Things I etc. etc.

[roadrunnertwice]

Please to enjoy some book reviews.

Things I Read During October

John Scalzi — The Ghost Brigades (10/2)

The middle book of his green Earthling soldiers trilogy; I haven't read either of the other books.

It was a pretty good book, but the thing is that military SF in general is really not what turns my crank. It kind of bores me, honestly. So while it was a decent enough ride, with copious Neat Stuff and some clever plot twists, it didn't push any of my buttons, and I didn't feel very connected with the characters or invested in the stakes.

Anyway, I like his blog, and I liked The Android's Dream, but I'll be taking a miss on the rest of this series. My problem, not the book's; if you're a Starship-Troopery sort to begin with, you're set, because it really is quite well-done.

Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm — Good as Lily (graphic novel) (10/14)

I really liked it! Dunno if I have much to SAY about it, though. Or maybe I have too much to say about it — it's hard to tell, sometimes.

I read it as being a book about perspective — about having the sense to tell what's important from what's just noise, and about how unforgivingly hard that is. Of course, the existential backwash here is that we all have Grace Kwon's problem, but the Deus ex Machina doesn't run on Sundays — where she got fair warning, the rest of us are going to have to make do with listening really hard for echoes. It's a good heads-up, but it's never a nice one.

Anyway, the story was well-told, and the central gimmick worked well for showing a long life as a whole, cohesive thing.

(Actually, come to think of it, I have had one or two experiences that I kinda-sorta-almost think of as messages from my future self. Believe me, you treasure those when you get 'em.)

Jim Ottaviani & Dylan Meconis — Wire Mothers (graphic novel) (10/14)

Harlow's life makes for a grand story, but I don't really like the substitute janitor qua framing device; it's kind of contrived. Alas, I don't know if there was a better way to do it, because the sense of the long hard slog is important, and telling the story without the janitor frame while keeping the same level of compression might have felt blasé. Tough call.

...You know, I am enamored with the way Dylan draws people smoking. Smoke on, phlegmatic 1950s scientists; smoke on.

Carla Speed McNeil — Finder: Five Crazy Women (graphic novel) (10/14)

I read it online the first time around, but Finder always reads better as a trade paperback. (Especially on account of the endnotes.)

So this was an odd duck of a Finder book, largely because it changed its mind halfway through about what kind of story it was. The first half or so is a screwy sex comedy, with Jaeger running around crashing into things like the ape-man he is (and frequently getting more than he bargained for from the supposedly-civilized women he chases). But once it hits the Grazie arc, 5CW turns into something entirely different and much darker. Jaeger spends most of it about a third of the way dead, and there's a sort of, um, escalation of the consequence scale. All the things that were jokes before are suddenly happening for keeps. The floor kind of drops out, you know? And then, right when it's about as dark as it can get, it pulls a hairpin turn and cuts loose with one last ridiculous screwball punchline, and closes the whole thing off with a quiet moment of boozy, sleep-deprived camaraderie.

Like I said, odd book. Good, though. (But you already knew that, because it's goddamn Finder. You're all reading this series by now, right?)

Elizabeth Bear — Undertow (10/15)

Very very good.

For me, the thing Elizabeth Bear does better than anything else is working with myth. Not telling myths or inventing myths, but using myth as the growth medium for weird, twisty, mycelial story structures, and making characters who consume myth and build muscle and bone from it. When her books do that, they're a pure and satisfying drug for me; when they don't, they're merely awesome.

This book is "merely" awesome. The conjuring was a brilliant device; the idea of a whole galaxy of company towns was upsettingly plausible, given humanity as we know it; the setting was both solid and lovely; and the story and the scope of events went through some very clever mutations before the ride was over.

Oh, and the froggy aliens were fabulous.

Things I Read During November

Stuart and Kathryn Immonen — Never as Bad as You Think (small book of collected strips) (11/4)

I read the whole series of this when it was on their Flickr page; it's great. (See userpic.) I wish there was more of it, but that's life.

Terry Pratchett — Making Money (11/4)

Read it in one gulp. It's part of the subseries following Moist von Lipwig, a former con man who has become Vetinari's favorite tool for forcing sweeping social change in Ankh-Morpork. It's not as much of a pure romp as Going Postal was, and it suffers from having a much weaker antagonist, but it's still good.

