Sorcerer to the Crown

Oh, how I wanted to love Sorcerer to the Crown.  Because of all the amazing reviews.  Because I enjoyed other things I've read by Zen Cho.  I was waiting for it to come out, and then Netgalley sent me a copy, and I started it right away, and....

Well, actually, what happened was that I ran into a problem reading the Netgalley copy on my Kindle, because it was a PDF, and the cropping made the font very tiny and hard to adjust.  My eyes aren't great, so the tiny font was kind of a dealbreaker--I read a few pages at a time with a kind of grim determination, but petered out fairly quickly.

But then I managed to figure out how to crop the PDF so it read a little easier, and I started going further, and....no, it was still too small to read comfortably (seriously, guys, my eyesight, I'm not even kidding).  By this point, I'm 2/3 of the way through the book, and it languishes for another month.

Finally, though, I got my hands on a print copy from the library and, for the first time in probably months, sit down to read an actual book in actual hardcover.  Maybe this was the solution, because the last third was by far the most interesting. 

But alas--I didn't love this book as much as I wanted to.  I found it slow; we spent far too much time with the staid, upright, rather boring Zachariah and not nearly enough time with the confident, no-nonsense, cocky Prunella.  We spent too much time having the same conversations in different drawing rooms, rather than (best) adventures or (a decent second) different conversations in really whichever drawing rooms, would be fine.

But there WAS so much to love about the book, and I will tell it to you now.  Aside from the obvious and unusual focus on non-white people in this type of Regency novel (I don't actually know what Regency means, but suffice it to say England between 1700 and 1900), the details of how these characters are dealt with are so lovely and real.  Zachariah's internal conflict between love for his mentor and adoptive parents and resentment that they forced him into all kinds of roles he didn't want to play; his mentor's true love for him contrasted with the low-grade, unthinking racism of his time; Prunella's status as somewhere between white and not, somewhere between gentlewoman and not.  The subtleties of living in a world that claims not to hold things against you but, on one level or another, does.  All of that is brilliantly done.

Prunella herself is such a delight to read about.  She's intensely competent, determined in her goals (whatever they may be), and a gifted player of the game.  I was quite shocked by the ending, actually, and the calculated, somewhat ruthless choices that she makes, but that only made her a better character.  She moves through a world that will never be easy with an indifferent ease, and it's hard no to love her for it, even if it makes her feel somewhat distant much of the time. 

In the end, I think this is the review I related to most, even though I actually enjoy authors like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, in their own right.  I don't feel as apologetic as she does, but I did find the language a slog, and I found that it felt like I was being put at a distance from the story, rather than drawn into it the way that the original books or even my favorite imitators (Joan Aiken, say) do. 

So close to being my book, really, but in the end, sadly, not my book.

The Wave

Work book club!  It's been ages since we've met, before Christmas I think.  Vacations and then illnesses and then one thing and another.  Finally we just said that we'd have to sit down and do it.  Turns out that one of the main things that was slowing us down was that nobody really liked the book.

Which is a shame, because it was full of potential.  The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean is about, as it sounds, crazy-big waves.  This is one of those science topics that I know nothing about, so pretty much any angle you want to take on this, you have a chance to tell me interesting stories from some little corner of science and/or history.

But I don't think I ever realized before how much skill goes into making a book like this.  There's a lot of good raw material here, but the author, Susan Casey, is a sports writer, and she doesn't know how to use her material to its best advantage.  What I think happened is that she had a great idea, but the more research she did, the more she realized that the science is either really complicated or largely unknown, and she bloundered.

From the end of the first chapter, I was itching to restructure the book, ask for big additions and rearrangements.  The first chapter is about surfers, which was a good approach--get interested, watch waves in action.  The second is about scientists at a wave science conference. Somewhere in one of these chapters, there should have been a breakdown of how waves word--what makes them break, what the difference between a breaking wave and a non-breaking one is, where the energy comes from.  I looked some of this up on the internet and it's fascinating--how the momentum of the wave is interrupted underwater, causing the top to move faster and break over the bottom.

So many questions I'm left with.  What's the difference between a regular giant wave and a tsunami?  How does a surf ride on a big wave work--how do you get off (barring a fall), what's it like in the foam, what is "the drop" that you keep talking about?  How big are the "normal sized" waves at one of the big surfing areas that she discusses--not the days that bring out the pros, but the regular days in between?

The structure of the book was basically switching back and forth between surfing and other wave stuff.  So every other chapter was about surfing.  Now, I can envision a really good book about pro surfers, but this wasn't quite it.  Every character is described with a one-sentence physical description, every one of them is level-headed and humbler than your average surfer, and I couldn't tell any of them apart.  There are tiny hints at the darker parts of the scene--when she describes how one of her calm, humble friends beat a guy up in a bar because he told everyone where the waves were (leading to overcrowding), when we meet one female surfer at the surfing awards (and she gets ogled and catcalled), when one of these great guys who's really in touch with life flies halfway around the world while his wife is nine months pregnant because he won't miss a wave.

There are all these moments that I interpret as kind of awful, but not only won't she pass judgement on them, she seems to be trying to make them seem okay.

There are a lot of really interesting bits.  The chapter on Lituya Bay, in Alaska, was fascinating; the world's largest tsunami was there only a few decades ago, and there were witnesses and evidence.  There's a lot of great info on how and why that happened.  There's a story about a ship that was caught for days in an enormous storm and, being a research ship, got some amazing readings.  There's a chapter on salvage companies in South Africa, and how they rescue ships and people and cargo when the ocean gets to be too much.

But there was no throughline, and no real episodic structure (as a Mary Roach book might have had).  The story had no spine, no buildup, and it was hard to tell what was going on when in one chapter, 20 foot waves are causing havoc and in another, 40-footers are being dismissed by the surfers as not very special. 

I kind of want Mary Roach to go out and write this book now--take this as a starting place, take all of Susan Casey's notes, and go write the book I wanted this to be.  It's not the charming digressions or the funny (often raunchy) side observations.  What's missing is the sense of there being something to be learned, something to be understood, even if you never do figure out exactly what.

