Third Quarter 2021 Reading

[Peadar]

Next up, The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

[Ormond]

I think I forgot to mention that I read Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer a few weeks ago. This is a rather remarkable book considering it was copyrighted in 1994. It's a fantasy about a woman artist, wife and mother who somehow unconsciously creates alternate versions of herself and others that show up in the real physcial world. For most of the book she becomes a "he", a young gay male version of her middle-aged heterosexual female self. While in that body she discovers that her father, who abandoned her and her mother years ago, is a gay man himself living as a shapeshifted younger version of himself in the same small town. There's a lot of humor in the book, and it's well worth reading as a take from 27 years ago on gender issues that are much more discussed today.

Last week I finished Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler. Though it was the fourth one of her "Patternist" novels written, it is the first in the chronology of the overall story, set between the late 17th and early 19th centuries. Its two main characters, Doro and Anyanwu, are both shapeshifting nearly immortal human beings. Doro is a narcissistic character who has been orchestrating a human breeding program over centuries to try to create more beings with powers such as he and Anyanwu have. Anyanwu is a much more sympathetic character, who at the start of the story has spent several centuries in her native West Africa successively outliving husbands and children. Doro convinces her to go with him to America in the guise of a slave. (Both Doro and Anyanwu sometimes shapeshift into characters of the other gender than the one they mainly identify with, which makes it quite a coincidence I read this book so soon after Larque on the Wing.)

Butler was one of the first science fiction writers to win a MacArthur "genius" grant and Wild Seed is a book that to me shows she really was a genius. She is able to create a novel which deals with heavy issues around slavery, race and gender while making immortal characters with amazing powers completely believable. Her characters, even the minor ones, are complex and real human beings with both strengths and flaws. I always have the sense that I am reading something written by a person of profound intelligence when I read an Octavia Bulter book. 

Yesterday I finished A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. This is a contemporary comic novel by a Swedish author which I of course read in English translation. Ove is one of the more memorable single fictional characters I've ever encountered in a "realistic" novel. He is the complete archetype of a "lovable curmudgeon", a rigid, taciturn, humorless man, 59 and recently widowed at the start of the book. Backman does a marvelous job of presenting Ove as a seemingly complete comic jerk at the start of the book, and then gradually introduces back story that makes one understand where many of his quirks and rigid beliefs come from. If one stands back and thinks about this back story, Ove actually has had a very tragic life, though one brightened by his relationship with his late wife. In the present Backman provides Ove with a foil character, Parvaneh, who's an Iranian refugee married to a Swedish man who moves to the street Ove lives on at the start of the novel. Parvaneh is in some ways a female counterpart to Ove, as she barges in everywhere with supreme confidence that she's right, but she does this in a loud emotional way. I also think Backman may have felt he had to create a "foreigner" character in Parvaneh to shake up Ove's life -- his wife just accepted his quirks, as I think Swedish women of her generation would have. As I understand Swedish culture, even more than other Germanic cultures it's one where people do not discuss negative things out loud, so to push Ove to grow a bit beyond his original uncommunicative rigid personality he needs a non-Swedish woman to confront. Ove eventually becomes a surrograte grandpa to Parvaneh's kids. This book was evidently a bestseller in several European countries. It had several points where I laughed out loud -- the very first chapter, where Ove is making a pruchase in a computer store and dealing with very young clerks who don't know how to deal with his cluelessness about technology, is just hilarious. A great book if one wants a "feel good" read, but also does make older blue collar men a bit more understandable to the rest of us. 

[Wilbur]

This past weekend I finished up Stephen Fry's reading of Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold.  Once again, Fry is a fine reader, and his collections and summary of the events leading up to and then the conflict at Troy are very well constructed.  He covers the necessary ground with humor, little repetition, and just the right amount of depth.

My own assessment is that this is the best of his Greek history collections so far, helped as it is by being a full story rather than a collection of tales.  I hope that he will continue on to also create a work on The Odyssey as well.  Highly recommended, particularly as an audiobook.

[Plessiez]

I finished The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox.  Not entirely convinced by this one either, but I did mostly enjoy it.  As far as I can tell it's being pretty heavily marketed towards people who don't really read much traditional SF, and in particular to people who liked Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  Which I think is a bit unfortunate for a couple of reasons: one being that it's not (in my opinion) quite as good as Clarke's book, but the other being that (mild spoilers):

Spoiler

The comparison kind of gives away the fact that this is a portal fantasy, the actual reveal of which is one of the better parts of the book.

I definitely don't regret reading this, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it either.

Now moving on to Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace.  Her previous novel A Memory Called Empire was one of the last books I read before the pandemic hit and (perhaps relatedly) I can't really remember anything about it, although I do think that I liked it.

