book list, February 2008
Mar. 3rd, 2008 06:41 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 February 2008. I'm experimenting with cuts to keep from annoying people who don't want to read my blather about each book.
Usually I read a lot more than this, but I spent the second half of February watching DVDs of the new Doctor Who. I think it was more than a fair trade-off!
New: 7
---Thumbs, Toes, & Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human, Chip Walter (nonfiction: Walter picks 6 traits that he thinks are central to humanity -- toes [walking upright], thumbs [and tool-making], the ability to speak, tears, laughter [both of those as social bonding mechanisms, and tools for maintaining emotional homeostasis], and kissing [which is really a stretch, if you ask me]. He then elaborates on each, often going off on quite strained tangents -- which are interesting in their own right, true, but which don't always tie back into his original arguments. Also, he really, really needs a better editor, to weed out the egregious logical repetitions even a casual reader will stumble over.)
---Children in Colonial America, James Marten, ed. (nonfiction: a collection of essays about various aspects of childhood in colonial North America. They range from extremely readable to the worst excesses of academic doublespeak jargon, and their content is similarly variable. For example, I quite liked the one about the legal construction of childhood in New Amsterdam, whereas the bit about German Catholic teenage girls was a textbook example of how to kill a potentially interesting idea.)
---Mine to Possess, Nalini Singh (romance: 4th in her Psy/Changeling series, in which we finally get a human as one of the main characters. Hooray! I still feel strangely embarrassed about admitting that I sometimes like reading genre romance -- and I definitely find the 'mating for life!' concept that permeates paranormal romance rather irritating -- but there's something about this series that really grabs me, even if I can't put my finger on it.)
---White Lies, Jayne Anne Krentz (romance: a human lie-detector and a psychic hunter investigate a series of murders that may be tied to a sinister plot to take over the Arcane Society. Competent and harmless, and I did quite like Clare's rather blasé attitude toward the lies she's constantly assaulted by.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 18, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: in which Daredevil puts together a group to take down the Kingpin, and things go badly wrong.)
---Fullmetal Alchemist vols. 1-2, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: opening of the series, in which Ed and Al investigate a fraudulent priest in Lior, deal with a train hijacking, meet Shou Tucker and his daughter, and confront Scar for the first time.)
Old: 3
---Dzur, Steven Brust (fantasy: a Vlad Taltos novel, in which Vlad returns -- briefly -- to Adrilankha and attempts to fix one of the problems he created when he left abruptly several years ago.)
---Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny (science fiction: in which Francis Sandow, the last survivor of the 20th century, finds himself tangled in a revenge plot that stretches back several hundred years. Not Zelazny's best -- too many threads are left untied, or just allowed to fall by the wayside -- but interesting and fun.)
---Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (fantasy: in which Kay does Provence and Languedoc, only this time he does it 'for real' rather than in the not-quite-Europe he'd been using for his previous four books. Ysabel ties in more directly to the Fionavar Tapestry, which is why I don't like it nearly as much. I don't know why people like that trilogy so much -- it's clunky and creaky and not even a third as good as, say, The Lions of Al-Rassan -- and while I don't mind the way Kay slips mini-references to it into all his other work, I really prefer to ignore his whole Fionavar-as-the-center-of-everything conceit, and it's damned hard to do that when two characters from the trilogy turn up as major characters in Ysabel. Especially when it's two characters I was happier thinking of as platonic friends, and now he's gone and made them be married for about twenty years!
On the bright side, at least they've aged convincingly, and aren't implausibly heroic or anything. But I still think Kay tries a bit too hard to tie all his characters up in romantic relationships, sometimes against all their previous development and all rational plot momentum.)
February Total: 10 books (plus several magazines, a few newspaper articles, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 37 books (21 new, 16 old)
---------------------------------------------
In other news, I finished a rough draft of chapter 14 of "An Ounce of Prevention" a few days ago, but I had to scrap the entire thing for pacing reasons. See, the story is hitting the part where things are happening, and I have to keep the pacing tight and quick-feeling (though really, it's very drawn out compared to some other chapters, which covered several days in one scene). And while I had some nice character interaction between Sakura and Kakashi, I was basically stalling the story dead in the water because...
Well, there are two reasons, really. First, I'm not completely sure what comes next, and second, I have mixed feelings about finishing stories. On the one hand, finishing is the point. It's a joy and a satisfaction and a relief. But on the other hand, once a story is done, those characters lose the... the urgency, I suppose, with which they inhabit my mind. And I hate letting them go and saying goodbye.