The Marvels

There's something about Brian Selznick's art that I can't resist, and the stories that he unfurls through his art are irresistible.  This is what brought me to his recent novel, The Marvels.

This book begins with about a hundred pages of illustrated story, as we follow five generations of a theater family.  We begin with two brothers performing a play on a ship, which ends with a storm and a wreck. The story travels to London, to the building of the Royal Theatre, and through generations of good and wicked characters, loving and distant parents, great and mediocre actors. 

The art is absolutely gorgeous. I could look at this art all day.  I would like to hang some of these illustrations on my wall, particularly the first image in the book, of the ship at sea.

And then we transition into the text.  This part of the novel takes place in 1990 in London; Joseph has run away from boarding school--between his absent parents, his trouble at school, and his departed best friend, he has nothing to keep him there, so he goes looking for the uncle he's heard of but never met. 

Joseph is about 12 and unprepared for this adventure, but luckily he finds his way to his uncle's house where the solitary man reluctantly takes him in.  He finds that his uncle lives a strange, reclusive life, in a large, old-fashioned house where everything seems frozen in time--there is nothing modern in the house, and his uncle travels by horse-drawn carriage.  Their lives are lit by candles, and the contents of each room are perfectly preserved; his uncle is very specific that nothing must be moved or changed.

Well, this is a mystery that any 12-year-old will want to investigate, and with the help of the spunky girl next door, Joseph goes poking around into everything, breaking stuff and causing trouble and finding clues to the history of the Marvel family--clues that point to their history being Joseph's own.

And I....really can't stand this.  Maybe it's because I'm too much of a grown-up, but everything feels so contrived and forced.  Joseph is an irritating kid--the kind who's always causing trouble for other people in books (asking annoying, embarrassing questions; instantly doing exactly what you just asked him not to do, even if that's something designed to keep the house from burning down.  

Honestly, maybe this is a success on the book's part; so many kids' heroes are meant to be strange and awkward, but they're "Hollywood ugly," meaning they're really normal and relateable, but somehow nobody gets them. Joseph isn't this kid--he's genuinely kind of annoying.

Then there's the mystery.  Yeah, his uncle's life is clearly weird.  But he just met this guy, who barely knew he existed.  How does he go from "arrived in the middle of the night; trying to figure out where the bathroom is" to "must poke into ever drawer to find the Answer" in literally a few hours, when there really isn't even a question. 

Honestly, I kind of spend most of the book sorry for the uncle and wishing that he had another option besides putting up with Joseph and sending him back to boarding school, because neither seems like a great path to me.  I mostly wanted Joseph to leave him alone for five minutes.

And then the solution to the whole mystery, while sad and poignant, is...weird?  Not quite "it was all a dream," but trivial along that line.  I'm left feeling like I'm not quite sure why I read this story.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a book for someone who feels as out of place as Joseph--completely unattached to anything, alone and adrift.  And I feel for him, I really do.  But I don't relate to him; his alienation bears pretty much no resemblance to my alienation, and instead of wanting to reach out to him as I so often do with kids in books who just need a friend or caretaker, I just wish he'd keep his head down and stop being so weird.

God I'm a jerk. I mean, I look at this review and I'm demonstrably being a jerk about it.  But I just don't care for this story.

Oh, but the art!  The silent story of the Marvel family, as told in pictures that are lavish and atmospheric and at the same time loose and mysterious!  I would love to see so much more of this.  Just without all the words getting in the way.

Satisfaction

You know the feeling when you start something and you just know it's going to be exactly right?  Like when you're in the movie theater and the lights dim and the music comes up and you see the familiar Star Wars scroll across the screen, or when you walk into Mariah's house and you smell carnitas and you're just like, BAM! Yes, that's going to be exactly it.

That is exactly how I felt when I heard Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's voice when I first hit Play on Ben Aaronovitch's Moon Over Soho.  I really loved Midnight Riot, the first book in Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, about recently graduated cop Peter Grant, who finishes up his probationary period only to find himself selected for the supernatural beat. I looked back over my blog and I can't believe I didn't review it, because it was a fun, smart supernatural thriller with a great cast of characters and a narrator with a really wonderful voice.

And speaking of voice, I could listen to these audiobooks all day.  Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is the name of the actor who reads the audiobooks, and he's amazing.  He does a huge range of accents, from nasal soccer moms to a Glaswegian coroner, from the earthy mother spirit of the river to Peter's precise, upper-crust mentor.  It's a full acting job, and Peter's weary, pragmatic take on what it takes to be a police officer (85% of the time, patience with drunks) are perfectly rendered. 


I just started the new book today, but just hearing his voice pour out of the car speakers left me feeling like something wonderful was happening.  It's just the feeling you want when you start a new book; I am all in.

Dim

Into the Dim is one of the QueryShark books I was posting about on Monday.  When I saw it on Netgalley, the blurb billed it as a YA Outlander, and since I've never read Outlander but heard good things--plus, I recognized the plot!--I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I go back and forth on whether I'm not the audience for this book, or if it's just not great.  On one hand, I think it would work much better for an actual teenager--the romance especially seems aimed at a very young crowd.  On the other, I think part of the reason I think it would work better on a young teen is that it's not just simple but simplistic, and I hate to imply that teenagers don't deserve better than this.

I almost gave up quite a few times over the first half, but I decided that I wanted to write about it, and I try not to write about ARCs that I didn't finish (since that seems unfair).  So for the first third, I was giving it a fair shot; for the second third, I was kind of hate-reading.  I'll grant it, this, though--for the final third, I wanted to know what would happen.  Once the action picked up, it swept me along well enough to keep me interested.

But it took so long to get there!  The setup was fully half the book--setting up the emotional stakes, getting Hope to Scotland, and leisurely training/prep time before the actual time travel.  There was no tension there, and that made the clunkiness of the writing stand out.  I'm pretty sure that every noun in the first chapter had an adjective before it.  Definitely at least half of them did.  Hope sits in the hot church surrounded by hypocritical people whose loud whispers reach her burning ears.  Again, by the time the plot picked up toward the end, I didn't notice the writing anymore, but I noticed the heck out of it for the first chunk of the book.

