book list, July 2006

[edenfalling]

I made three resolutions this year. First, get a job. (Done!) Second, exercise more regularly and lose weight. (Done!) Third, keep a list of the books I read.

These are the books I read in July, 2006:

New: 33
---A Tolkien Miscellany, J. R. R. Tolkien (mostly fantasy, a bit of literary theory: I'd read a couple of the individual pieces before -- Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wooton Major -- but Tree and Leaf, Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the various Middle Earth poems were new to me, so I'm calling this a new book.)
---Southern Fire, Juliet E. McKenna (fantasy: a magical invasion of a decentralized archipelago whose people abhor magic as evil. There are a number of interesting concepts in the way McKenna sets up her society, but she finks out and uses boring elemental-style magic, and I found myself wishing that she had left the 'evil barbarian' magical invaders out altogether and just told a story about inter-island politics instead, because those and the fortune-telling systems were the parts that really interested me. Also, her names don't have a consistent ethno-linguistic 'sound,' and her spelling system is a mess. But I will be reading the sequel, when it comes out, because I like Kheda and I want to know what happens to him next.)
---The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (fantasy: this has been described as Ocean's Eleven in a fantastical version of medieval Venice, and, barring the Victorian London influences, that's about spot on. Marvelously engaging; go read it now!)
---The Mirror Prince, Violette Malan (fantasy: yet another 'let's do a new spin on elves and fairyland!' attempt that isn't actually new or particularly interesting at all. A waste of perfectly good time and money. The technical quality of the writing is good, though, even if the subject matter is pointless.)
---Time Was, Nora Roberts (romance: unexceptionable for the genre, though the standard sci-fi 'future' and the time-travel schtick would've been irritating if I'd actually cared enough to take it seriously.)
---Times Change, Nora Roberts (romance: sequel to Time Was, in which the previous lead characters' sister and brother get together. Hey, this is how I kill time while I'm closing the store some nights.)
---Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours, Jim Butcher (comics-based novel: pretty standard for a Spidey story, though Jim Butcher writes it quite well. I may have to look into his original work.)
---Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer (fantasy: definitely for kids, no particular depth, and quite fun, though it doesn't pay more than the barest lip service to realism and the fairy society would never in a million years actually work.)
---Fruits Basket, vols. 7-10, 13, Natsuki Takaya (manga: somehow manages to include slapstick humor, crack fantasy, high school travails, martial arts fighting, and pull-your-heartstrings drama/romance/tragedy... without seeming to have multiple personality disorder. Actually reduced me to sniffles a couple times, which is not easy to do!)
---Angel Sanctuary, vols. 1-20, Kaori Yuki (manga: this series ate my brain. It is fucked-up and brilliant, and I will review it in more detail later.)



Old: 6
---The Death of Chaos, L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (fantasy: I have ISSUES with Modesitt -- the sound effects alone could keep me going for twenty minutes -- but I keep rereading some of his books anyway, so clearly there's something there that resonates. I think, in this particular case, it's the wood-crafting scenes.)
---Fruits Basket, vols. 4-6, 11-12, Natsuki Takaya (manga: heartwarming)



July Total = 39 books (plus a lot of fanfiction, a couple newspapers, and several magazines)

Year to Date = 180 books (132 new, 48 old)

Comments

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

When do you sleep? Seriously. The mind boggles. I don't think I've read 39 books in the past five years. Well, if you don't count reading every HP books at least 4 times.

[edenfalling]

I sleep at least eight hours every night. :-)

Seriously, I just read very fast, and since I usually get more 'energy' from being alone than from being with people, I have a fair amount of time on my hands, which I usually spend either reading or writing. It would be more surprising if I didn't read at least 10 or 15 books a month. (Well, that or I'd have spent the month in question reading things like War and Peace... which I really do need to finish someday. I kind of stalled out about 2/5 of the way through.)

[bewize.livejournal.com]

Sorry to barge in here, but I just had to cheer on your list of books. And I also had to say that Fruits Basket has got to be one of my favorite manga series ever. Takaya is brilliant and her ability to really get in the skin of the characters, even in a medium that doesn't allow for much description, is nothing short of amazing.

I'm completely hooked on this series and I'm so very excited that 14 comes out *today*!!

