January 2011 Reading Thread

[beniowa]

Yesterday morning I finished The Hammer by KJ Parker. Parker's third stand-alone novel of vengeance and justice centers on an exiled noble family on a near-forgotten island colony. With it's tale of revenge as well as it's characterization, the book reminds me a bit of Devices and Desires and the Engineer Trilogy. The Hammer is quite good, though it'll probably end up being a lesser Parker work.

I'm now reading Vicious Grace by MLN Hanover.

[Ormond]

After a year of blogging, I've reached my first patch of quasi burn out. I've fallen behind on reviews, which has made me hesitant to read more, because then I'll be even more behind. I know, it's pathetic, but I can't help it. I then got the idea of reading more short fiction to take the pressure off - and then somehow ended up announcing that I'd go review that too. So I'm just sitting here starting novels and then dropping them because I keep thinking I need to come up with something intelligent to say about this and running away.

Do you get paid for this blog, or do publishers send you free books to review?

If not, you are under no obligation to review a certain number of items per year, and can simply make a blog post telling people that you are burned out and will be reviewing fewer items in the future, now matter what you have previously "announced".

[Isis]

Ouch. I'm assuming it was bad, or at least forgettable?

Actually, it wasn't! It was by an author I really like and I was quite surprised that I managed to 'forget' I'd read it. I can only think that I must have read it the first time when I was preoccupied with something else and it just didn't fully register with me. Strange.

Hmmm. Not sure how I feel about the idea of Mr E reading out/having someone else read passages from his books at gigs. It's a good book, definitely, but still... there's a time and a place for eveything. He does like to do things differently though. One point he makes in the book is how often people who like a particular album would be unhappy because the next album he brought out wasn't very similar. He also said the same thing about shows, i.e. playing different versions of songs, acoustically or with strings, or whatever means that people might expect one thing and get another. So no matter HOW he does something people get all pissed off with him. :)

[Ormond]

Yesterday I finished Annals of the Witch World by Andre Norton. It's an omnibus of her first three Witch World titles, Witch World, Web of the Witch World, and Year of the Unicorn.

I wanted to read this because many people consider Andre Norton somewhat of a classic author. I wasn't impressed with the first two titles; I didn't care for the characters and didn't think the way she mixed science fiction and fantasy in the two books was effective.

However, I really liked Year of the Unicorn. This is a bit surprising because it was the only one of the three told in first person, and I'm often not a fan of first person stories. But I really liked Gillan, the narrator of the book, and thought Herrel, the "wizard" she marries, was well-characterized as a young man who is scorned by his fellows for not being skilled in magic but who rises above that in the end with Gillan's help. If the following Witch World books are more like Year of the Unicorn than the first two, I can see why some do consider them early classics of the genre.

[wolverine]

I spent yesterday evening -- all of it -- reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novella The Mountains of Morning, which fits into the chronology just days before the beginning of The Vor Game but stands one-hundred percent on its own. Amazingly good; this was written a few years into Bujold's career when she had a little more writing experience, and the books are beyond just entertaining at this point. [Completely forget if I mentioned here that I finished The Vor Game? Well, I did. It rocked.]

Did a quick amazon search of this series....ouch these books can definitely fit in the worst book covers thread. It is so hard to take books seriously when they have covers like that.

Anywho, I am reading Dune and have about 1/3 left. It does not seem like there is enough time to wrap up the story line in this book, but the general impression I get is that the rest of the books in the sequence suck. Are any of them worth reading after Dune?

[Mjolnir]

Re Bujold's covers: Oh yes, Bujold's Vorkosigan series is published by Bean [which I admit with shame was a part of what kept me away from them for a while, I don't like the general impression I get of Bean's slant on sf. They're great pioneers in epublishing, though, and it sounds like they're good to their authors.] They're known for their truly wretched covers. Luckily I have the series in ebook format so I don't have to deal with them.

I finally finished Catherynne M. Valente's first Prester John novel, The Habitation of the Blessed, another absolutely wonderful book from one of my favourite authors writing in fantasy right now. It mixes a lot of things together to tell the story of Prester John and how his influence changes the land he finds: weird travelogue, the legends of the kingdom, the life story of one of those John becomes close to, religious debate [the novel's more than willing to be revisionist and tweek noses.] It's all very beautiful. In fact I found it tough to deal with too much of it at once -- it often takes me a while to read Valente's books, I prefer to make my way through them slowly so I absorb more and this one was no exception. What I've read of the author's previous work leans heavily toward the cluster of interlocking tales style of story-telling -- I'm not certain they're formally mosaic novels, though The Orphan's Tales might arguably be, but they've got things in common with the form, I think -- and this one trends that way too. But the characters are drawn together much more tightly as the narrative proceeds than they were in the nested stories within stories of The Orphan's Tales; some people seem to think that The Orphan's Tales has no plot, and I think those people are high, but Palimpsest and The Habitation of the Blessed are much more traditionally plotty narratives.

