book list, January 2008
Feb. 1st, 2008 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingIt's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in January 2008. I'm experimenting with cuts to keep from annoying people who don't want to read my blather about each book.
New: 14
---The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson (thriller: John Wells, who has spent nearly 10 years undercover within Al Qaeda, is ordered back to the US as part of a new terrorist plot. Meanwhile, Jennifer Exley, his former handler, works to help him from within the CIA. This book is much more... dispassionate, I think, than I expected -- Berenson is firmly on the side of America, but not blindly so. He doesn't seem quite easy with a lot of the things people do during wars, which is as it should be. Nobody should be comfortable when facing humanity's capacity for evil, be it petty or grandly diabolical. And nobody should forget that we are, after all, in the middle of a war.)
---Fullmetal Alchemist vols. 3-15, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: um. How does one summarize an epic? 1. The Elric brothers, Ed and Al, search for the legendary Philosopher's Stone in a their quest to repair the damage caused when they attempted to resurrect their mother. 2. Colonel Roy Mustang leads a quiet rebellion against the government of Amestris, which appears to be a military dictatorship with superficial democratic trappings. 3. Amestris is really governed by a secret cabal in thrall to alchemically created beings called homunculi, who are carrying out a plan that seems likely to sacrifice every citizen in some grand design. 4. Oh, and by the way, some people from the neighboring nation of Xing, and some members of the Ishbalan minority [who were on the losing side of a genocidal civil war] are also looking for the Philosopher's Stone. Often violently. 5. Nobody knows quite how Van Hohenheim, the Elric brothers' father, fits into all this, but he seems to be immortal at the very least, and possibly responsible for a previous attempt at the huge soul-destroying ritual that may have created the homunculi's master. 6. And all these threads tie together. Seamlessly. I am in awe.)
Old: 13
---And Eternity, Piers Anthony (fantasy/sci-fi: 7th in the Incarnations of Immortality series. Anthony's thing about sexualizing young teenage girls is on full display here, as is a really simplistic and wrong-headed summation of the evolution/creationism debate. I mostly reread this for the brief bits with Jolie, Orb, and Parry, who I always thought deserved a better author.)
---Man from Mundania, Piers Anthony (fantasy: 13th in the Xanth series. Princess Ivy uses the Heaven Cent to search for the missing Magician Humphrey, but ends up in Mundania instead. Grey Murphy, a young man who falls in love with her, proves to have a more interesting past than anyone expected. Cute, silly, trite, and with the usual dose of Anthony's weird sexual humor.)
---A Song for Arbonne, Guy Gavriel Kay (fantasy: Gorhaut and Arbonne, two nations that have clashed for generations, stumble inevitably toward a new war, no matter how disastrous it will be for both countries. Ignore any cover summaries that try to portray this as women vs. men. Kay doesn't do anything that simplistic.)
---Athyra, Steven Brust (fantasy: in which Vlad Taltos discovers one of his old enemies is not as dead as people had thought, and inadvertently screws up the life of Savn, a young Teckla peasant boy.)
---Orca, Steven Brust (fantasy: in which Vlad attempts to repay his debt to Savn, and stumbles across a financial scandal far bigger than he or his friend Kiera the Thief are prepared to deal with.)
---Changeling, Roger Zelazny (fantasy: after an evil wizard's defeat, his infant son is exchanged with a baby from a technologically oriented world, to prevent him from growing up to seek revenge. Unfortunately, Mark Marekson proves even more dangerous than the child he replaced -- bringing forbidden technology back to the magical world -- and so the other changeling, Pol Detson, is summoned 'home' to deal with him. The illustrations have a vivid feel, but they have fuck-all to do with the story as written.)
---Madwand, Roger Zelazny (fantasy: the sequel to Changeling, in which it is revealed just what exactly Pol Detson's evil father was up to before his neighbors killed him. These illustrations are more pedestrian, but at least this artist seems to have read the book rather than just saying, "Oh, it's sword and sorcery, so I'll draw the girl in a bikini made of fur and jewels.")
---Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling (fantasy/young adult fiction: I feel ridiculous summarizing this, but whatever. Harry's 5th year at Hogwarts, in which he tries to get people to believe him about Voldemort's return, deal with the Ministry's interference [in the person of the odious Professor Umbridge], and cope with the wild mood swings of puberty. He fails rather notably at all three tasks, until the very end. Not a happy book.)
---My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George (children's fiction: Sam runs away from home and spends a year living off the land in the Catskill mountains. This book is a strange combination of utter realism -- everything he eats and makes is accurate -- and breathtaking implausibility, because there is no way on earth that he could get away with that sort of thing, unless his parents were a good deal more peculiar than they're portrayed.)
---Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher (urban fantasy: Dresden Files, book 9, in which someone is killing women with minor magical talents, and Thomas seems to be one of the prime suspects. I like the way Butcher throws moral quandaries at Harry; it adds weight to the more standard action/mystery plots.)
---Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 1, in which Killashandra Ree discovers she can't quite make it as a solo opera singer, and decides to join the Heptite Guild on Ballybran instead, mining the crystal that makes interstellar communication possible. Episodic. Killashandra is immature and self-absorbed, which McCaffrey does make some effort to face and deal with. Most of the sex is unnecessary, though tastefully left off-page. This is loosely set in the same universe as McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and its related books.)
---Killashandra, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 2, in which Killashandra is asked to do some investigative work on the planet Optheria, while she does a routine crystal reinstallation. She finds a lot more than she bargained for, including love. A bit melodramatic, but less rambling than the first book, and the sex is less gratuitous.)
---Crystal Line, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 3, in which Killashandra and Lars Dahl suffer relationship trouble, and Killashandra's less appealing personality traits -- her self-absorption, her refusal to deal with setbacks, her denial of fallibility -- finally catch up and give her the grief she somehow managed to skate past in the first two books. Like the first book, this is fairly episodic and contains too much casual sex.)
January Total: 27 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 27 books (14 new, 13 old)
New: 14
---The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson (thriller: John Wells, who has spent nearly 10 years undercover within Al Qaeda, is ordered back to the US as part of a new terrorist plot. Meanwhile, Jennifer Exley, his former handler, works to help him from within the CIA. This book is much more... dispassionate, I think, than I expected -- Berenson is firmly on the side of America, but not blindly so. He doesn't seem quite easy with a lot of the things people do during wars, which is as it should be. Nobody should be comfortable when facing humanity's capacity for evil, be it petty or grandly diabolical. And nobody should forget that we are, after all, in the middle of a war.)
---Fullmetal Alchemist vols. 3-15, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: um. How does one summarize an epic? 1. The Elric brothers, Ed and Al, search for the legendary Philosopher's Stone in a their quest to repair the damage caused when they attempted to resurrect their mother. 2. Colonel Roy Mustang leads a quiet rebellion against the government of Amestris, which appears to be a military dictatorship with superficial democratic trappings. 3. Amestris is really governed by a secret cabal in thrall to alchemically created beings called homunculi, who are carrying out a plan that seems likely to sacrifice every citizen in some grand design. 4. Oh, and by the way, some people from the neighboring nation of Xing, and some members of the Ishbalan minority [who were on the losing side of a genocidal civil war] are also looking for the Philosopher's Stone. Often violently. 5. Nobody knows quite how Van Hohenheim, the Elric brothers' father, fits into all this, but he seems to be immortal at the very least, and possibly responsible for a previous attempt at the huge soul-destroying ritual that may have created the homunculi's master. 6. And all these threads tie together. Seamlessly. I am in awe.)
Old: 13
---And Eternity, Piers Anthony (fantasy/sci-fi: 7th in the Incarnations of Immortality series. Anthony's thing about sexualizing young teenage girls is on full display here, as is a really simplistic and wrong-headed summation of the evolution/creationism debate. I mostly reread this for the brief bits with Jolie, Orb, and Parry, who I always thought deserved a better author.)