I've been eyeing Angel Sanctuary for a while and your description has pretty much convinced me that I need to find it and read it. If you like Fruits Basket and rave about Angel Sanctuary, there is something in it that I need to read.

I also just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading your thoughts about the books themselves.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

ethno-linguistic consistancy?
wow. that-oen jsut madem ethink' she noticesso damn much more than me whe nshe reads'. makes me feel abit small. adn al these things, the tecnical part, the story teling, continuity, the setting the believability, they jstu all sound Very IMportant to e when iread someone's review(i remember for the first time reading someoen's review of ootp but it went into dissecting the (iforgothowmany) different TYPES of narrative 9or pov. I"m not sure. i know it wasn't about just first/second/third. it was about omniscient and nescient and...it jstu blew me away.)
Buthe nagian I feel liek that when someone says they ead something that wasseti nancient greek and found anachronisms...
mdesitt and soudn effects? I heard someone else tal kabout that but I hardl ybelieved it. Msut be irritating. Yeah. You should find mroe tolkien stuff. there's awhole set of unfinished-tales volumes. I so hate it when the nth perso ntakes a spin on elves and thelike and does acheap job of it.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

form yor ureviews adn all the thigns yo upic kup liek the language continutiy was off' yo udon't sound liek a fast reader at all. ( if igiggle it's b ecause i get pictures of that horrible vampire for anne rice who spent a day takign an entire library of thick volumes in mind, which leads me to an endless trail of hermiones who with oen spell have al lthe info in the hogwards library i ntheir brain.)
if iread 15 books in a month i forget most of them in a week.

[edenfalling]

Vol. 14 of Fruits Basket is coming out? Yay! *anticipates*

Angel Sanctuary really needs a warning label to the effect of "This series is dark and twisted, and really, something in here will probably disturb you or make you do a doubletake at some point, no matter how cynical and worldly you think you are," but it is so pretty that I don't care. I love the plot twists, and the way a lot of the story is unreliable -- characters tell two or more versions of the same story, or they say one thing and mean another, or they're flat-out lying, or they deliberately mislead people, or they think they mean what they're saying but their actions give the lie to their words, or they misinterpret other characters' motives, and so on.

I also like the character interactions. I like the depth of emotion, and the way it's never flat-out stated exactly what type of love or strong emotion various characters feel toward various other characters; I like the fluidity of motive. I especially like the way that a grand clash of heaven, earth, and hell is essentially folded into the quests of a few characters, who are fighting not for any grand principles, but for much more personal reasons (good and bad reasons, both -- sometimes both from the same person).

[bewize.livejournal.com]

I have read a little bit of fanfiction set in this series and I would agree based on what I know that it's safe to say that it's FUBAR. But... I love FUBAR. *grins*

I like dark and twisty and shadows and gray. So this definitely sounds like my type of series. I shall have to investigate at the library.

And yes! Fruits Baket 14 comes out today. If you're reading from the library, I'd advise getting on the wait list ASAP! *does happy dance*

I've see way ahead on spoilers, but I'm still almost giddy with finding out what happens next!

[edenfalling]

What I mean by 'ethno-linguistic consistency' is that names in any given culture often have a certain 'sound' -- that is, after hearing a bunch of them, you get a sense of what is and isn't possible as a name in that particular culture. McKenna's names don't cohere that way, and the couple of characters from a culture that's very clearly not the same as the archipelago -- it's a mainland culture that allows the use of magic -- sound no different from her archipelagan names. This has no effect on the story, but it's a sloppy bit of world-building, and that irritates me.

Yes, Modesitt actually writes sound effects, such as horses neighing (Wheee-eeeh), or the earth grumbling prior to a landslide (Grrrruuurrr), or fireballs hissing through the air and exploding on contact with people/walls (WhhsssssCrumpt!). It's a little peculiar to read, and, in my opinion, unnecessary.

[edenfalling]

For some reason, though my mind is a sieve when it comes to a lot of everyday things, I have a steel-trap memory about words on a page... at least for a month or so. After that, details fade unless I'm specifically trying to remember them.

I have never figured out why my mind works this way, but I admit it was very useful when I was still in school and taking regular tests!

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

You must read VERY VERY VERY fast :D Being such an introvert helps, though. Introversion is the bookworm's friend.

