book list, January 2019
Feb. 2nd, 2019 11:50 am![[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 2019. Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions. I reserve the right to spoil all hell out of any book if spoilery bits are what I feel like talking about.
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
-----So, having loved the Murderbot Diaries, it occurred to me that I should probably read some of Martha Wells's other works. This is actually something I'd been vaguely meaning to do for many years, but I'd bounced off the opening pages of The Cloud Roads at some point in the past and was curious to see if that reaction still held. It turns out that no, that reaction has not held, though I can see why I went "eh, not grabbing me" the first time around, before I had enough trust in Wells to push through Moon's low-key depression to meet first Selis and then Stone, both of whom help bring Moon into better focus. (Side note: I really like Selis, and am sad that her status as a minor tertiary non-Raksura character means she doesn't reappear in subsequent books.) The Raksura are an interesting mix of alien and human, and I think Moon is probably the best introduction to them and their culture, because he straddles the line of "yes this makes instinctive sense to me" on much of the physical stuff and "huh wait what why???" on a lot of the cultural things and some of the physical stuff that only comes into play in communities.
Anyway, I figured out how to borrow e-books from my library in order to get hold of this over the weird liminal Christmas-to-New-Year week, and then promptly borrowed the next two books as well. Which is really all you need to know, I think. :)
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
-----Book two of the Raksura series, in which the Indigo Cloud court arrive at their home from previous generations only to discover that -- shock! horror! -- there are unexpected complications and they may not be able to stay. Cue political shenanigans with another Raksura court plus a quest to retrieve a valuable magical item from some really fascinating locations in and around a freshwater inland sea. Also Moon continues to experience cultural displacement, but slowly decides that he really does want to make a home with Jade in the Indigo Cloud court and be accepted for himself, even if he doesn't quite fit what Raksura expect from a consort.
I really adore the worldbuilding in these books. It's so casually rich, with enough wild ideas that you could build extensive novels out of things Wells tosses off as minor subplots, or even tangential asides.
The Siren Depths, by Martha Wells
-----Book three of the Raksura series, in which there are political complications involving Moon's mysterious past, an adventure to an ancient and forgotten city under the sea, and the return of the Fell and their nefarious plans to forcibly interbreed with the Raksura. I continue to adore Wells's worldbuilding, with its blithe profusion of different approaches to magic and/or magitech and the sheer sense of scale, both physical and temporal -- this is an old and vast world, where different sentient species have come and gone for millennia, and no place is ever truly safe... but equally, no place is without wonders. And all the people are so gloriously people, with all the messy verisimilitude that implies.
The Edge of Worlds, by Martha Wells
-----A few years after the first trilogy, groundlings from Kish come to ask the Raksura's aid in exploring a potential ruined city in a distant sea. Meanwhile, more and more Raksura courts are having visions of the Fell invading the Reaches. Unlike the first trilogy, which were each self-contained stories within an overarching timeline, this book ends on a cliffhanger and is clearly part one of a single story.
The Harbors of the Sun, by Martha Wells
-----Direct sequel to The Edge of Worlds, wherein both the Fell invasion plot and the ancient ruins with devastating secrets plot are resolved in a satisfying manner. We also return to the earlier plot about Fell forced breeding programs, and complicate that situation even more (because people are multifaceted and Wells acknowledges that).
On a completely tangential note, the titles in this series bear next to no relation to the contents of the books. What does The Cloud Roads even mean? There are no serpents in The Serpent Sea, but at least there's an aquatic reptilian (???) monster, so... semi-relevant? The Siren Depths is about something luring people to a mysterious underwater city, and is therefore directly relevant to the theme and plot of the book! Look at this steady progress from gibberish to sense! ...And then we're back to pretty-sounding nonsense with The Edge of Worlds (what worlds? what edge?) and The Harbors of the Sun (I guess there's nominally a harbor? and it's high up near the sun, even though the defining environmental theme of that location is ice and clouds). Bah. This is particularly weird to me because all the short story titles make perfect sense in relation to the contents of the stories. So what's going on with the novels?
Stories of the Raksura, Vol. I, by Martha Wells
-----Two novellas and two short stories. One novella deals with Jade and Chime getting stuck in a moment of magically frozen time; the other is a historical episode about how Indigo met Cloud and they caused a political mess that nearly led to war in the Reaches. The short stories are a brief incident from Moon's wandering childhood years and Chime's unwanted transition from Arbora mentor to Aeriat warrior. I liked the historical novella best, mostly because of the interpersonal drama and character growth.