Pratchett has this fantastic iterative, fractal approach to worldbuilding, where new things keep slotting in where you wouldn't have thought there'd be space for them, and Making Money moves the whole Discworld project forward in a most satisfying way. Remember what I said about some of the standalone Discworld books being irritating in a filler episode, if-found-return-to-status-quo-ante sort of way? This is the opposite of that.

Also, I think this book showed Vetinari more pissed off than we've ever seen him before. He needs Lipwig, which I think bugs the shit out of him.

Pamela Dean — Tam Lin (11/11)

I found out about this one via a review on Elizabeth Bear's LJ, in which she describes it as "Real Genius for literature majors."

Uh, the pre-review I had here in my notes was a really pissy one. I'd been in a peevish and vexatious mood when I read it, and I was trying (and failing) to not take it out on the book. It's gotten better in my mind upon further consideration, but I still have major problems with it, the foremost of which is the nostalgia content. I've an almost allergically low tolerance for the stuff,* and pretty much the whole substance of the book is built around... hold on, can I quote Bear again? "...loving descriptions of the way we all secretly wish college life had been, though it wasn't." Yes, exactly, dammit. ARGH. (And to top that off, it was Carlton nostalgia, which I, as a Fighting Scot, am honor-bound to have a hate-on for regardless.) Soooo, probably not the right book for me. On the other hand, the transition into weirdness was amazingly deft, and the interaction between the characters was quite charming, so it wasn't by any means frisbee-worthy.

(Anyway. The reason I sought the book out is that I was mired in a side project of trying to get Tam Lin. You know the ballad, right? It's a fair enough song, but it also seems to exert an inexplicable hold on the imaginations of a whole pile of fantasy authors, and I was at a major loss as to why. It's a weird sort of project, I admit; not looking for anything in the text, but trying to elbow my way into position for a good viewing angle so as to see the sun sparkling off it.

I think I've finally got it now; the final key turned out to be this, though it probably wouldn't have tripped the switch if I hadn't hit Blood & Iron, Fire and Hemlock, and Dean's Tam Lin first.)

Oh, one more thing: the major reveal in the final act reminded me of something from Blood and Iron, that bit where someone comments that the Mebd only ever made the Tam Lin mistake once. It is kind of weird that everyone's plans here hinge on that being a repeatable trick, isn't it?

Martha Wells — City of Bones (11/11)

Verdict: great! (And with that, I do believe I've read all of Wells' non-Stargate novels.) Secondary-world fantasy, with a strongly Arabian-tinged desert setting; plot-wise, you've got a pretty basic relic chase, with shades of Indiana Jones (and my god, does the main character get beat up a lot) and a really startlingly corrupt social backdrop, plus an eventual showdown with the Big Nasties that will seem a bit familiar to anyone who's read Wells' other work. (The undead are such bitches.) Strong and engaging characters, rich and lifelike world, brisk plotting... if you like fantasy in the first place, you're pretty much set. I think this one is out of print, but your library probably has it hanging around.

Oh, man, also? The protagonist is a marsupial.** I can't get over it! I now hold a slight grudge against books that just assume the lead has to be a placental mammal. What have you got against pouches, writers?!

Lawrence Yep — Dragon Cauldron (11/12)

Third in that series I mentioned earlier. Still good. Still remarkably grim. Would probably make for a good set of movies.

Lawrence Yep — Dragon War (11/18)

A decent enough ending to a quite good series. Haven't much to say about it right now.

Karl Schroeder — Queen of Candesce, and Miranda July — No One Belongs Here More Than You (didn't finish)

The library wanted them back, and for one reason or another, I was in no mood for either of these. I know, I know, I have to read that Miranda July book. I'll get to it later, sometime when it doesn't fill me with existential dread and loathing. (I'm just in a mood lately, honest.)

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* Probably sensitized by a toxic reaction to a Jostens catalogue during high school.

** Well, not really, because the males have pouches too, and their species is based on patched human DNA anyhow. BUT STILL TOTALLY A ROO-MAN.

Special preview of Things I Read In December: Everyone should go read Charlie Stross's Halting State. And the new Scott Pilgrim.