The villains are broad--Celia's just a Mr. Burns-style caricature of evil; the evil medieval characters are all anti-Semitic (while the good ones don't believe all the horrible things their culture says about the Jews); the loutish guards are looking to rape women at every turn. 

Even our main characters are cartoonish.  Collum's totally useless and badly timed emotional outbursts--who put him in charge of this mission?  Bran's witty comments in the face of anger.  Again, maybe this would read as more relatable to a teenager; these kids just seemed whiny to me. 

Also, the fact that Hope has literally never had a friend is strange, and used strangely.  There are all these moments where she's learning about how important friendship is, but almost none where she has no clear ideas about boundaries, or fails to get social cues.  What was her mother thinking?  I've read the whole book and still can't figure it out.  And don't get me started on how her eidetic memory (which is used in some useful ways in the story) also seems to give her the ability to calculate any physical action perfectly--like, to literally see the possible paths or motions and their results and choose the best one.  There are some cool books that use the characters' superpowers like this as plot devices, but this is just a bit much.

Oh, plus: there's a group of bad guys who call themselves the Timeslippers.  That's what they named themselves. The good guys are called the Viators.  The MacGuffin is called the Nonius Stone.  There's a whole stretch where they're doing the time travel world building part where you're just getting these names dumped on you, and you can't help but picturing the Evil Celia trying to make up a name for her renegade time travel group and saying "The Timeslippers!  That's it!" and laughing an evil laugh.

So yeah, I didn't care for this book.  And I feel bad ripping on it, but there it is.  It was pretty bad.

Query Wins, Losses

I've mentioned QueryShark before, the blog run by literary agent Janet Reid in which writers send query letters for her to critique. It's a great exercise, and many people send in multiple drafts until they get one that will work. I love this site for a lot of reasons: behind the scenes book creation stuff, picking apart writing on a very fine level, and tiny previews of books--three of my favorite things!

Recently, two books popped up in Netgalley that I had first read about on QueryShark.  I have a weird ability to retain book premises, so I noticed right away, and I'm reading them both.  This happened last year with one book, too, so I decided to go back to some of my favorite queries and see if I could find them on Goodreads or Amazon.

It was amazing--I very quickly found a whole bunch of them.  Not surprisingly,  my favorites were mostly the ones that the Shark gave the thumbs-up to, either in a first draft or after multiple revisions.  The more I looked for, the more I found, which was really pretty exciting.  Not all of them are right up my reading alley, but I do think I'll probably give most of them a shot, at least out of a sense of internet fellowship.

Here's what I've got!

Into the Dim, by Janet B. Taylor.  I'm reading this one right now, an ARC from Netgalley.  The Query Shark post is from 2010, and there are a decent number of changes from that version in the book.  The book isn't quite delivering on the final version of the query--the voice, in particular, is very different--but I'm going to review it soon. That should get its own post in a couple of days.

The Girl from Everywhere, by Heidi Heilig.  This was on QueryShark in 2013, and it's another one that I was really excited about when I read it.  This is another ARC that I have from Netgalley, and I can already tell a dozen pages in that it's going to be really good.  The writing is excellent, anyway, and I'm already fond of at least three characters. I'll write more about this one when I finish it, too.

Premeditated, by Josin McQuein, is another QS post from 2010 (actually, the very next one after Into the Dim).  I read that one last year, actually, after QS herself posted that its publication had been announced. I reviewed it then; the book didn't quite live up to the really excellent premise and blurb.  But the blurb--which was basically the query letter--was irresistable.

Comedy of Terrors is another one I remembered from the blurb--there was a castle with an idiot whose job it is to take the blame for things, but somehow he ends up having to save the world?  Basically it sounded like a slapstickier version of Christopher Moore's Fool, which, as we all know, is My Favorite Book, so this one stuck in my head.  Turns out it's been published, and the author is named Graeme Smith.  Don't think I'm not going to investigate.

Ooh, and Waypoint Kangaroo is coming soon, too!  This one, by Curtis Chen, I remembered only that it was a guy who was kind of an inept smuggler with a special talent--control of a pocket universe, allowing him to move things around undetectably.  I was thinking how useful that would be just the other day; I'm thrilled to see the book is coming out this year!

Nine Days is a mystery by Minerva Koenig about an ex-criminal in witness protection whose handler is killed and whose new boss is suspected of the crime.  There's a lot more to it, of course, but the selling point is really the voice of the query, which is sharp and funny.  If the novel reads anything like the query, the fact that I don't usually ready mysteries will be no problem.

So yeah, QueryShark's best queries actually have a pretty excellent record of getting published.  And I love the throughline of finding out how the stories of these novels ended.  I'll review as many as I can, starting with Into the Dim later this week. 

Thanks, QueryShark!

The Runaround

As I said, I've been in a bit of a rut.  I'm wandering back and forth between about six books, none of which is quite scratching my itch.  I'm going to have to hit hard on the fun, exciting stuff for the next few things I pick up.

The sad part is that a few of these--not disappointments, but mood-breakers--are books I've been really excited about.  Like Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, which is the basis of the recent Oscar-nominated movie Carol.  I've wanted to read The Price of Salt for years, because of how much I enjoyed (slash was-freaked-out-by) The Talented Mr. Ripley.  What I knew about the book was that it was one of the first books about a lesbian romance that didn't end tragically.  I knew that the main character fell in love/became obsessed with a beautiful woman, and that at some point they travel together.  That's pretty much it.

This is one of those books that I don't enjoy nearly as much as I appreciate it, or nearly as much as I want to enjoy it.  I rather liked it at first, actually--we meet Therese, who is young and living in New York, trying to work as a set designer but working at a department store over Christmas to make ends meet.  I liked Therese's small life and her small observations, her boyfriend whom she is fond of but not in love with, her fear of getting caught forever at the department store.

And then she meets Carol, and her overwhelming sense of fascination with her is pretty great, too.  You know how it is (or at least I do) when you meet someone and you instantly feel like they're the most amazing person. As the unlikely friendship starts to grow, I was interested by how it evolved, and by how hard it was to figure out what Carol is thinking.