Stories of the Raksura, Vol. II, by Martha Wells
-----Two novellas and three short stories. One novella deals with Moon's wandering adulthood years, where he gets involved in a local problem without quite knowing why he's bothering and begins to cope (badly) with the aftermath of his first meeting with the Fell; the other deals with the birth of Jade and Moon's first clutch and a murder mystery involving strange groundlings from the forest floor. The short stories are about Jade and some warriors dealing with a tricky predator, Moon getting irritated by Raksura lack of trading acumen and a groundling's attempt to capitalize on that, and some non-Raksura characters dealing with a pirate ransom demand and one of their own crew's shitty relationship with his father. I liked the murder mystery novella and the non-Raksura story best, though Moon's almost inadvertent reawakening from kind flat-affect passive suicidal ideation is also pretty good.
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson
-----Thoughts about culinary technology through the ages. Fascinating, engagingly written, and now I want to look into Wilson's other books. This was another ebook loan, and as I recall, I checked it out based ondomarzione's mention of it in a Dreamwidth post.
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly
-----Basically what it says on the tin. Shetterly has a gift for clear, easy prose that pulls you along and gets across the sense of people doing difficult and complicated things with great dedication, whether that's math and engineering or navigating mid-20th-century America while black. (As a white woman, I found reading this book an interesting balancing act between "The shit these women had to wade through is utterly enraging" and "...If I had lived in that time and place, I probably would have gone along with most of that systemic bullshit just from osmosis and inertia, wouldn't I? Bugger." Which is a useful sort of tension to sit with.) I would have liked to see some of the actual math the West Computers worked on, and/or diagrams of the aircraft and spacecraft the math applied to, but I think that may just be a personal idiosyncrasy. (If you're writing a history of people whose lives revolved around math and science, I like to see the math and science! Even if I don't understand the details, it helps make things feel more tangible to me.)
Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
-----I have only two complaints about this book: first, the climax is a little too compressed and I think would work better if there was more of a sense of what the Wood was doing outside of the grove instead of Agnieszka telling us that after the fact. (Relatedly, the stuff about the throne of Polnya would have more impact if we saw the king being a good ruler instead of hearing about it secondhand from Alosha, and got to see Crown Prince Sigmund for more than his farewell scene with his family.)
Second, while Agnieszka's relationship with the Dragon was built up perfectly reasonably -- all the pieces fell neatly into place, like stones in an arch -- you will note the lack of emotion in that description. It felt like something built rather than something that grew naturally. The relationship that grew naturally was Agnieszka and Kasia, damnit. I mean, there's nothing wrong with Agnieszka/Dragon, but it's not what my heart wants. (I am also open to the possibility of a threesome, if someone were to put in a bit of work to make Kasia and Sarkan interact in emotionally meaningful ways instead of keeping them weirdly separate even when they're in the same scene working toward the same goal.)
Anyway, those quibbles aside, this book is wonderful and I loved it. :D
(I also kept getting naggingly distracted by the suspicion that Luthe's Summoning, which calls forth truth, is a Damar reference, but that was more a little sneaking curl of "I see what you did there!" pleasure than a problem. *wry*)
Wheel of the Infinite, by Martha Wells
-----A standalone fantasy novel about a religion/magic system whose practitioners have an annual ritual that literally lets them reshape the world. They generally use it simply to reaffirm things as they are, but once in the past they used it to erase a whole people. This had consequences beyond the immediately obvious, and generations later those are coming due. Now Maskelle, a disgraced Koshan priestess, must return to the city of Duvalpore to protect the Rite from those who seek to use it for destruction. Her unlikely allies? An equally disgraced personal guardsman from a distant province, and a group of theater performers plagued by a cursed puppet.
I feel like this book would have benefited from another fifty pages to develop the other religions of this world and explore their connections to the Infinite, and also to explain the red herring enemies a bit more clearly. Also, I remembered once I started reading that I'd bounced off the opening of this book some years ago, just like I'd initially bounced off The Cloud Roads, and it's for the same reason: namely, they both open with a somewhat closed-off character doing things that are frankly kind of boring (in this case, slogging through a miserably rainy day on the road), so I'm left with neither an action whose outcome I want to know, nor a character whose fate I care about, for just that vital few too many pages. And worldbuilding alone isn't enough to hook me on page one. Now that I know that's a pattern in Wells's work, I can push through that initial disconnect on trust, but without that trust I just shrugged and assumed they weren't for me.
---------------
---------------
And that is that for January. :)
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
-----So, having loved the Murderbot Diaries, it occurred to me that I should probably read some of Martha Wells's other works. This is actually something I'd been vaguely meaning to do for many years, but I'd bounced off the opening pages of The Cloud Roads at some point in the past and was curious to see if that reaction still held. It turns out that no, that reaction has not held, though I can see why I went "eh, not grabbing me" the first time around, before I had enough trust in Wells to push through Moon's low-key depression to meet first Selis and then Stone, both of whom help bring Moon into better focus. (Side note: I really like Selis, and am sad that her status as a minor tertiary non-Raksura character means she doesn't reappear in subsequent books.) The Raksura are an interesting mix of alien and human, and I think Moon is probably the best introduction to them and their culture, because he straddles the line of "yes this makes instinctive sense to me" on much of the physical stuff and "huh wait what why???" on a lot of the cultural things and some of the physical stuff that only comes into play in communities.
