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Books read, April and May, with varying amounts of comment:
April 2012 books:
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, reread, still a lot of fun.
Birdie and the Ghosties by Jill Paton Walsh, a picture book someone recommended ages ago that the library finally sent me, a sweet riff on the idea of "second sight." (If you're the recommender, thank you.)
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip, reread. After finishing this, I decided to reread the other 2/3 of the trilogy, despite being more bothered than I remember by Raederle's father having made an arbitrary condition for her marriage when she was born (yes, the condition is a quest in the best fairy tale tradition, but I'm not sure that helps).
The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod, reread, sort of an alternate history to The Cassini Division (or vice versa, since there is no privileged "real history" between them).
Alphabet of Thorns by Patricia McKillip. This is mostly the story of Nepenthe, an orphan raised in the royal library, which has a tradition of taking in and training foundlings. She is trying to decipher a mysterious manuscript, in an unknown alphabet, that may be connected to the school of magic down the road. Nepenthe has an odd disinclination to talk about the manuscript (and realizes it's odd), and is squeezing in the work around her assigned tasks. McKillip plays with alternating narratives, one set much earlier than the other, and gradually brings them together. The impressive battles and heroic deeds are all far enough in the past that nobody in the librarian's time is sure of what happened, or when, and most don't think it matters much. The ease with which the librarians decipher unknown scripts is completely implausible, of course (Linear A, anyone?), but there's enough other magic driving the plot that it seems silly to draw the line here. Recommended if you like non-quest fantasy.
The Questing Road by Lyn McConchie. I picked this one up at Chapters on the strength of remembering the author's name from long-ago fannish correspondence and looking at a random page. It's a fun, fairly lightweight quest fantasy, complete with unpredictable travel among parallel worlds, sapient nonhumans, someone seeking revenge by summoning demons, and some of the political/historical background on the events he wants revenge for.
Something the Cat Dragged In by Charlotte MacLeod, reread; deliberately light mystery fiction, part of MacLeod's series in which the detective is a professor of agriculture known for having bred a better rutabaga; the attempts at political dirty tricks that are part of the plot here manage to seem quaint and remarkably harmless, from the viewpoint of 2012, and not just because the tech is significantly different.
V is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton. This gets off to a slow start, and I spent a while being irritated at some of the characters' really cliched "I am jealous even though I don't actually care about my husband" drama, but eventually the threads came together. Grafton is dealing with the problems of making mystery novel plots work in the present by evading it: the continuity in these is moving slowly enough that this book is explicitly set in 1988, which means cell phones aren't an issue, record-keeping systems are somewhat different, and various people are casually getting away with impersonations that would be difficult if not impossible with contemporary security systems. I'd say this is probably worth reading if you've been following the continuity, but not otherwise, and there are no major changes in Kinsey's circumstances, so you could just skip from _U is for Undertow_ to the not-yet-published W book.
Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia McKillip, reread of the second volume of the Riddle Master trilogy; there are still people doing things that don't make a lot of sense, but it's more "these characters are very confused and groping for what to do" than "what in the world is her motivation?" Raederle has rather more agency than in the previous volume, some of it achieved by sheer stubbornness. Among other things, she notes that her father vowed not to give her in marriage to anyone who didn't fulfill this arbitrary condition, but that doesn't mean she has to get married at all, even though she loves the designated groom. These books definitely have more male than female characters, but they easily pass any version of the Bechdel test. (I am now partway through the third volume.)
Ventus by Karl Schroeder: an odd and ambitious book set in a world that was terraformed some centuries in the past, and in which things went badly wrong. We, and some of the characters, slowly learn what went wrong, and how things are now being run on Ventus, and why. There's urgency to the question, as a variety of AIs are maneuvering with each other for power, and debating the proper role, if any, of humans in the world. One of the main characters was, and may still be, an agent of a tyrannical machine intelligence/group mind from another world, and is suspected of trying to recreate it on Ventus. I read this in bits over several weeks, partly because I didn't always have the iPad handy, and partly because it hit just the wrong mood one evening, so I put it aside for a while, and when I picked it up couldn't remember why it had been problematic. (Which suggests that it is good enough to have that emotional impace, though of course part of that was my own state of mind.) Recommended.
April 2012 books:
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, reread, still a lot of fun.
Birdie and the Ghosties by Jill Paton Walsh, a picture book someone recommended ages ago that the library finally sent me, a sweet riff on the idea of "second sight." (If you're the recommender, thank you.)