But as you get further into the book and you get to know Carol and Therese better, I don't feel like I'm getting to understand better what they're thinking.  Quite the opposite, actually--it's gone from feeling like the mystery of understanding the people around Therese is something that she and I share to feeling like Therese has crossed over into understanding the subtext of what's going on, what the people in the story think and want and might do, where I'm still on the outside, confused. 

There are so many conversations where everyone has a few drinks and lights a few cigarettes and talk about where they'll eat and who they'll see, and it seems to mean something to the other people but I can't even figure out the tone.  Are you free tonight? We might see Abby, but she's busy.  We can take a drive.  Shall we got that funny little Russian tea house?  No, Rumplemeyer's is right there.  All of these things seem to be evocative, but I have no idea of what.  So as Therese becomes more and more of the world, I'm more and more shut out. 

I'm nearly to the end, so I'll finish it, if only because I do want to see the movie.  I feel like the movie can't help but loop me in on what's going on between the lines, and I think Cate Blanchett is the perfect choice for this fascinating, worldly, aloof woman.  I'm not sorry I'm reading it, but I'll be glad to be done.

Parker to the Rescue

My book rut has been broken, and thank you to K.J. Parker for writing the novella I just read, Downfall of the Gods.

I got it from Netgalley; it appears to be an upcoming reissue in ebook format of a book from a few years ago.  Every time I read K.J. Parker, I am delighted.  His (I'm pretty sure he's officially been made public as being a man, right? It was a bit of a mystery there for a while) stories are both cynical and hopeful, and his characters are both untrustworthy (both to the reader and to others in the story) and generally non-evil.  I think.  Mostly.

This book is about a goddess--youngish, as these things go, or so it seems--who refuses absolution to someone who prays for it.  This leads to some disagreement among her divine relatives, and so she sets the penitent mortal a task and helps him along on his quest.

And so we follow the put-upon Archias, who is neither an evil man nor a blameless one, as he tries to avoid damnation.  Having a god for a sidekick is often more trouble than it's worth, and watching Archias's faith and understanding of what it means evolve over the course of the book is one of the best parts.  Gods make poor sidekicks; they have no sense of time, are easily distracted, and tend to ignore irritating things like laws and weather and physics.

We also meet many other gods and learn about some of their petty infighting, what it means to be eternal, and the paradoxes of omnipotence. They mostly seem to hate each other--or at least to dislike our narrator--and what at first seems to be all sly wit and wordplay gradually reveals itself to be real insight into the strange world they inhabit.

There's no way for an outline to do the book justice, because it's all about the laughs that make you think, and the characters getting enlightened in the background.  K.J. Parker's narrators in general are for fans of Miles Vorkosigan and Eugenides the thief--just as bright, just as sharp, but also darker, and more dangerous.  Brenda, this is a book I highly recommend for you.

Audio Stumble

Well, my excellent book streak over the holidays has been broken up a bit, not by bad books (for the most part) but by long ones that I'm reading all at once, and therefore not finishing.  A lot of them are kind of meaty, too, which I tend to dip in and out of, because I tend not to find the meaty ones quite as compelling.

But I think I've hit a big stumbling block with the audiobook I've been listening too.  Longbourn, by Jo Baker, is billed as Pride and Prejudice from the view belowstairs.  It had me for a while--the reader is very good, and her delicate, deliberate voice very much matches the literary tone of the book.  And I love the details of how a manor house runs, and the glimpses of the drawing room drama that we all know so well from our beloved P&P.

So I've made it about halfway through so far, but I'm thinking of giving it up.  I'd say that it had my attention for a while, but only tenuously. What the book really doesn't capture is what makes Jane Austen so great; this book has a very modern style, in that it is almost entirely composed of the fine minutiae of daily life--what the cloth feels like on your skin and the exact dampness of a certain kind of rain wetting your skirts and chilblains and flower scents and the meadow in the morning and in the moonlight and and and.  It's all sensory information.

Did you know that there's no physical description of Jane or Elizabeth in P&P.  We know Jane is lovely, and fairer than Lizzie, and that's basically it.  I realize this is a contrast Baker is playing on--that Austen ignored the mud that was getting tracked in, and the dishes that needed to be cleared, because she ignored the people who did those tasks, that even gauzy, floating young ladies had bodies that sweated and underclothes to be washed and chamberpots to be emptied.  But those details can't keep me going forever.

I'm a little confused by Sarah's sense of being trapped in the country--does everyone feel so trapped?  Is the idea that every small life feels small, or that Special People like Sarah aren't meant for these backwaters?  Also, is the sketchiness of Ptolmey Bingley really that sketchy?  I mean, he seems very smug and urbane, and that seems kind of a jerky response--the "reverse" snobbery of the country folk for the city.  I was dismissing that until Sarah didn't actually fall for him.  But then there's James--he's the romantic hero mostly because he's there, it seems.

And now, at the part I'm mired in, we're getting James's war stores in flashback form, and they're grim and brutal, yes, but they're also inevitable.  It's perfectly clear from what went before that he's on the run from the militia, as a deserter, presumably.  It's worth it to learn the nature of this downfall there, but it's the longest damned chapter of the book, and I know exactly how it's going to end.  War is hell, she said for 50 more pages.

It's not a bad book, I think.  It's very much a minutely observed literary novel in which not much happens, our favorite P&P characters appear only long enough to ignore the servants to a greater or lesser degree. Some of them get painted more sympathetically than Austen paints them, which I usually appreciate (see Joan Aiken) but here kind of resented, not because I don't like the idea of Mary being put upon or Mr. Collins just doing his best, but because the heavy implication is that Austen was being snobbish about people who are not terribly charming.  But she's showed herself to sympathize with the uncharming over the charming often enough (hell, Darcy's a fine example of that), so I'm not really on her side there, either.

I don't know--I hate ditching a book, but I've been avoiding listening to it, which seems like a bad sign.  Maybe I'll pick up the next Rivers of London book, or the first Flavia de Luce, and see if I ever come back to Longbourn.  That seems disingenuous, though.  I should probably just put it down.

In closing, let me leaving you with another piece of non-authentic Austeniana, one that I'm very excited about.

