book list, February and March 2019
Apr. 1st, 2019 08:59 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 and March of 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 Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us, by Bee Wilson
-----I picked this up because I loved Wilson's Consider the Fork. I didn't love this one as much, but it was still very enjoyable and informative. It's basically a history of human ideas about, attitudes toward, and methods of keeping bees through the ages, with some digressions into the related topics of human attitudes toward and ideas about honey. I would have liked Wilson to focus more on commercial/industrial beekeeping instead of hobbyists in her chapter about modern beekeeping, but that's a relatively minor quibble.
Dreadful Company, by Vivian Shaw
-----The second Greta Helsing novel, about a doctor whose clientele are entirely classic horror monsters. Greta and her friend Ruthven are in Paris so she can attend a supernatural medical conference, but their vacation is interrupted by a coven of bloodthirsty vampires with no sense of how to live among humans. Meanwhile an infestation of well-monsters and hair-monsters is spreading across the city, and something has stirred a number of previously quiet ghosts into inconvenient activity...
As with the first book in this series, this is surprisingly cozy for its genre, and again Shaw has put a lot of thought into the actual logistics of supernatural life. (I particularly liked the small asides about Varney renovating his ancestral mansion.) The villain is a bit one-dimensional (which I think is a hangover from the old drawer-manuscript this series was initially based on), and Shaw still needs to get more female characters on-page, but we're now up to three rather than one so that's a step in the right direction. Also, there's a secondary plot involving the vampire coven's second-in-command that I could predict from the character's first appearance, but that's mostly because I've read Shaw's fanfic and I know the tropes she likes. *wry*
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
-----I had a slightly difficult time getting into this story, which I think is because I was initially expecting it to be something other than what it actually is -- or in other words, I got really into all the details of Miryem's moneylending business, and Wanda's family situation and her planning to escape it, and kind of forgot that this was operating on fairy-tale logic and the Staryk were going to come crashing into the plot. (I was also very taken by the scenes in the witch's cottage later on, for similar reasons.) Once I had readjusted my parameters, everything went very nicely.
Aside from the intense sense of place and culture provided by all the everyday life details, and the way Miryem's Jewish identity is woven deeply and inextricably through the whole fabric of the story, I particularly liked the emphasis on the need to make difficult choices even when there isn't a clear-cut "right" answer, because you can't just abdicate responsibility and the perfect is the enemy of the good. I also really enjoyed the way the characters didn't automatically recognize each other as allies at first, but had to work to see and understand where other people were coming from. And of course the idea of community and mutual aid and love as ways to keep the wolf from the door, because life is hard and often senselessly cruel, and the best way to fight is to be kind, as stubbornly as you can.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
-----I read this because of a post on Tumblr that said it was like a version of Hamlet told by the embodiment of Elsinore Castle to a mostly-oblivious Horatio. Which was so intriguing I had to see for myself. And that is a more or less accurate summary of one half of the book, but I wish I'd gone into the story cold instead of with that Hamlet overlay in my head, because I found the non-Hamlet parts of the story much more interesting and it gets annoying to have a corner of one's mind constantly going, "Ah, so this character is the equivalent of that character," instead of just appreciating them for who they are in the story one is actually reading. *sigh*
Anyway, like I said, the non-Hamlet parts of the story are absolutely fascinating, as is the worldbuilding in general, and I have not previously encountered a narrative voice or POV quite like this one, even though I've read more than my fair share of second-person fanfic. And even the Hamlet bits are intriguing in their own right: for the worldbuilding, for Eolo's outside-in characterization and methodical detective work, and for the fact that A) Tikaz lives and B) her most significant relationship is with Eolo. :)
-----
And now onward to April!
The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us, by Bee Wilson
-----I picked this up because I loved Wilson's Consider the Fork. I didn't love this one as much, but it was still very enjoyable and informative. It's basically a history of human ideas about, attitudes toward, and methods of keeping bees through the ages, with some digressions into the related topics of human attitudes toward and ideas about honey. I would have liked Wilson to focus more on commercial/industrial beekeeping instead of hobbyists in her chapter about modern beekeeping, but that's a relatively minor quibble.
Dreadful Company, by Vivian Shaw
-----The second Greta Helsing novel, about a doctor whose clientele are entirely classic horror monsters. Greta and her friend Ruthven are in Paris so she can attend a supernatural medical conference, but their vacation is interrupted by a coven of bloodthirsty vampires with no sense of how to live among humans. Meanwhile an infestation of well-monsters and hair-monsters is spreading across the city, and something has stirred a number of previously quiet ghosts into inconvenient activity...
As with the first book in this series, this is surprisingly cozy for its genre, and again Shaw has put a lot of thought into the actual logistics of supernatural life. (I particularly liked the small asides about Varney renovating his ancestral mansion.) The villain is a bit one-dimensional (which I think is a hangover from the old drawer-manuscript this series was initially based on), and Shaw still needs to get more female characters on-page, but we're now up to three rather than one so that's a step in the right direction. Also, there's a secondary plot involving the vampire coven's second-in-command that I could predict from the character's first appearance, but that's mostly because I've read Shaw's fanfic and I know the tropes she likes. *wry*
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
-----I had a slightly difficult time getting into this story, which I think is because I was initially expecting it to be something other than what it actually is -- or in other words, I got really into all the details of Miryem's moneylending business, and Wanda's family situation and her planning to escape it, and kind of forgot that this was operating on fairy-tale logic and the Staryk were going to come crashing into the plot. (I was also very taken by the scenes in the witch's cottage later on, for similar reasons.) Once I had readjusted my parameters, everything went very nicely.
Aside from the intense sense of place and culture provided by all the everyday life details, and the way Miryem's Jewish identity is woven deeply and inextricably through the whole fabric of the story, I particularly liked the emphasis on the need to make difficult choices even when there isn't a clear-cut "right" answer, because you can't just abdicate responsibility and the perfect is the enemy of the good. I also really enjoyed the way the characters didn't automatically recognize each other as allies at first, but had to work to see and understand where other people were coming from. And of course the idea of community and mutual aid and love as ways to keep the wolf from the door, because life is hard and often senselessly cruel, and the best way to fight is to be kind, as stubbornly as you can.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
-----I read this because of a post on Tumblr that said it was like a version of Hamlet told by the embodiment of Elsinore Castle to a mostly-oblivious Horatio. Which was so intriguing I had to see for myself. And that is a more or less accurate summary of one half of the book, but I wish I'd gone into the story cold instead of with that Hamlet overlay in my head, because I found the non-Hamlet parts of the story much more interesting and it gets annoying to have a corner of one's mind constantly going, "Ah, so this character is the equivalent of that character," instead of just appreciating them for who they are in the story one is actually reading. *sigh*
Anyway, like I said, the non-Hamlet parts of the story are absolutely fascinating, as is the worldbuilding in general, and I have not previously encountered a narrative voice or POV quite like this one, even though I've read more than my fair share of second-person fanfic. And even the Hamlet bits are intriguing in their own right: for the worldbuilding, for Eolo's outside-in characterization and methodical detective work, and for the fact that A) Tikaz lives and B) her most significant relationship is with Eolo. :)
-----
And now onward to April!
