I have mostly brief notes on what I've read in the last couple of months, and the meta-note that I should probably spend more time with books and less with sudoku puzzles and games of Bubblet on my PDA. (I'm not going to bother listing rereads that I have nothing particular to say about; the total for 2009 is 63 books not counting rereads, individual short stories, or anything I decided not to finish.)
Laurie King, A Grave Talent, a good but dark mystery/detective novel, of the sort that includes quite a bit of "okay, we know they did it, how can we prove it? How can we find them again?" after the viewpoint character and her colleagues identify the killer. It's set in and around San Francisco, and the detective is a rookie cop and closeted lesbian, and part of the story is about her ongoing disagreement with her partner, who wants her to come out, partly for political reasons and partly because the partner doesn't like having to hide things, in the ways that are necessary when only one partner is out and they share a home. (Adrian, recommending this to me, told me it was a series set in the lesbian community, but even without that, the character's sexual orientation would not have come as a big surprise. Maybe to a straight reader who isn't used to the ways people can be ambiguous about the gender of their partners.) It's a little close to the thriller end of things for me to want more right away, but when I am in the mood, I will probably see what the library can do for me. Recommended, if you're in the mood/like that kind of thing, and will be okay reading fiction about tracking down a sociopath who is murdering children.
Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain. Number 2 of the Aubrey/Maturin series, which I enjoyed enough to keep going.. This is another thing that other people are more drawn to than I am, and more inclined to just hurry through large amounts of. And H.M.S. Surprise, volume 3; I posted a bit about this earlier in the year, and![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
txanne observed that she tends to treat the sailing terminology as "a subset of handwavium" rather than trying to track it. I now have volume 4, The Mauritius Command, in my daypack; reading them not-too-quickly, and ordering the next volume from the library when I finish one, may be a good system for neither losing track of stuff, nor getting over-full of the same thing. Or I may want to space them out more after a bit.
Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man. This is a biography of the physicist Paul Dirac; I think I was pointed to this by a review in Science. It's very good, very thorough, and sometimes still feels as though something is missing, because Dirac was very hard to get close to, for anyone. That leaves less to be gleaned by talking to his colleagues and family. The book is also good on the science Dirac was working on, and on some of the politics related to that: the complications of working with people in the Soviet Union, for a British scientist in the 1930s and 1940s; the effects of Naziism and the War on Dirac's family; and the effects of the Cold War on physics and physicists. In the last chapter, Farmelo discusses the possibility that Dirac was on the autistic spectrum, and is very clear that the question simply isn't answerable at this distance. However, one of the things he points out as evidence in favor is that while Dirac had few friends, he fought hard for one of them, who he perceived as having been wronged. (Can I believe Farmelo that the latter is, in fact, typical of autists and Aspies, moreso than of the rest of us?)
Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed, reread after several years. This is first contact/exploration, in which the Terran envoy finds herself feeling more and more connected to the aliens who is traveling among. This is partly her job, and partly that she is an empath (sort of hand-wavy psi stuff here), which is considered an advantage in that job, though the government recognizes that the work is hard on empaths. She runs into problems because of that empathy: she forgets, not so much that they aren't human, as that their emotions and motivations aren't. The world-building is good, with ambiguity that makes sense because we're seeing what Christie sees, limited both inherently and because people have reasons not to tell her everything. However, there are too damned many apostrophes and italics in the text: too many words like "t'an" which I suppose would look more alien as a title than plain "tan," and too many alien words, including things like plant-names, that are in italics over and over. It doesn't make me think "alien language," it makes me think "you already introduced this word. And used it over and over." [I recall that one should avoid the sequel; I held off on this reread long enough to not really remember the book, so I can't tell you why the sequel can ruin this novel for you. I am not asking for an explanation here, since it might contain Too Much Information.]