Valente's fully in control of her prose at all times despite how wild and shiny it becomes -- it's one of the things I love about her writing -- but I do think there are a couple of places where poetic turns of phrase earlier in the book unintentionally cause little bumps in continuity in the latter half when the plot kicks into higher gear and starts drawing connections across the book's many threads much more comprehensively. These are tiny things, though. There is one device used -- this is a spoiler so I'm being vague -- which makes the reader have to infer some events rather than seeing them firsthand. There are plenty of hints dropped for the reader to work with when reconstructing the missing events, but Valente uses the device pretty liberally and you do miss the going down of some pretty important shit. And I admit, I did once or twice grumble to myself something like: "Don't see the point of this other than to keep the book from becoming huge long. Just tell the damn story, please." But it is of thematic importance, it keeps things moving, and a couple times lets the author pull off little elidings of events that are really quite beautiful -- do we really need to know everything, after all? That being said, there are two more books in this trilogy and I'm kinda hoping they're not entirely linear; there's some stuff we skate over pretty fast in The Habitation of the Blessed that I'd love to see explored in more detail. Because it's worth exploring. Because it is that good.

I read something else last couple days, but this is long enough...

[williamjm]

Hmmm. Not sure how I feel about the idea of Mr E reading out/having someone else read passages from his books at gigs. It's a good book, definitely, but still... there's a time and a place for eveything. He does like to do things differently though.

In this instance, I did think the reading worked reasonably well but I don't think it is something that should really catch on. It did provide a bit more context to the songs, but I think if they'd done any more than the three short excerpts they did then it would have felt like it was taking up time that could be better spent on the actual music. The "support act" was also a video documentary about E investigating his late father's theory of parallel universes, which I thought was definitely out of place, it may have been a reasonably interesting video, but that's really not the right time for it.

Re Bujold's covers: Oh yes, Bujold's Vorkosigan series is published by Bean [which I admit with shame was a part of what kept me away from them for a while, I don't like the general impression I get of Bean's slant on sf. They're great pioneers in epublishing, though, and it sounds like they're good to their authors.] They're known for their truly wretched covers. Luckily I have the series in ebook format so I don't have to deal with them.

There are some pretty bad covers among the Baen ones, but none of them quite as hideous as this German cover for The Warrior's Apprentice

[Bellis]

I read the much hyped The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman. It's a solid secondary world steampunk, and much more controlled in its execution than the author's previous works. It's not KJ Parker or Mieville, but it held my attention throughout, even when it lapsed into a generic travelogue. The characters are relatively unmemorable for the genre. I liked Creedmoor, Liv didn't annoy me, and I didn't really notice any others :worried: The Gun was cool though. Dunno if I'll look hard for the sequel; I'm almost happy to leave things where they are, where it ended.

[SpaceChampion]

Finished Under Heaven, G G Kay -- excellent!

Starting into Against All Things Ending, 3rd (of 4) book of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson.

[The Evil Hat]

Do you get paid for this blog, or do publishers send you free books to review?

If not, you are under no obligation to review a certain number of items per year, and can simply make a blog post telling people that you are burned out and will be reviewing fewer items in the future, now matter what you have previously "announced".

This is true, and, of course, a possibility, even if I'd prefer to not have to back down. For now, I'm reading Murakami shorts and will probably reread some Lovecraft. If I'm not feeling more analytical after that, I'll see what happens.

The Murakami shorts in question, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, are interesting, but I'm not sure I'm really grasping all that many of them. Several of the stories seem like the most enigmatic moments of his novels. I am enjoying them, though.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon was a book that I really enjoyed. Great characters, believeable plot (I liked the fact as her first mission she spends most of the novel trying to avoid a war, not to go in there with guns blazing in a decrepit, weaponless cargo ship, and she makes mistakes but learns from them), and light on the science made this fast read for me. I'm hoping this will be my "gateway" novel to the science fiction realm that I've avoided. Marque and Reprisal, the next book in the series is up next.

[peterbound]

Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon was a book that I really enjoyed. Great characters, believeable plot (I liked the fact as her first mission she spends most of the novel trying to avoid a war, not to go in there with guns blazing in a decrepit, weaponless cargo ship, and she makes mistakes but learns from them), and light on the science made this fast read for me. I'm hoping this will be my "gateway" novel to the science fiction realm that I've avoided. Marque and Reprisal, the next book in the series is up next.

Good for you. I'm glad you weren't swayed by the negative hype she got on here a while back. I'll pick this one up and give a shot.