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip, reread. After finishing this, I decided to reread the other 2/3 of the trilogy, despite being more bothered than I remember by Raederle's father having made an arbitrary condition for her marriage when she was born (yes, the condition is a quest in the best fairy tale tradition, but I'm not sure that helps).
The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod, reread, sort of an alternate history to The Cassini Division (or vice versa, since there is no privileged "real history" between them).
Alphabet of Thorns by Patricia McKillip. This is mostly the story of Nepenthe, an orphan raised in the royal library, which has a tradition of taking in and training foundlings. She is trying to decipher a mysterious manuscript, in an unknown alphabet, that may be connected to the school of magic down the road. Nepenthe has an odd disinclination to talk about the manuscript (and realizes it's odd), and is squeezing in the work around her assigned tasks. McKillip plays with alternating narratives, one set much earlier than the other, and gradually brings them together. The impressive battles and heroic deeds are all far enough in the past that nobody in the librarian's time is sure of what happened, or when, and most don't think it matters much. The ease with which the librarians decipher unknown scripts is completely implausible, of course (Linear A, anyone?), but there's enough other magic driving the plot that it seems silly to draw the line here. Recommended if you like non-quest fantasy.
The Questing Road by Lyn McConchie. I picked this one up at Chapters on the strength of remembering the author's name from long-ago fannish correspondence and looking at a random page. It's a fun, fairly lightweight quest fantasy, complete with unpredictable travel among parallel worlds, sapient nonhumans, someone seeking revenge by summoning demons, and some of the political/historical background on the events he wants revenge for.
Something the Cat Dragged In by Charlotte MacLeod, reread; deliberately light mystery fiction, part of MacLeod's series in which the detective is a professor of agriculture known for having bred a better rutabaga; the attempts at political dirty tricks that are part of the plot here manage to seem quaint and remarkably harmless, from the viewpoint of 2012, and not just because the tech is significantly different.
V is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton. This gets off to a slow start, and I spent a while being irritated at some of the characters' really cliched "I am jealous even though I don't actually care about my husband" drama, but eventually the threads came together. Grafton is dealing with the problems of making mystery novel plots work in the present by evading it: the continuity in these is moving slowly enough that this book is explicitly set in 1988, which means cell phones aren't an issue, record-keeping systems are somewhat different, and various people are casually getting away with impersonations that would be difficult if not impossible with contemporary security systems. I'd say this is probably worth reading if you've been following the continuity, but not otherwise, and there are no major changes in Kinsey's circumstances, so you could just skip from _U is for Undertow_ to the not-yet-published W book.
Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia McKillip, reread of the second volume of the Riddle Master trilogy; there are still people doing things that don't make a lot of sense, but it's more "these characters are very confused and groping for what to do" than "what in the world is her motivation?" Raederle has rather more agency than in the previous volume, some of it achieved by sheer stubbornness. Among other things, she notes that her father vowed not to give her in marriage to anyone who didn't fulfill this arbitrary condition, but that doesn't mean she has to get married at all, even though she loves the designated groom. These books definitely have more male than female characters, but they easily pass any version of the Bechdel test. (I am now partway through the third volume.)
Ventus by Karl Schroeder: an odd and ambitious book set in a world that was terraformed some centuries in the past, and in which things went badly wrong. We, and some of the characters, slowly learn what went wrong, and how things are now being run on Ventus, and why. There's urgency to the question, as a variety of AIs are maneuvering with each other for power, and debating the proper role, if any, of humans in the world. One of the main characters was, and may still be, an agent of a tyrannical machine intelligence/group mind from another world, and is suspected of trying to recreate it on Ventus. I read this in bits over several weeks, partly because I didn't always have the iPad handy, and partly because it hit just the wrong mood one evening, so I put it aside for a while, and when I picked it up couldn't remember why it had been problematic. (Which suggests that it is good enough to have that emotional impace, though of course part of that was my own state of mind.) Recommended.
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Birdie and the Ghosties by Jill Paton Walsh, a picture book someone recommended ages ago
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It's his first novel, and I think you would enjoy reading more of his stuff.
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I've read the first four Virga books and liked them; is there anything else I should be looking for?
(For anyone else reading, they feel very different from Ventus, though they have in common being set in weird-to-us artificial worls, so I can see someone liking Ventus but not the Virga books, or vice versa.)
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