(PS. Who told me (on Goodreads, I think) that they would be interested to see my reaction to the book?  I can't find the note, but I want to discuss it with you!)

Round Up

I have been reading SO many incredibly great round-ups, best-of lists, and year-end sign-offs.  And I've had an amazing run of books these past few months, some of the best stuff I've ever read.

It's also been a year of fewer books than I've read in a long time. 95 total, according to Goodreads, and I think that's over by a few, because it counts things that I mark as discarded in the middle (which I don't count).  But taking 95 as the number, 25 of those were comics, which, given how easy it is to zip through one of those, I kind of consider that a different list.  Leaving 70 novels.  For comparison, last year I read 173 total, 69 of which comics, meaning 104 novels.

I blame the fanfiction.  I've read well over 10 novel-length fics this year, but Goodreads doesn't know how to count those. I'm not even sure how to track back through how many of those I read, but if you then count the short ones--well, it was really a lot of pages.

My best-ofs have already been covered here, for the most part (or will be soon, I hope!), but for the purpose of posterity (and of offer someone else the delight of reading a blog post listing a bunch of good books), here's a list:



Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (Rich and personal and beautiful fantasy)
Illuminae, by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman (Perfect roller coaster of action and emotion and real thoughtfulness)
The Imperial Radch, by Ann Leckie (Possibly the best science fiction series ever)
Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon (Haven't blogged this yet, but it was SO much fun)
Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures, by Jackson Pearce and Maggie Stiefvater (Bright, sassy, and a ton of fun)



Hexed, by Michael Alan Nelson (They say Lucifer is the next Buffy, and they might be right)
Wild, by Cheryl Strayed (Human vulnerability has never been so powerful or personal)
Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge (Pure storytelling, unexpected and inevitable)
The Scorpion Rules, by Erin Bow (I will follow Erin Bow anywhere; here it was a pleasure)
Jenny Lawson in general (I can't believe I didn't blog these!  Her memoirs are the BEST audiobooks--hilarious and so perfectly delivered.)

There's so much I could say about how great the last few months of reading have been, and how tough it was to pick favorites.  But mostly I'm feeling overwhelmed by the AMAZING books that are being recommended elsewhere, and I really just want to go read more.  So I'll just sign off and say happy new year!

Blurbing

I'm so far behind in blogging about the amazing, awesome stuff I've been reading lately.  I'm just going to have to gush incoherently and in random order about a bunch of incredible books that I've finished in the past few weeks, because I can't bear not to talk about them.  But I'm hoping to catch up with the stuff I'm in the middle of soon.

Okay,  I'm big on fantasy and scifi, but I often find the blurbs surprisingly irritating.  The books with the most worldbuilding often tease you with it in ways that just sound stupid--"a time traveling robot, a socialist guinea pig, and a sassy French horn team up to fight crime!"  I'm supposed to be excited wondering how the author makes it work, but mostly I end up being doubtful.

So the problem comes when I'm trying to talk someone into reading a book with a plot that is so--complicated isn't the word, because it's very easy to understand.  But complex, with lots of moving parts, many of which make good poster blurbs for exciting movies.

You've got a teenage love story set against the backdrop of an interstellar corporate war.  Okay, that's a thing, sure.  And the girl's a gifted hacker and the guy turns out to be an amazing pilot and they've just broken up, but fate throws them together(ish).  And their planet is attacked, and they are evacuated, and the fleet is on the run from the attackers.  This is a reasonable scope for a story, and it's a really good story.

But then you have to add in the rogue (possibly insane) AI.  And the plague--don't forget the plague.  Which is kind of a zombie plague?  Not really zombies, but your standard psychotic rage plague.  We've all seen these movies, read these books.

But this one is SOOOOO much better!  Illuminae, by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman, is insanely good.  It's incredibly ambitious--it's formatted as a story of found documents, chat transcripts, official records, etc.  This is always a risky proposition, because it's SO easy to fall out of voice, but this is just so well done.  There are a few places where I'd like to debate about the format--the AI logs, especially, seem very linear relative to what they're trying to do with the computer, but I'm not sure how else you would do it.  And the transcripts of the video logs are charmingly narrated--the "tech" who transcribed them was clearly an author who hadn't had a chance to be sassy in a while.

But I think the BEST thing about this was Kady.  She is tough as nails, and damn if I don't mean that.  She's not a softy underneath; she's shoe-leather to the spine, but that doesn't mean that she's dead inside or anything.  She's just hard and fast and passionate and on fire.  And brilliant.  And also 17 and stubborn, and powerfully resistant to authority. 

Honestly, when you're running a refugee camp and a fleet of spaceships on the run, authority isn't all bad.  A maverick can be dangerous.  But so can the powerful making narrow minded decisions.  And, you know, the plague.  Did I mention the plague?  Or the rogue AI? Anyway, Kady knows they're keeping secrets, and she's determined to dig them up.  With all the antagonists pulling the refugees in different directions, one random 17 year old might be the one to hold things together.

Kaufman and Kristoff coauthored the book, and the bio says that they're a combined 12 feet 5 inches tall.  I find that one of the most fascinating things to ponder.  Are they both over six feet?  Is one of them almost seven?

You absolutely should read this book.  And NOT on the Kindle--you need to have a physical copy.  There is some very complicated typography that is not going to translate well to different screen sizes.  Okay, yes, go now and read this.

Vacation Holding Pattern

Not the going somewhere type of vacation, but the days off work type.  Getting ready for it sucks up energy; being on it give me time (I hope!) to write the posts about all the really good reads I've had in the past couple of weeks. 

So, happy holiday prep and I'll be back this weekend!

(Photo via)

And...Not

So I'm putting down this book that I was pretty interested in reading: The Cage, by Audrey Schulman.  I even got the library to order it for me, but I'm not even 20% done and I think I have to put it down.  And that's feeling kind of fraught to me.

The Cage is about Beryl, a nature photographer who has mostly only taken photos near where she lives in New England, but who wins an opportunity to go on an Arctic expedition where she'll sit in a protective cage and take photos of polar bears from close up.  This is a huge deal; most photos of animals like bears are taken with telephoto lenses. So this is an enormous opportunity for Beryl, who got the job because she was pretty much the only applicant small enough to fit in the cage that they had already built.

