not a place to start unless you think football (soccer) improves any story. In between the "hey, let's put on a football match!" stuff (with a completely arbitrary reason for reviving a sport banned because of hooliganism) and cameos by huge numbers of characters from previous books, there's a self-made orc trying desperately to avoid anyone noticing that he's an orc, or otherwise standing out. There are two women who work in the kitchen, one of whom spends a lot of time running her very small corner of things, regretting the lack of pies or other cooking in formula romance, and reflexively squashing her own and her friend and co-worker's impulses to do anything interesting or that might get them out of where they are.
About 90 minutes after finishing this one, I wandered over to Tor.com, read Arachne Jericho's review, and left a comment disagreeing with large parts of it. Unlike Arachne, I don't think Pratchett meant us to think of Glenda is incredibly smart, but as a reasonably intelligent woman fighting umpteen years of "it's not done" and "be reasonable" and "that's not for the likes of us." Both she and Trevor Likely, a working-class man who is devoted to football and promised his mother he wouldn't play because it killed his father, have definite "I don't have to stay in this rut" realizations, which Pratchett handles well, I think. And the character who could be read as "pretty airhead" isn't stupid, it's just that any time she tried to learn anything some well-meaning person said "let me do that for you" instead of letting her try. She's smart enough to take a better job when it's offered, and not be completely swept away by glamor.
Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking: Quick, often funny, memoir of a celebrity upbringing with an absent father and of mental illness, addiction, and treatment. There's a "did that happen to you?" joking no-of-course-not on things like "seeing my father more often on television than in real life." The book includes some good serious lines as well as the funny: for example, that the difference between a problem and an inconvenience is that a problem derails your life, and an inconvenience is not getting a good seat on the derailed train. Fisher also notes that being awake for several days (in her case because the doctors decided to take her off her meds) can lead to paranoia, and if you must watch television in that state, avoid CNN at all costs. We also get the idea of people being "related by scandal." (I grabbed this more or less randomly from the "new books" display at my library, because I'd heard good things about the stage show version.)
Aaron Elkins, Uneasy Relations: series mystery of the amateur detective sort, in this case a forensic archeologist. This book takes Dr. Oliver and his wife to Gibraltar to attend a conference celebrating and discussing the fifth anniversary of a major discovery about Neandertals; fairly early, Oliver suspects someone is trying to kill him, and becomes suspicious of the accidental death of another archeologist working on the site a couple of years after the major discover. I enjoyed this and will likely read more.
Mike Carey, The Devil You Know. Noir detective fiction, a slightly-alternate world in which ghosts, and other dead, have started appearing in our world; the hero is an exorcist. Except, it being noir, a wants-to-be-retired exorcist, with strong emotional reasons for that retirement. Good, and not just "if you like that sort of thing" because neither noir fiction nor ghosts, demons, and such are my usual thing.
Patricia Wrede, Dealing with Dragons: A YA novel about a princess, Cimerene, in a fairy-tale world full of tiny kingdoms, princes and princesses and advisors, and rigid expectations. For starters, she was supposed to be blond, because all princesses are. And she's not interested in any of the extremely limited things she's expected to do, including etiquette and embroidery, and every time she tries to learn anything she finds interesting, from sword-fighting to Latin to cooking, someone stops her, explaining "It's not done." Rather than marry a boring prince someone has selected for her, Cimerene runs off and becomes a dragon's princess, which, oddly, is respectable for a princess, though volunteering is unusual and she has to stop the prince from rescuing her.
adrian_turtle read this aloud to me, a chapter at a time, over a few months. Wrede has a lot of fun with this; it's full of places with names like The Caves of Fire and Night, and a witch who we first meet when Cimerene borrows her saute pan. (Adrian has started reading me the sequel, which I'm not enjoying as much, I think because as of two chapters, there's no sign of Cimerene, only a mention of Kazul, the dragon whose princess she is.)Emma Lathen, Sweet and Low, series mystery from a second-hand shop; this time the amateur detective is a banker. I read a chunk of these a few years ago. They're from the 1960s and 1970s, and it shows, both in obvious ways of cultural change, and odd moments. In a previous book, set in the late 1960s, the banker (Thatcher, a name with no specific resonance when Lathen was writing, in the U.S.) calls the police to report a bomb threat, and is surprised at the matter-of-fact "you'll want the bomb squad," because he hadn't known there was such a thing. This time, I almost bounced right off the book in paragraph 2, because Lathen is talking about mountains impressing people very differently than even the largest of artificial structures: "But mountains have a better reputation than other high rises. Say Everest or Jungfrau, and you conjure up men to match them; say World Trade Center, and you evoke automatons mistaking profit for enrichment." Entirely reasonable for her to have written, in 1974, but startling in 2009. That aside, it's reasonably crafted, and plausible, though I wouldn't suggest reading it for the characterization; even the continuing characters are cardboard.
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From:
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Yes, absolutely. Glenda is a very recognisable British working-class "type" - I don't think she's supposed to strike the reader as all that unusual.
From:
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Is this the first of a series it is important to read in order?
And she's not interested in any of the extremely limited things she's expected to do, including etiquette and embroidery, and every time she tries to learn anything she finds interesting, from sword-fighting to Latin to cooking, someone stops her, explaining "It's not done." Rather than marry a boring prince someone has selected for her, Cimerene runs off and becomes a dragon's princess, which, oddly, is respectable for a princess, though volunteering is unusual and she has to stop the prince from rescuing her.
There's nothing at all odd about a princess in a fairy tale being carried off by a dragon, and held captive in the dragon's lair until a prince rescues her. It's one of the perfectly conventional ways for a fairy-tale princess to be courted by a fairy-tale prince (either of whom may have grown up with or without knowledge of their true heritage and destiny, of course.) The remarkable thing is that these characters have evolved self-awareness. They KNOW they are living in fairy tales, and try to work with those boundaries. (That makes it very interesting that being "stubborn as a pig" doesn't turn our heroine into a witch [even a helpful witch] or show up as something that needs to change for her to be a better princess. She's just a stubborn princess all the way through.)
(Adrian has started reading me the sequel, which I'm not enjoying as much, I think because as of two chapters, there's no sign of Cimerene, only a mention of Kazul, the dragon whose princess she is.)
Don't worry. Cimorene will turn up again in a little while.
"But mountains have a better reputation than other high rises. Say Everest or Jungfrau, and you conjure up men to match them; say World Trade Center, and you evoke automatons mistaking profit for enrichment." Entirely reasonable for her to have written, in 1974, but startling in 2009.
Er...um...yes. Indeed. Even in 1999, I think I might have found it jarring, just reading it as a city person. Substituting other big structures (Empire State Building, Sears Tower, Taipei 101) tend to bounce me away in a different way, just because I'm thinking:
"I am not part of that 'you' evoking automatons mistaking profit for enrichment. To my mind, great buildings conjure up the people who designed and built them. Nor do I conjure up great men to match mountains. We look at mountains. Maybe we stand on them, or make pictures. They are still mountains."