[polishgenius]

Just started Matterhorn. I hope it's as good as some of y'all are saying: I don't really have the money I spent on it.

[murphy]

Good for you. I'm glad you weren't swayed by the negative hype she got on here a while back. I'll pick this one up and give a shot.

I've always liked her books, at least most of them. And negative hype or not, I'll still keep on reading them. I thought her Speed of Dark and Remnant Population were brilliant and the Herris Serrano books were a great deal of fun.

At the moment, I'm reading Amanda Downum's Bone Palace and really liking it.

[pat5150]

Just finished Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear.

Though it suffers from the same shortcomings as The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss upped his game in this one. Fans will love it, while those who weren't that impressed with TNotW need not bother, methinks.

Check out the blog for the full review. :)

Patrick

[Tears of Lys]

I just bought Perdido Street Station and The Steel Remains. Started Steel last night. Can't say I'm too high on it yet, but I've got to have something that knocks me off of this Bakker reread session I've been on. It's like I'm in a feedback loop... reading, rereading, rinse, repeat...

I tried to get Disciple of the Dog or Neuropath, but stupid Borders didn't have them in the store. :angry:

[beniowa]

Yesterday I finished M.L.N. Hanover's Vicious Grace, the third book in the Black Sun's Daughter series. A little light on plot, it had a decent bit of character development and it didn't end the way I had expected.

I'm going to give Twisted Metal by Tony Ballantyne a shot next.

[Mjolnir]

Finished Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace the other day. [i see Murphy's reading this as well.]

When Downum's first book, The Drowning City, came out last year to be honest I didn't really pay attention. I was interested for a while, but I kinda bounced off the sample chapters and thought no more about it. Then The Bone Palace got a couple really good reviews, so I read a sample. I'm glad I did; I think the book is awesome.

It's secondary world fantasy, falling on the ubergothy end of the spectrum: draughty old castles, dark hints of terrible deeds done in the past, the dead walking and hunting by night, revenge plots and emotions running high -- that sort of thing. There are even some vampires, but while some of the characters do find them alluring both characters and reader are never, ever allowed to forget that these creatures are monsters who feed on the blood of mortalkind. I really dig the vampires in this book, which is something I honestly didn't expect to be saying given that when they first showed up my reaction was something along the lines of "oh fuck, here we go".

But yes: it's got a lush decadent setting, cool political intrigue coming out every orifice, interesting characters who have a lot of drama going on but deal with that drama like the adults they are. And the writing brings it all off. It's not showy prose, particularly, but it balances between the grounded and the theatrical elements of the situation really well. It's basically pure entertainment, but of the kind that will never, ever insult your intelligence or talk down to you, and is also willing to explore the relationships between its characters in what feels like a mature way while it wends along its intrigue-laden, bloody way. Oh, and it's got strong female characters, lots of them, from several different walks of life, and they all get to have interesting personalities and do interesting things. And the book doesn't make a big deal out of this; it's just taken for granted. [Which is somewhat the case with differing sexualities in the novel, too.] It didn't reshape the way I look at secondary world fantasy or anything -- it's not the kind of book that aims to do that, I don't think -- but I really enjoyed it, to the point where I'm sure I'll reread it at some point.

I'm now reading Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, because Jo Walton wrote about it on tor.com, but I am doing so slowly because I think it's the sort of book I'll get more out of that way. So I'm reading The Broken Kingdoms by Jemisin at the same time, though I'm only 80 pages in at this point.

[RedEyedGhost]

About time! :)

I know, right! So far I'm loving it, if only I had more time to read.

Yesterday I finished M.L.N. Hanover's Vicious Grace, the third book in the Black Sun's Daughter series. A little light on plot, it had a decent bit of character development and it didn't end the way I had expected.

In a good way? I'll be reading that at some point in February.

[Eponine]

I finished The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman and started The City and the City by China Mieville. I have a backlog of non-fiction and a third attempt at War and Peace, but I saw that it was a relatively short book and I've enjoyed Mieville's Bas-Lag books.

I'm both glad and sorry that The Half-Made World has a sequel. I really loved the setting - the spirits and the conflicts and the locations - and I would have liked to know even more about how things were structured. But I feel that I've had about enough of this set of characters and don't have much interest in continuing to follow Liv and Creedmore in such detail. One of the things that drew me in most strongly with the plot were that there were several times when I really had no idea what was going to happen next - whether certain characters would live or die or change their minds - but several outcomes seemed plausible. I liked Liv's character alright, except how it felt that aspects of her emotional past was put there just as plot device and didn't otherwise shape her personality. OTOH, at least she didn't go on about it all the time. It was good enough that I'm interested in reading other things from the author, especially since other people have recommended Thunderer.