This is a metaphor for how Beryl is a tiny, quiet woman who is full of fear in a world of big, loud men who barrel through life.  The world is full of threats--people who interrupt you at parties, men who walk behind you down a quiet path in the park and might have been meaning to assault you, other photographers who are loud and full of themselves.  Literally every man in this book is actively obnoxious.  Beryl's father is the least awful one, because he's mostly just overprotective and kind of distant, in a traditional dad of 30 years ago way.

There aren't many women in the book at all, except Beryl's mom, whose life is one long experience of anxiety, mostly about how you might get assaulted. 

Okay, so there is no sense here that anyone is just a flawed human being making their way through the world.  People range from thoughtlessly brutish to selfishly brutish.  But see, this is very much Beryl's point of view.  I mean, it has to be--it's so extreme that I can't believe it's the author blithely telling me that this is how she views the world. 

But even if it's Beryl's view of the world, I don't feel very sympathetic to her.  I feel put off.  When she meets the reporter, Butler, who will be writing the copy to go with her photos, before she even knows him, he's awful. Literally, the first moment: "He'd introduced himself only by his last name.  Beryl guessed that his frist  name must be something effeminate, like Ceciil or Francis.  He wore the practical outdoor clothes of someone who wished for a short and common name with hard consonants, like Nick or Ted."  She's judging a guy who wears rugged, outdoorsy clothes on an Arctic expedition as compensating for something?  Besides the cold? 

So yeah, I don't have a lot of respect for Beryl, and I don't think I can read a whole book on her point of view.  But this feels fraught, because I feel like I'm giving up on something that's trying to show me a certain lens of the world.  I mean, this is about how a small, shy, introverted woman gets kicked around for not being one of the guys.  That's a story worth telling, right?  And honestly, when I put it that way, yeah, that's a story that needs to be told--it's okay to be small and shy; the system will try to tell you that you don't matter, but you do. 

Except.  Except I don't admire Beryl, or like her, or sympathize with her.  I've developed a taste for unlikable characters who are more active, or who are just doing their own thing.  But Beryl isn't doing her own thing--or rather, when she is (photography), she's actually interesting and tolerable.  But as soon as she enters the world of people, she becomes completely inert, and seems to exist only as a lens through which to despise things.

I don't know.  I feel like there might be some important feminist point to the stuff I don't like about this story.  But I can't stomach it long enough to find out.  Which is a shame, because I was really curious to see what happened when she actually go into the cage.  Just not curious enough, I guess.

BEST. BOOK. EVER.

I want to write this post in all caps.  I want to come through the computer and grab you, gentle reader, wherever you are, by the lapels and shake you and tell you that you do not have a choice, you have to and absolutely must read this book!  I mean series! All of it!  Ancillary Mercy for the win!

Okay, I know that I can't write the review that I want to write; this is one of those moments where I want to write a long and detailed review with elaborations on how the book worked on a technical level, and how I felt about the characters and plot, and the things it made me think about regarding society and humanity.  And I would not be able to do all those things--at least not coherently in the time I have available--so I would never get it written if I tried to write the whole thing.

So what you're going to get is the rough outlines of how wonderful this book is.  And then you will read it yourself (YOU WILL READ IT, YOU MUST) and then you will know how wonderful it is, forever and ever amen.

The first book in Ann Leckie's series is Ancillary Justice, which I read months ago for book club.  It was good--a bit on the hard-scifi side for me, and kind of hard to follow sometimes.  There's a lot going on, including two separate timelines ("present" and a 20-years-ago past), plus flashbacks to other periods and political background.  That, plus the gender thing (everyone is "she" in Radch language; they don't distinguish gender) can be a bit confusing.

Ancillary Sword was the second book; I didn't write a review, because I basically downed it and Ancillary Mercy in one big gulp. It's a lot more straightforward than the first book--the politics are all set up for you, everything happens in the present, and the gender thing is really not at all confusing when Breq isn't running into non-Radch people as often.

(I'm sure there's a whole post on gender in these books, but it's taking me forever to write this as it is. In the first book, I kept trying to guess people's sex because in our culture, that has a powerful effect on the nature of interpersonal interactions.  And since Breq was interacting with gendered societies in that book, that guessing served a purpose.  But once we got to hang out in the Radch, where gender just plain isn't a factor, it just went away.  Like, no confusion, no nothing.  There's one character whom, based on the description, I was picturing as Idris Elba and my friend who had just finished it was picturing as Queen Latifah.  But it doesn't matter, really, because gender has no meaning in their interactions.  It's AMAZING.)

Anyway, in Sword, Breq has a ship and a mission.  The first third or so of the book is her establishing herself with her new ship and crew, and us getting a real picture of how a crew functions.  The rest is her arriving in the region she's supposed to protect and dealing with local politics, kicking ass and taking names.

Mercy flows right out of Sword, impeccably.  I NEVER read a series of books in a row, because I hate the transition where we retreat from all the tension I'm invested in to the beginning of another book, where the tension is down and we're building a new set of tension.  I find that very off-putting.  No problem here--the worldbuilding carries you right through that, and she throws you a few little nuggets of "remember what's going on here" and then just keeps things rolling out.  It worked really well as a seamless read.

Sword is also very much a book about local politics, while Mercy comes back to the galactic stage, bringing the Anaander Mianaai problem to the front again.  And over the course of this, it examines SO MANY really huge issues through enormously satisfying fiction.

I feel like I'm going to jinx it, make it seem less awesome if I say this, but I will: Breq is a literal social justice warrior.  She has an objectivism that lets her say "there is no reason at all for anyone to be oppressed besides the greed of the oppressor," and she has no tolerance for that.  She dismantles these structures left and right.  You get sympathetic characters on both side, and people who believe what they believe, often without consideration.  Even the bad guys, almost all of them, are acting in good conscience, according to their understanding of the world.  The people who act worst are those who have thought least about how others might come to feel the way they do.