---Man from Mundania, Piers Anthony (fantasy: 13th in the Xanth series. Princess Ivy uses the Heaven Cent to search for the missing Magician Humphrey, but ends up in Mundania instead. Grey Murphy, a young man who falls in love with her, proves to have a more interesting past than anyone expected. Cute, silly, trite, and with the usual dose of Anthony's weird sexual humor.)
---A Song for Arbonne, Guy Gavriel Kay (fantasy: Gorhaut and Arbonne, two nations that have clashed for generations, stumble inevitably toward a new war, no matter how disastrous it will be for both countries. Ignore any cover summaries that try to portray this as women vs. men. Kay doesn't do anything that simplistic.)
---Athyra, Steven Brust (fantasy: in which Vlad Taltos discovers one of his old enemies is not as dead as people had thought, and inadvertently screws up the life of Savn, a young Teckla peasant boy.)
---Orca, Steven Brust (fantasy: in which Vlad attempts to repay his debt to Savn, and stumbles across a financial scandal far bigger than he or his friend Kiera the Thief are prepared to deal with.)
---Changeling, Roger Zelazny (fantasy: after an evil wizard's defeat, his infant son is exchanged with a baby from a technologically oriented world, to prevent him from growing up to seek revenge. Unfortunately, Mark Marekson proves even more dangerous than the child he replaced -- bringing forbidden technology back to the magical world -- and so the other changeling, Pol Detson, is summoned 'home' to deal with him. The illustrations have a vivid feel, but they have fuck-all to do with the story as written.)
---Madwand, Roger Zelazny (fantasy: the sequel to Changeling, in which it is revealed just what exactly Pol Detson's evil father was up to before his neighbors killed him. These illustrations are more pedestrian, but at least this artist seems to have read the book rather than just saying, "Oh, it's sword and sorcery, so I'll draw the girl in a bikini made of fur and jewels.")
---Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling (fantasy/young adult fiction: I feel ridiculous summarizing this, but whatever. Harry's 5th year at Hogwarts, in which he tries to get people to believe him about Voldemort's return, deal with the Ministry's interference [in the person of the odious Professor Umbridge], and cope with the wild mood swings of puberty. He fails rather notably at all three tasks, until the very end. Not a happy book.)
---My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George (children's fiction: Sam runs away from home and spends a year living off the land in the Catskill mountains. This book is a strange combination of utter realism -- everything he eats and makes is accurate -- and breathtaking implausibility, because there is no way on earth that he could get away with that sort of thing, unless his parents were a good deal more peculiar than they're portrayed.)
---Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher (urban fantasy: Dresden Files, book 9, in which someone is killing women with minor magical talents, and Thomas seems to be one of the prime suspects. I like the way Butcher throws moral quandaries at Harry; it adds weight to the more standard action/mystery plots.)
---Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 1, in which Killashandra Ree discovers she can't quite make it as a solo opera singer, and decides to join the Heptite Guild on Ballybran instead, mining the crystal that makes interstellar communication possible. Episodic. Killashandra is immature and self-absorbed, which McCaffrey does make some effort to face and deal with. Most of the sex is unnecessary, though tastefully left off-page. This is loosely set in the same universe as McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and its related books.)
---Killashandra, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 2, in which Killashandra is asked to do some investigative work on the planet Optheria, while she does a routine crystal reinstallation. She finds a lot more than she bargained for, including love. A bit melodramatic, but less rambling than the first book, and the sex is less gratuitous.)
---Crystal Line, Anne McCaffrey (sci-fi: Crystal Singer series volume 3, in which Killashandra and Lars Dahl suffer relationship trouble, and Killashandra's less appealing personality traits -- her self-absorption, her refusal to deal with setbacks, her denial of fallibility -- finally catch up and give her the grief she somehow managed to skate past in the first two books. Like the first book, this is fairly episodic and contains too much casual sex.)
January Total: 27 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 27 books (14 new, 13 old)