Anyway, I figured out how to borrow e-books from my library in order to get hold of this over the weird liminal Christmas-to-New-Year week, and then promptly borrowed the next two books as well. Which is really all you need to know, I think. :)
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
-----Book two of the Raksura series, in which the Indigo Cloud court arrive at their home from previous generations only to discover that -- shock! horror! -- there are unexpected complications and they may not be able to stay. Cue political shenanigans with another Raksura court plus a quest to retrieve a valuable magical item from some really fascinating locations in and around a freshwater inland sea. Also Moon continues to experience cultural displacement, but slowly decides that he really does want to make a home with Jade in the Indigo Cloud court and be accepted for himself, even if he doesn't quite fit what Raksura expect from a consort.
I really adore the worldbuilding in these books. It's so casually rich, with enough wild ideas that you could build extensive novels out of things Wells tosses off as minor subplots, or even tangential asides.
The Siren Depths, by Martha Wells
-----Book three of the Raksura series, in which there are political complications involving Moon's mysterious past, an adventure to an ancient and forgotten city under the sea, and the return of the Fell and their nefarious plans to forcibly interbreed with the Raksura. I continue to adore Wells's worldbuilding, with its blithe profusion of different approaches to magic and/or magitech and the sheer sense of scale, both physical and temporal -- this is an old and vast world, where different sentient species have come and gone for millennia, and no place is ever truly safe... but equally, no place is without wonders. And all the people are so gloriously people, with all the messy verisimilitude that implies.
The Edge of Worlds, by Martha Wells
-----A few years after the first trilogy, groundlings from Kish come to ask the Raksura's aid in exploring a potential ruined city in a distant sea. Meanwhile, more and more Raksura courts are having visions of the Fell invading the Reaches. Unlike the first trilogy, which were each self-contained stories within an overarching timeline, this book ends on a cliffhanger and is clearly part one of a single story.
The Harbors of the Sun, by Martha Wells
-----Direct sequel to The Edge of Worlds, wherein both the Fell invasion plot and the ancient ruins with devastating secrets plot are resolved in a satisfying manner. We also return to the earlier plot about Fell forced breeding programs, and complicate that situation even more (because people are multifaceted and Wells acknowledges that).
On a completely tangential note, the titles in this series bear next to no relation to the contents of the books. What does The Cloud Roads even mean? There are no serpents in The Serpent Sea, but at least there's an aquatic reptilian (???) monster, so... semi-relevant? The Siren Depths is about something luring people to a mysterious underwater city, and is therefore directly relevant to the theme and plot of the book! Look at this steady progress from gibberish to sense! ...And then we're back to pretty-sounding nonsense with The Edge of Worlds (what worlds? what edge?) and The Harbors of the Sun (I guess there's nominally a harbor? and it's high up near the sun, even though the defining environmental theme of that location is ice and clouds). Bah. This is particularly weird to me because all the short story titles make perfect sense in relation to the contents of the stories. So what's going on with the novels?
Stories of the Raksura, Vol. I, by Martha Wells
-----Two novellas and two short stories. One novella deals with Jade and Chime getting stuck in a moment of magically frozen time; the other is a historical episode about how Indigo met Cloud and they caused a political mess that nearly led to war in the Reaches. The short stories are a brief incident from Moon's wandering childhood years and Chime's unwanted transition from Arbora mentor to Aeriat warrior. I liked the historical novella best, mostly because of the interpersonal drama and character growth.
Stories of the Raksura, Vol. II, by Martha Wells
-----Two novellas and three short stories. One novella deals with Moon's wandering adulthood years, where he gets involved in a local problem without quite knowing why he's bothering and begins to cope (badly) with the aftermath of his first meeting with the Fell; the other deals with the birth of Jade and Moon's first clutch and a murder mystery involving strange groundlings from the forest floor. The short stories are about Jade and some warriors dealing with a tricky predator, Moon getting irritated by Raksura lack of trading acumen and a groundling's attempt to capitalize on that, and some non-Raksura characters dealing with a pirate ransom demand and one of their own crew's shitty relationship with his father. I liked the murder mystery novella and the non-Raksura story best, though Moon's almost inadvertent reawakening from kind flat-affect passive suicidal ideation is also pretty good.