You've got colonialism, social status, capitalism, oppressed ethnic groups.  This is a detailed examination of every kind of privilege and what it looks like to fail at checking it.  Even when you're trying--there are characters who are actively trying to be more openminded, even being a bit smug about it, who fall down at that.  There are so many lovely illustrations of what it means to be truly considerate of other people.

There are so many ideas that I want to just think about and talk about here, so many nuggets that would make a whole book themselves but are just throwaway observations here.

It is possible for someone to have traits you respect and admire, but to believe in things that put those traits to the service of something abhorrent to you--and for them to do that in good faith.  Conversely, it is possible for someone horrible and unkind to have beliefs that are good and respectful, and to act on them in one circumstance, even when they would act cruelly in another.

The bad guy never thinks she's the bad guy.  She believes in her cause, and that what she is doing is right, in that it's more important than whatever is opposed to her.

Never confuse a system for the thing the system is meant to do.  (I find this one fascinating, and I feel like it's something I think about a lot when I watch superhero shows--vigilantism vs. faith in the justice system is a big question there.  But it's true; if you confuse, say, having a Department of Veteran's Affairs with taking care of veterans, you can too easily wind up in a Kafkaesque nightmare.  The bureaucracy isn't the enemy, but it's supposed to be a tool; if it gets in the way of the task, it's not doing its job.)

What makes a person a person?  The whole question of the humanity of an AI is almost jumped over here, since our main character is an AI and is obviously a person.  But there's the bigger question of what makes a person herself?  Characters are "reeducated" and ancillaries are made over to be part of a different consciousness--what does it mean to be yourself?  Who are you if you are remade with other memories? Who are you if you are taken entirely out of your context?

See, the thing is that this is, for all of its huge social injustices, kind of a happy-feeling story.  It's about a character who is insanely competent in every way--Breq experiences growth, especially personally, but her ability to handle people and situations (interpersonal, political, physical) is already thousands of years perfected at the beginning of the story.  She handles everything perfectly.  A story built around a character like that can so easily be trite, because it's just about Captain Wonderful being Wonderful.

But when you're looking at the kind of huge, empire-spanning political situations involving oppression and justice, there's no simple answer, so Breq being able to do everything right doesn't  mean anything is easy.  I think the ancillary question is the best example of this.

Ancillaries are made out of people, who should have autonomy--there's no way that ancillaries are just, by any definition.  But ships are built so that parts of their bodies are made of ancillaries, and they're not really complete unless they have them.  How is it even possible to reconcile those two situations?

Not everything has an easy answer.  But that's okay, because in this book, everyone is truly, truly, doing the best they can, toward whatever their goal is.

Okay, you go read this book now.  I'll close with this: if someone told me that I had to get a tattoo, no choice, I honestly think that "What Would Breq Do?" is the closest I've ever come to something I might voluntarily want on my body permanently.

Read it.

Haunts and Jumbies

I have two kinds of experiences reading middle grade novels: either I'm reading them to my son, who's seven, or I'm reading them for my own pleasure.  Tracey Baptiste's The Jumbies is a book that I read recently for my own pleasure, but that I really hope to either read to my son eventually, or at least give him to read for himself.

He's not ready for it yet, though.  As Mrs N at Between These Pages points out, this is a good book for a target reading level of third or fourth grade or higher.  While I do think the vocabulary (especially the introduction of new words, which I know still confuse my first-grader), I think part of that is that this is, believe it or not, a perfectly targeted children's horror story.

Because it is a horror story.  The appealing woman who is slowly transformed into something grotesque reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The forest full of jumbies--a collection of supernatural creatures of all shapes and sizes and sorts--is eerie, and the specific creatures are quite terrifying.  I don't think Adam would have been able to sleep after I read him this.

There was so much I liked about this story, especially the first half.  I love Corinne's confidence and independence, and her loving, trusting relationship with her father.  I love the friendships that are modeled here--with Dru and Bouki and Malik, how they all have flaws and they really annoy each other sometimes, but that doesn't mean they don't stick together.  I love how Dru's big family takes care of her, and Bouki and Malik stick together with no one else, and how many different ways there are to be a family here.

Really, I just love the setup of the island--the market, the forest, the fishing boats; the legends, the villages, the witch.  The first half of the book, where you meet everyone and everything, was by far my favorite.

The second half was good, too, but it didn't appeal to me quite as much.  The second half was where the action happens--the figuring out and the battles and the stakes.  I think all of this would have worked great for a kid of the appropriate age, but I am not that. The big build up, the grand showdown, the pacing--all of these were fine, but they were pretty expected, and they didn't blow my mind. 

What I loved, though, and what I'll carry away, is how Corinne was strong and brave when she needed to be, and how she knew what was right, even when she didn't know what she needed to do.  She was going to save her father no matter what, and that determination was beautifully drawn.  The path that takes her on--this is the magic thing, and here is where the power comes from, etc.--is something I think I'm too old for; I've read this before, and it's fine.  But Corinne carried me through all of that on her sheer strength of will.

Great book--a must for the creepy-loving ten-year-old in your life!

Ancillaries

I've been so bad about reading sequels in the past few years; there's so much new stuff dragging my attention away.  And I can never read a sequel just after its predecessor, when my interest is high, because I always get all bummed that it's a whole book of its own, not just more of what I loved in the last one.

BUT!  But I finally picked up Ancillary Sword, sequel to the excellent Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, and I cannot put it down.  Like, not for a few minutes, it's so good.

Summarizing it isn't really important: Breq has been sent to manage a system that I guess is important, while Anaander Mianaai fights a war against herself.  This is about Breq as captain of a ship, ranking officer in a system, managing the politics of a station and the loyalty of her crew, including some characters we know and some new ones. 

I think what I love about Breq is that she don't give a damn.  She wants things and cares about them--with the cool passion of someone who is very rational but also very empathetic.  Breq is my hero, I want to be her.  And she's so good at things; she gets politics, she has poise, she takes no crap and while her emotions can be riled, she doesn't lose her cool.  The first book was about Breq learning her humanity; this one is about her applying it.