[Starkess]

On 8/7/2021 at 7:10 PM, Wall Flower said:

I think that should be pompous Belgian accent. Poirot would not be pleased at being called a Frenchman!

Of course Monsieur Poirot is Belgian! But his accent comes from speaking French!

[williamjm]

I read N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. I liked the book but I did have some reservations about it and I think it's not as good as some of her previous work. It was an interesting premise for an urban fantasy novel, that once cities get to a certain stage of development and their identity becomes so strong that they manifest that identity as an avatar who is then responsible for protecting the city from supernatural threats that want to stop this from happening. In the case of New York City this becomes more complicated since there ends up also being one person acting as an avatar of each of the five boroughs and they don't necessarily like or get on with each other even though they are going to have to work together to prevent a cataclysm.

Usually I would complain if I felt the protagonists in a novel felt like stereotypes, but here it is part of the point because they are meant to be stereotypes of their different boroughs. However, it did mean some of the characters felt like they lacked depth, Bronca and Brooklyn probably get the most development but some of the others felt a bit flat. There were also times when I felt some characters didn't react to some of the events in ways I found believable, people sometimes seemed far too accepting of some of the bizarre stuff that was happening.

As the premise would suggest the book does spend a lot of time talking about New York City. Having never been to New York there are probably lots of references I missed and it is a bit uneven in terms of how much it covers various parts of the city but it was interesting to spend a lot of the book in parts of the city that maybe get a bit overlooked in many stories like The Bronx or Staten Island. Another aspect of the book where I probably missed out on some of the references was that there's a lot of influence by and commentary on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. There do seem to be a lot of revisionist Lovercraft stories in recent years and since I've never read Lovecraft nor been particularly tempted to read him I don't find that trend particularly interesting.

I thought the plot had some interesting twists along the way, along with some late developments which I didn't anticipate but made sense in retrospect. Although there's clearly a set-up for the rest of the trilogy I thought it did manage to resolve most of the story threads in this volume.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I can report that after (thirteen!) years, I have finished reading the entire King James Bible (including Deuterocanonical Apocrypha) from cover to cover.

[3CityApache]

On 8/9/2021 at 4:58 PM, Peadar said:

Next up, The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

Finished it recently and I loved it. Just bought Utopia Avenue ebook for $3.50 on Amazon (good deal btw!) and that would really be the last Mitchell book I still haven't read. Bugger.

[Wall Flower]

16 hours ago, Starkess said:

Of course Monsieur Poirot is Belgian! But his accent comes from speaking French!

Good point, mon amie!

Apologies if I've butchered the French language.

[Wilbur]

5 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I can report that after (thirteen!) years, I have finished reading the entire King James Bible (including Deuterocanonical Apocrypha) from cover to cover.

The KJV has some of the most beautiful turns of phrase ever written.  I understand that newer English translations are more accurate or more accessible to readers, but it is difficult to compete with "bite the dust", etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/18/phrases-king-james-bible

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12205084

[Starkess]

Started listening to The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow. So far it's okay, although quite a lot of setup and not a whole lot of story yet. Also a bit heavy on the writing for my taste. There were like four different metaphors about the literal shape of letters in one scene. I don't like writing that feels so designed to be noticed. But I'm willing to stick with it for now!

19 hours ago, williamjm said:

I read N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. I liked the book but I did have some reservations about it and I think it's not as good as some of her previous work. It was an interesting premise for an urban fantasy novel, that once cities get to a certain stage of development and their identity becomes so strong that they manifest that identity as an avatar who is then responsible for protecting the city from supernatural threats that want to stop this from happening. In the case of New York City this becomes more complicated since there ends up also being one person acting as an avatar of each of the five boroughs and they don't necessarily like or get on with each other even though they are going to have to work together to prevent a cataclysm.

Yeah, I attempted that one recently and it was DNF for me. Not my thing. Hopefully she'll have other projects upcoming outside of that series because I do enjoy her work!

[lady narcissa]

On 8/10/2021 at 5:48 PM, williamjm said:

I read N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became.

That was such a helpful review. I've been wavering about if I wanted to read this or not since it came out. But your review has swayed me towards reading it.

[The Marquis de Leech]

17 hours ago, Wilbur said:

The KJV has some of the most beautiful turns of phrase ever written.  I understand that newer English translations are more accurate or more accessible to readers, but it is difficult to compete with "bite the dust", etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/18/phrases-king-james-bible

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12205084

One of the stranger experiences was running across famous phrases, and thinking "so that's where that comes from!"

[A wilding]

Yes, it is amazing how much of the English language comes from the King James bible translation or from Shakespeare. Something about Elizabethan English I guess. Or maybe just that until recently both were drummed into everyone at school.