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky I enjoyed this, and suspect I read at least part of it quite a while ago, because it had a bit of the "reread" feeling. This is a weird romp, not something I'd read for characterization. This isn't exactly "beware inexplicable gifts and information from the sky," because the people who try to avoid them don't do much better, and of course a starving peasant boy who picks up a telephone that offers anything he can think of is going to want food for his family. Chunks of plot are driven by the Echelon, a deliberately-mysterious entity that can travel in time and whose one and only absolute rule is Thou Shalt Not Meddle with My Past Light-Cone; characters are, or think they are, trying to serve its ends, and others are trying to make an end-run around the rules.
Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller. Reread. This was very odd: I remember liking this, and finding it very funny, years ago. Enough so that I read a bunch more of Holt's play-with-old-myth stuff, and enjoyed it, though after a few I got the feeling he'd run out of steam, or used the stories that were best suited for this. This time around, it wasn't funny. This isn't a case of noticing offensive assumptions, or of not finding the word "booger" funny anymore: I mostly couldn't even identify what had been funny. Instead, it's just a mildly interesting story of someone who accidentally kills the then-owner of the Ring of the Nibelungen and has to learn how to deal with owning that and the tarnhelm. And lots of stuff about his dysfunctional family, and Odin's dysfunctional family, and it just didn't click at all, in part because his background wasn't believable: the parents have no motivation for their behavior other than "let's create an insecure nebbish," which may be the author's motivation but isn't plausible as theirs. (This is all before-the-story and offstage, so maybe in some other mood I'd have filled it in in some way that worked for the story.)
Mike Carey, Vicious Circle, second in a series, a bit more noir than I tend to go for. I enjoyed it, but if I don't get around to reading any more (rysmiel tells me they're not in print in the U.S.) I don't think I'll mind.
Laurie King, A Grave Talent, a good but dark mystery/detective novel, of the sort that includes quite a bit of "okay, we know they did it, how can we prove it? How can we find them again?" after the viewpoint character and her colleagues identify the killer. It's set in and around San Francisco, and the detective is a rookie cop and closeted lesbian, and part of the story is about her ongoing disagreement with her partner, who wants her to come out, partly for political reasons and partly because the partner doesn't like having to hide things, in the ways that are necessary when only one partner is out and they share a home. (Adrian, recommending this to me, told me it was a series set in the lesbian community, but even without that, the character's sexual orientation would not have come as a big surprise. Maybe to a straight reader who isn't used to the ways people can be ambiguous about the gender of their partners.) It's a little close to the thriller end of things for me to want more right away, but when I am in the mood, I will probably see what the library can do for me. Recommended, if you're in the mood/like that kind of thing, and will be okay reading fiction about tracking down a sociopath who is murdering children.
Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain. Number 2 of the Aubrey/Maturin series, which I enjoyed enough to keep going.. This is another thing that other people are more drawn to than I am, and more inclined to just hurry through large amounts of. And H.M.S. Surprise, volume 3; I posted a bit about this earlier in the year, and
txanne observed that she tends to treat the sailing terminology as "a subset of handwavium" rather than trying to track it. I now have volume 4, The Mauritius Command, in my daypack; reading them not-too-quickly, and ordering the next volume from the library when I finish one, may be a good system for neither losing track of stuff, nor getting over-full of the same thing. Or I may want to space them out more after a bit.Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man. This is a biography of the physicist Paul Dirac; I think I was pointed to this by a review in Science. It's very good, very thorough, and sometimes still feels as though something is missing, because Dirac was very hard to get close to, for anyone. That leaves less to be gleaned by talking to his colleagues and family. The book is also good on the science Dirac was working on, and on some of the politics related to that: the complications of working with people in the Soviet Union, for a British scientist in the 1930s and 1940s; the effects of Naziism and the War on Dirac's family; and the effects of the Cold War on physics and physicists. In the last chapter, Farmelo discusses the possibility that Dirac was on the autistic spectrum, and is very clear that the question simply isn't answerable at this distance. However, one of the things he points out as evidence in favor is that while Dirac had few friends, he fought hard for one of them, who he perceived as having been wronged. (Can I believe Farmelo that the latter is, in fact, typical of autists and Aspies, moreso than of the rest of us?)
Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed, reread after several years. This is first contact/exploration, in which the Terran envoy finds herself feeling more and more connected to the aliens who is traveling among. This is partly her job, and partly that she is an empath (sort of hand-wavy psi stuff here), which is considered an advantage in that job, though the government recognizes that the work is hard on empaths. She runs into problems because of that empathy: she forgets, not so much that they aren't human, as that their emotions and motivations aren't. The world-building is good, with ambiguity that makes sense because we're seeing what Christie sees, limited both inherently and because people have reasons not to tell her everything. However, there are too damned many apostrophes and italics in the text: too many words like "t'an" which I suppose would look more alien as a title than plain "tan," and too many alien words, including things like plant-names, that are in italics over and over. It doesn't make me think "alien language," it makes me think "you already introduced this word. And used it over and over." [I recall that one should avoid the sequel; I held off on this reread long enough to not really remember the book, so I can't tell you why the sequel can ruin this novel for you. I am not asking for an explanation here, since it might contain Too Much Information.]
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky I enjoyed this, and suspect I read at least part of it quite a while ago, because it had a bit of the "reread" feeling. This is a weird romp, not something I'd read for characterization. This isn't exactly "beware inexplicable gifts and information from the sky," because the people who try to avoid them don't do much better, and of course a starving peasant boy who picks up a telephone that offers anything he can think of is going to want food for his family. Chunks of plot are driven by the Echelon, a deliberately-mysterious entity that can travel in time and whose one and only absolute rule is Thou Shalt Not Meddle with My Past Light-Cone; characters are, or think they are, trying to serve its ends, and others are trying to make an end-run around the rules.
Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller. Reread. This was very odd: I remember liking this, and finding it very funny, years ago. Enough so that I read a bunch more of Holt's play-with-old-myth stuff, and enjoyed it, though after a few I got the feeling he'd run out of steam, or used the stories that were best suited for this. This time around, it wasn't funny. This isn't a case of noticing offensive assumptions, or of not finding the word "booger" funny anymore: I mostly couldn't even identify what had been funny. Instead, it's just a mildly interesting story of someone who accidentally kills the then-owner of the Ring of the Nibelungen and has to learn how to deal with owning that and the tarnhelm. And lots of stuff about his dysfunctional family, and Odin's dysfunctional family, and it just didn't click at all, in part because his background wasn't believable: the parents have no motivation for their behavior other than "let's create an insecure nebbish," which may be the author's motivation but isn't plausible as theirs. (This is all before-the-story and offstage, so maybe in some other mood I'd have filled it in in some way that worked for the story.)
Mike Carey, Vicious Circle, second in a series, a bit more noir than I tend to go for. I enjoyed it, but if I don't get around to reading any more (
rysmiel tells me they're not in print in the U.S.) I don't think I'll mind.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Many neurotypical people project their own bewilderment with autistic body language into the minds of the autistics. While autistic folks may be unable or unwilling to follow the rules regarding eye-gaze, facial expressions, and casual body-contact, that doesn't mean they don't love their friends. And given the hostility many autistics experience--whether it's torment from school peers or "therapeutic interventions" which include electric shocks and pepper sprays--true friends are indeed dear.
I believe true friends are important to all of us, nu?
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While you're thinking in this direction, you may want to download the free version of Mobipocket.
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsReader.asP
Your library seems to have a bunch of mysteries available in that format. I don't know if the file disappears after 2 weeks, but with a library book it would make sense.
I had the same experience with Tom Holt. He used to be outrageously funny, and then the same books stopped working for me. I think I'm just too old to appreciate his humor, like I'm too old to appreciate most knock-knock or elephant jokes. (Only I feel pleasantly mature about the knock-knock jokes, and unpleasantly old about Tom Holt's jokes. YMMV.) It may be a tradeoff for the books I was too young for until the last 5-10 years. (And, of course, those I am still too young for.)
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