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson
-----Thoughts about culinary technology through the ages. Fascinating, engagingly written, and now I want to look into Wilson's other books. This was another ebook loan, and as I recall, I checked it out based on
domarzione's mention of it in a Dreamwidth post.Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly
-----Basically what it says on the tin. Shetterly has a gift for clear, easy prose that pulls you along and gets across the sense of people doing difficult and complicated things with great dedication, whether that's math and engineering or navigating mid-20th-century America while black. (As a white woman, I found reading this book an interesting balancing act between "The shit these women had to wade through is utterly enraging" and "...If I had lived in that time and place, I probably would have gone along with most of that systemic bullshit just from osmosis and inertia, wouldn't I? Bugger." Which is a useful sort of tension to sit with.) I would have liked to see some of the actual math the West Computers worked on, and/or diagrams of the aircraft and spacecraft the math applied to, but I think that may just be a personal idiosyncrasy. (If you're writing a history of people whose lives revolved around math and science, I like to see the math and science! Even if I don't understand the details, it helps make things feel more tangible to me.)
Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
-----I have only two complaints about this book: first, the climax is a little too compressed and I think would work better if there was more of a sense of what the Wood was doing outside of the grove instead of Agnieszka telling us that after the fact. (Relatedly, the stuff about the throne of Polnya would have more impact if we saw the king being a good ruler instead of hearing about it secondhand from Alosha, and got to see Crown Prince Sigmund for more than his farewell scene with his family.)
Second, while Agnieszka's relationship with the Dragon was built up perfectly reasonably -- all the pieces fell neatly into place, like stones in an arch -- you will note the lack of emotion in that description. It felt like something built rather than something that grew naturally. The relationship that grew naturally was Agnieszka and Kasia, damnit. I mean, there's nothing wrong with Agnieszka/Dragon, but it's not what my heart wants. (I am also open to the possibility of a threesome, if someone were to put in a bit of work to make Kasia and Sarkan interact in emotionally meaningful ways instead of keeping them weirdly separate even when they're in the same scene working toward the same goal.)
Anyway, those quibbles aside, this book is wonderful and I loved it. :D
(I also kept getting naggingly distracted by the suspicion that Luthe's Summoning, which calls forth truth, is a Damar reference, but that was more a little sneaking curl of "I see what you did there!" pleasure than a problem. *wry*)
Wheel of the Infinite, by Martha Wells
-----A standalone fantasy novel about a religion/magic system whose practitioners have an annual ritual that literally lets them reshape the world. They generally use it simply to reaffirm things as they are, but once in the past they used it to erase a whole people. This had consequences beyond the immediately obvious, and generations later those are coming due. Now Maskelle, a disgraced Koshan priestess, must return to the city of Duvalpore to protect the Rite from those who seek to use it for destruction. Her unlikely allies? An equally disgraced personal guardsman from a distant province, and a group of theater performers plagued by a cursed puppet.
I feel like this book would have benefited from another fifty pages to develop the other religions of this world and explore their connections to the Infinite, and also to explain the red herring enemies a bit more clearly. Also, I remembered once I started reading that I'd bounced off the opening of this book some years ago, just like I'd initially bounced off The Cloud Roads, and it's for the same reason: namely, they both open with a somewhat closed-off character doing things that are frankly kind of boring (in this case, slogging through a miserably rainy day on the road), so I'm left with neither an action whose outcome I want to know, nor a character whose fate I care about, for just that vital few too many pages. And worldbuilding alone isn't enough to hook me on page one. Now that I know that's a pattern in Wells's work, I can push through that initial disconnect on trust, but without that trust I just shrugged and assumed they weren't for me.
---------------
---------------
And that is that for January. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-03 03:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-03 05:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-03 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-03 07:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-04 01:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-04 04:52 am (UTC)Moon and the trader was fun because Moon was so delightfully grumpy (and the rest of the Raksura so delightfully oblivious to other cultures' standards of value), but it escaped being one of my favorites mostly because it was so short. I like a little bit more to sink my metaphorical teeth into. *wry*
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-07 07:40 am (UTC)I loved Wheel of the Infinite - cranky, competent, older female protagonists make me very happy and I adored the sub plot with the theatre troop and the cursed puppet. It's also a very satisfying read after City of Bones, in that the villains of Wheel can easily be read as the Inhabitants of the West from City and I enjoy seeing them obliterated.
(City of Bones is my absolute favourite - it has relic-hunting and archaeology and found family and learning to live after the apocalypse and banter and... It's a sad ending, but there's room for things to get better for Khat and he has friends around him, and I'm going to hang onto that.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-07 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-07 02:07 pm (UTC)Selis is excellent. I wish she could reasonably pop up again, but all the ways I can imagine to have her cross our protagonists' paths again are hopelessly contrived.
Have you read the Ile-Rien books? My favorite Martha Wells is Death of the Necromancer, it hits so many of my narrative buttons. So many.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-07 05:15 pm (UTC)I have not read any of the Ile-Rien books yet. That is on my project list for March. :)