The story is a bit complex, and honestly, I can't tell at every moment what the wider goal is, where the big political stuff stands.  I don't care.  I will follow this book to the end, follow Breq into battle because I know that even if I don't make it, I will have died for the right cause, in the best chance we had at the moment. 

Damn, I'm sorry, I need to go read now.

Wish List

Guys, this is going to be really bad for my self-control.

Both the BPL and the Minuteman Overdrive networks--my source for library ebooks--have added a "suggest a purchase" feature.  You search for the book you want, and if it's not in your library, you can expand the search to overdrive, and suggest they order it.

And they do!  They will!  They have!  They were wise to put in a maximum (though I haven't quite figured out the limits, I know I hit them at one point), because every book I asked for they have bought for me.  They bought them!  Because I asked!  And now anyone who wants can read The Empress Game by my sister's childhood friend Rhonda Mason, or Mary: The Summoning by Hillary Monahan, which looks kind of trashy but delightful, or the new Mindy McGinnis book, A Madness So Discreet.  Anyone!  Because I asked for them!

Guys.  Guys.  This is a  power that should never have been put in my hands.  Someone warn the librarians, and maybe get me some smelling salts.

All In My Head

Okay, I'm going to tell you something that's either going to convince you I'm nuts or just give you a glimpse of my rich inner life.  I would like to apologize in advance for this glimpse of the crazy that is in me.

Okay, so there are these two authors, Genevieve Valentine and Catherynne M. Valente. They are not really related, but for a while there I got them confused.

Valente wrote The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and its sequels, which I wasn't able to finish, and Six Gun Snow White, which I read and enjoyed but didn't love.  She is quite popular, and her writing is beautiful, but it's like poetry--you have to dig into it to appreciate it, rummage through the language to find the point.  Not for me, not at all.  Still, famous.  Popular.  Prolific.

Valentine broke onto the scene more recently with The Girls at the Kingfisher Club.  She'd published stories before, but this was her breakthrough novel.  This was an excellent book, and I immediately considered myself a Genevieve Valentine fan.

Kingfisher is a retelling of the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses in the Jazz Age.  It was bold and stark, and it used the structure of the fairy tale to tell a story with its own villains and hero's journeys.  It made me care about twelve separate sisters, for crying out loud. It was about power, and all the small kinds of power that a person has or doesn't have in the world, including many that you and I take for granted in our day to day lives.  It was really lovely.

Summary thus far: I love Genevieve Valentine, I don't care for Catherynne Valente, and I get them a little confused sometimes (wait, which one do I like? Oh, yeah, the other one).  Because of this, I see them as being in a little bit of a rivalry--note that this has no bearing on their books, which are in two totally different styles, and which actually share a lot of fans.  But somehow, I have set them up as opponents in my mind, and of course, I'm totally on Team Genevieve.

So here we come to the point, the reason I'm telling you this story about this odd little system that's been in my head for a while: I just learned that Catherynne Valente is publishing a new novella.  It's called Speak Easy.  Can you guess what it's about?

It's a Jazz Age retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

I want to say "OF COURSE," but that's ridiculous, because only in my head is there a rivalry because their names are sort of a little bit similar.  But really, am I taking this too personally (on someone else's behalf)?  Sure, I didn't think the literary world needed another Jazz Age Twelve Dancing Princesses story, but maybe there's room for two?  Maybe this is not a "ha, I can do better" moment.

But I'm still feeling really resentful.

There you go.  Guided tour of the nonsensical interior of yours truly.  Bitter rivalries playing out entirely in my mind. 

Is your inner life this rich?

Gotta Love a Pip

As a parent reading to their first grader at night, there is a very special moment when you're enjoying a book just as much as your kid is.  I mean, there are the books that you grit your teeth through because the kid loves them (I'm looking at you, Amelia Bedelia Unleashed), and there are the ones that you love from your childhood and they kind of put up with them out of kindness (our current My Side of the Mountain experience).  And plenty of kids' books are fine and pleasant and I'm perfectly happy to read them for him.

And then there's the book that I like so much that I'm glad it's a kids book just so I have someone to share it with as I'm reading it.  The book where I'm glad to be a parent so there's a perfectly good reason for me to be reading this, and to buy the sequel the minute it comes out.  Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures, by Maggie Stiefvater and Jackson Pearce is that kind of book.

It's hard not to like a character named Pip, right?  I mean, has there ever been a non-spunky Pip?  I didn't think so.  This Pip is no different--she's in fourth grade (I think; it's been a few weeks), and she lives in a world that is pretty much just like ours, except that magical creatures exist.  There are unicorns and miniature silky griffins, just like there are cows and alligators.  It's just part of the world.

Pip can talk to these creatures and understand when they talk to her.  But however much magic there is in this world, this is not a talent anyone else has, and no one believes Pip.  So she goes through life carrying her dog-eared copy of Jeffrey Higgleston's Guide To Magical Creatures, seizing any opportunity she can to chat with them and marking up the margins of her Guide.

But sometimes her talent gets her into trouble, and after The Unicorn Incident, Pip goes to spend the summer with her aunt, who is a magical creature veterinarian.  It's an amazing opportunity to learn about all kinds of animals, and maybe make some friends. (Pip's not very good with people.)  But when her aunt's town gets an infestation of Fuzzles (which are adorable, but with a nasty habit of bursting into flames), Pip might be the only one who can solve the problem.

This book is adorable, and hilarious, and charming.  I love Bubbles, the cranky old miniature silky griffin.  I love Tomas, Pip's new friend who is allergic to (almost literally) everything--especially magical creatures.  I love her awesome aunt and her oh-so-teenaged cousin, and Regent Maximus the paranoid unicorn, and the horrible Mrs. Dreadbatch.  I love the chapter names and the sassy ducks and Tomas's houseful of non-allergic rough-and-tumble brothers.  I love the illustrated pages from the Guide, complete with Pip's insider annotations.  I love everything about this book.

I am heartbroken that I have to wait until, apparently, next FALL to read Pip Bartlett's Guide to Unicorn Training, which is book two in the series.  And the best part?  Adam's going to be SO EXCITED!  It's like the best book club ever.  When he's not interrupting to repeat his favorite lines, that is.