[williamjm]

8 hours ago, lady narcissa said:

That was such a helpful review. I've been wavering about if I wanted to read this or not since it came out. But your review has swayed me towards reading it.

I hope you enjoy it. 

I have now started Rebecca Roanhorse's "Black Sun", which seems good so far. 

[stonebender]

I finished the first collection of Cook's Garrett P.I. novels and now I'm working on the final book of the first collection of Brust's Vlad Taltos stories.  They could almost be set in the same world given how well the two styles mesh.  Funny how that works out.  I like both Erikson and Esslemont, for instance, but they can often feel like they're working in two different worlds.  

[Ser Not Appearing]

On 7/26/2021 at 11:15 AM, Ser Not Appearing said:

I just read (listened to) The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I was much more satisfied with the book about midway through than I am here at the end. It was good. Plenty of world building and interesting characters, plus much about the various deceits played out well. But a good bit of the manner in which everything played out in the second-half felt more plot-armory and less well-crafted. There just wasn't enough for me to suspend my disbelief when peril was escaped and everything got tied up in a nice, little bow.

 

On 8/5/2021 at 2:27 PM, Ser Not Appearing said:

Just got through book 2. Did I enjoy it? Sure. Was it a good step back? For me, yes. I'm going to complain because that's my nature and it'll result in me seeming convinced the book was terrible. Again, it wasn't. But it held some major dissatisfactions for me.

Locke was more petulant than witty, plot points turned on Harry Potter-esque previously-unrevealed, magic, alchemical devices and ... the possible fridging was telegraphed and regretful by mere existence. Their eventual scheme seemed unnecessarily elaborate and the money spent + time spent could probably have netted them just as much with far less risk. It just seemed odd, once revealed.

On the subject of money, it just seems off in general. They can get 250 coins with ease. Do that 100 times (again, easy to do over two years from what I can tell) and they have a sum of 25,000 coins, which is treated as an insane amount of money. It's just all incongruent and, for whatever reason, this sort of thing really bothered me despite that economy is often a hand-waving matter than can be ignored.

Just finished the third book. It's significantly better than the second one, imo, and the epilogue is a well-done tease. There were obviously still gaps and challenges, as there are in any book, but I was much better able to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy it.

I don't know how highly I value the series overall but I commend the author on refinding his voice after a somewhat too-forced narrative in the second book and I'm actively interested in seeing the conclusion.

Hot take: My prediction is that Locke eventually finds he has a talent for magic.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I've knocked off a couple of H.G. Wells books I haven't read since childhood - The Time Machine and The Invisible Man.

The former is darker than I remembered. Wells can do horror when he wants.

[Plessiez]

On 8/10/2021 at 4:54 PM, Plessiez said:

Now moving on to Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace.  Her previous novel A Memory Called Empire was one of the last books I read before the pandemic hit and (perhaps relatedly) I can't really remember anything about it, although I do think that I liked it.

Finished this today and I liked it a lot (and I suspect I'd have liked it even more if I'd remembered more of the previous book).  Only slight criticism I have is that the ending is, I think, a little too neat (or perhaps just that the major crisis of the story is resolved a little too abruptly). 

On a couple of occasions I assumed that the book was dropping hooks for a sequel, but I then read this interview with Martine from 2019 which implies there might not be one (Martine states that she'd like to write other books in the same universe, but implicitly not with the same group of characters).  Which slightly surprised me, though on reflection it probably shouldn't have: it's not as though this volume ends on any sort of cliffhanger.

[williamjm]

I read Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun, the first volume in an epic fantasy trilogy set in a world inspired by pre-Columbian American civilisations such as the Mayans. I read Roanhorse's debut novel Trail of Lightning a couple of years ago and I liked bits of it but I felt it was very uneven, however I feel she has improved as a writer since then. The most interesting aspect of this book is the setting, while it isn't quite the first fantasy series to use this kind of setting it is still noticeably different to the setting of most fantasy series. I think the world-building works well, gradually revealing various aspects of the society without having to rely too much on large chunks of exposition.

I thought the plot moved at a good pace with most of the book taking place in the 20 days before an eclipse regarded as a major event by the sun-worshipping religious order who rule the continent, although with some flashbacks revealing more about the characters. One issue is that it is very much the first novel in a series with nothing resolved and a big cliffhanger right at the end. The book follows four different characters and I did find three of them interesting, although the remaining character gets very little to do in the book although they will presumably play a bigger role later in the series.

Overall, I thought this was a good book although due to the lack of plot resolution it's difficult to really judge it completely without reading the sequels.

I've now moved on to Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead. I really liked The Goblin Emperor so I'm definitely intrigued by another book set in the same world, even if the protagonist was a relatively minor character in the first book.