But anyway, I do know where chapter 14 needs to go, and this time I'm going to get it right. *grin*
Usually I read a lot more than this, but I spent the second half of February watching DVDs of the new Doctor Who. I think it was more than a fair trade-off!
New: 7
---Thumbs, Toes, & Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human, Chip Walter (nonfiction: Walter picks 6 traits that he thinks are central to humanity -- toes [walking upright], thumbs [and tool-making], the ability to speak, tears, laughter [both of those as social bonding mechanisms, and tools for maintaining emotional homeostasis], and kissing [which is really a stretch, if you ask me]. He then elaborates on each, often going off on quite strained tangents -- which are interesting in their own right, true, but which don't always tie back into his original arguments. Also, he really, really needs a better editor, to weed out the egregious logical repetitions even a casual reader will stumble over.)
---Children in Colonial America, James Marten, ed. (nonfiction: a collection of essays about various aspects of childhood in colonial North America. They range from extremely readable to the worst excesses of academic doublespeak jargon, and their content is similarly variable. For example, I quite liked the one about the legal construction of childhood in New Amsterdam, whereas the bit about German Catholic teenage girls was a textbook example of how to kill a potentially interesting idea.)
---Mine to Possess, Nalini Singh (romance: 4th in her Psy/Changeling series, in which we finally get a human as one of the main characters. Hooray! I still feel strangely embarrassed about admitting that I sometimes like reading genre romance -- and I definitely find the 'mating for life!' concept that permeates paranormal romance rather irritating -- but there's something about this series that really grabs me, even if I can't put my finger on it.)
---White Lies, Jayne Anne Krentz (romance: a human lie-detector and a psychic hunter investigate a series of murders that may be tied to a sinister plot to take over the Arcane Society. Competent and harmless, and I did quite like Clare's rather blasé attitude toward the lies she's constantly assaulted by.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 18, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: in which Daredevil puts together a group to take down the Kingpin, and things go badly wrong.)
---Fullmetal Alchemist vols. 1-2, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: opening of the series, in which Ed and Al investigate a fraudulent priest in Lior, deal with a train hijacking, meet Shou Tucker and his daughter, and confront Scar for the first time.)
Old: 3
---Dzur, Steven Brust (fantasy: a Vlad Taltos novel, in which Vlad returns -- briefly -- to Adrilankha and attempts to fix one of the problems he created when he left abruptly several years ago.)
---Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny (science fiction: in which Francis Sandow, the last survivor of the 20th century, finds himself tangled in a revenge plot that stretches back several hundred years. Not Zelazny's best -- too many threads are left untied, or just allowed to fall by the wayside -- but interesting and fun.)
---Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (fantasy: in which Kay does Provence and Languedoc, only this time he does it 'for real' rather than in the not-quite-Europe he'd been using for his previous four books. Ysabel ties in more directly to the Fionavar Tapestry, which is why I don't like it nearly as much. I don't know why people like that trilogy so much -- it's clunky and creaky and not even a third as good as, say, The Lions of Al-Rassan -- and while I don't mind the way Kay slips mini-references to it into all his other work, I really prefer to ignore his whole Fionavar-as-the-center-of-everything conceit, and it's damned hard to do that when two characters from the trilogy turn up as major characters in Ysabel. Especially when it's two characters I was happier thinking of as platonic friends, and now he's gone and made them be married for about twenty years!
On the bright side, at least they've aged convincingly, and aren't implausibly heroic or anything. But I still think Kay tries a bit too hard to tie all his characters up in romantic relationships, sometimes against all their previous development and all rational plot momentum.)
February Total: 10 books (plus several magazines, a few newspaper articles, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 37 books (21 new, 16 old)
---------------------------------------------
In other news, I finished a rough draft of chapter 14 of "An Ounce of Prevention" a few days ago, but I had to scrap the entire thing for pacing reasons. See, the story is hitting the part where things are happening, and I have to keep the pacing tight and quick-feeling (though really, it's very drawn out compared to some other chapters, which covered several days in one scene). And while I had some nice character interaction between Sakura and Kakashi, I was basically stalling the story dead in the water because...
Well, there are two reasons, really. First, I'm not completely sure what comes next, and second, I have mixed feelings about finishing stories. On the one hand, finishing is the point. It's a joy and a satisfaction and a relief. But on the other hand, once a story is done, those characters lose the... the urgency, I suppose, with which they inhabit my mind. And I hate letting them go and saying goodbye.
But anyway, I do know where chapter 14 needs to go, and this time I'm going to get it right. *grin*
