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Recent reading:
Rex Stout, And Four to Go. I thought I'd read all the Nero Wolfe books, but I think this one was new to me. It's a collection of four novellas, none of them impressive. "Easter Parade" does odd things with Wolfe's orchid obsession, and contains some anti-Asian racism, what feels like a mix of Wolfe (and the author) being aware of how that racism affected a Chinese-American woman, and Archie's literal and straightforward use of "inscrutable." (Authors aren't responsible for the opinions of their characters, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether they share them.) An character's actions being with both Wolfe telling one character that he understands that she knew the police wouldn. There's one ("Fourth of July Picnic") that's more Wolfe-tricks-the-killer than usual one where he and Archie Goodwin figure out who did it, but learn the motive in Wolfe's usual meeting of all the suspects. "Christmas Party" is layers of deceit, including Goodwin and Wolfe lying to each other, but didn't quite work for me.
Steven Brust, Vallista. This is the fifteenth of the Vlad Taltos/Jhereg books, and not a good starting point—a lot of it assumes the reader knows who people are, and what happened in many of the previous books. The story starts when Devera finds Vlad and says something like "Uncle Vlad, help me" before vanishing, leaving him trying to figure out what's going on, how, and why, in a building that makes Escher's "Relativity" seem straightforward. (Slightly grumpy spoilers here: ("Figuring out" doesn't quite seem to fit, since he gets significant parts of this because the goddess Verra decides to tell him what the house is, and why the Vallista have spent thousands of years trying to build it, or something like it. I think I liked these better when it wasn't both "this person is Important because of his birth"--a trope that I am tired of in general--and nontrivial amounts of divine intervention. Adding explicit "this world, and the nature of the Dragaerans, are an experiment by the Jenoine" doesn't help, even though it's consistemt with what Brust has been doing.
Brust has said there will be 17 of these, which leaves two after this, and I'm not sure where he's going to take it from here (which I think is a good sign).
Current reading:
The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
So Far So Good, by Ursula Le Guin
Rex Stout, And Four to Go. I thought I'd read all the Nero Wolfe books, but I think this one was new to me. It's a collection of four novellas, none of them impressive. "Easter Parade" does odd things with Wolfe's orchid obsession, and contains some anti-Asian racism, what feels like a mix of Wolfe (and the author) being aware of how that racism affected a Chinese-American woman, and Archie's literal and straightforward use of "inscrutable." (Authors aren't responsible for the opinions of their characters, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether they share them.) An character's actions being with both Wolfe telling one character that he understands that she knew the police wouldn. There's one ("Fourth of July Picnic") that's more Wolfe-tricks-the-killer than usual one where he and Archie Goodwin figure out who did it, but learn the motive in Wolfe's usual meeting of all the suspects. "Christmas Party" is layers of deceit, including Goodwin and Wolfe lying to each other, but didn't quite work for me.
Steven Brust, Vallista. This is the fifteenth of the Vlad Taltos/Jhereg books, and not a good starting point—a lot of it assumes the reader knows who people are, and what happened in many of the previous books. The story starts when Devera finds Vlad and says something like "Uncle Vlad, help me" before vanishing, leaving him trying to figure out what's going on, how, and why, in a building that makes Escher's "Relativity" seem straightforward. (Slightly grumpy spoilers here: ("Figuring out" doesn't quite seem to fit, since he gets significant parts of this because the goddess Verra decides to tell him what the house is, and why the Vallista have spent thousands of years trying to build it, or something like it. I think I liked these better when it wasn't both "this person is Important because of his birth"--a trope that I am tired of in general--and nontrivial amounts of divine intervention. Adding explicit "this world, and the nature of the Dragaerans, are an experiment by the Jenoine" doesn't help, even though it's consistemt with what Brust has been doing.
Brust has said there will be 17 of these, which leaves two after this, and I'm not sure where he's going to take it from here (which I think is a good sign).
Current reading:
The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
So Far So Good, by Ursula Le Guin
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Vallista was weird, yeah.
IIRC "Dragaerans started as a Jenoine science experiment" was spelled out explicitly in the very first book, along with Vlad having a Special Reborn Soul. I don't think they mattered much until Issola brought the Jenoine back in, though.
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