[edenfalling]

Someone once said I read 'obscenely' fast. The word choice has always amused me, especially since that was years before I started reading erotica, or even soupies. :-)

[iponly.livejournal.com]

*looks at her short story in progress that starts with the sound effect for radio static*

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly was annoying about the sound effects? Were they repetative as in "the horse whinnied, 'Wheee-eeh'" or just ridiculous sounding like "crumpt" (crumpets?) or something else?

I also have a feeling you got a lot more out of Angel Sanctuary then I did. Maybe I should try reading it again and on paper...

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

i swea i soemtiesm fele my mind works exactly the opposite. I forget thigns I should remember but when someoen dictates thier phone nubmer to someone else and i'm not suposedto remember it I'll store it anyway.
i mostl yasl omeanthe ability to read quickly and proces sit all (I assume you do that, or yo uwouldn't red that much either. i mean if yo uneed to order itall inbits isntead of stuffing ital in and mull over it when you're done with the book.)

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

aha. that soundsa lto less complicated than I thought. (it's like someon who watched troy said they filmed a few miles aay form wher ithacasuposedly usedto be or something detailed/obscure liek that. or perhaps it was theri comment on the anachronisticcostumes. i might or might not have said that I sometims get big doubletakes--very irrealistic irrational once -- of wtf? they know all that!!! waaa! I gethat anywhere. someone does an astronomy report of star-watching and they jsut soudn liek they take al lthat from lots of leanred info and they jsut know so much!!)
heheh. 've lognago guessed that world-building is one of yoru strenghts and main interests. i 'als oguessign if you've read like six hundrd antas yseriesby now ovre the lengt of yoru reading-lifey ou hav a rightto get very damn picky.
(that's a new thign for me. i kept havignto bite my tongue earlier becausei kept wanting to say 'o hwhat does it matter just enjoy the story' the way I wanted to say i nsome very picky yahoo hp discussions.)

aha. someone mentioned that to me. i laughed back then and now you point it out it makesm e think of kids books and radio plays. adn story hours. is the rest of the prose ofa more mature tone? i'd get annoyedi n that case.

[edenfalling]

Um. It's like... he'll be writing completely normal prose, and then there's a one-line paragraph, in italics, which is nothing but a single sound effect word. Like this:

--------------------

I bent the light around me, and pointed Gairloch away from the patrol. Pebbles shifted under his hooves, clattering.

"--hear that?"

"What?"

"Sounded like footsteps." The voices were approaching. Gairloch shifted uneasily, and protested.

Wheee-eeeh.

"Shhh," I whispered to him, hoping nobody had heard.

--------------------

You know, I just realized that I cannot stylistically imitate Modesitt worth a damn. I think, overall, I'm relieved -- the last thing I need is to get infected by his terminal case of the letter Y. ;-)

But anyway, there's nothing wrong with sound effects, per se. I just think the overall effect could be conveyed equally well within standard narrative conventions, and it wouldn't be so visually distracting. It's especially distracting when Modesitt's writing in first person, and you're left wondering what sort of idiot narrator would be writing down sound effects when telling this very serious story about his foolish youth.

Also, yes, he does sound effects for fireballs, and it is (for me, anyway) very hard to take WhhhsssssCrumpt seriously in the middle of an action scene when it's not a comic book.

As for Angel Sanctuary, not every story can work for everybody. It simply happens to hit a large number of my... buttons? Kinks? Well, anyway, it hits a lot of elements that I really like in stories, enough to make me mostly overlook the occasional gaping plot and world-building holes, some of which you could drive a truck through.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, I don't have access to a lot of this books, though now you've got me wanting to read most of them - but one book I did read was Artemis Fowl. I'm not very good at world-building details, you see. So when you said "the fairy society would never work", I went "oh, well, all right", and two seconds later, "...but why not?" And now I'm curious. *and sheepish*
Would you mind elaborating, please?

[yuenoclow.livejournal.com]

...Nice to know I'm not the only one who goes through books that fast. *sheepish* I usually read through at least one novel a day, sometimes two or three. It depends on how fast I go. I got through the sixth Harry Potter book in about six hours. ^^;;; Manga, of course, I go through in a flash. The longest it usually takes is about a half hour. *snickers* Sometimes I'll be at a friend's house and snitch one of her manga volumes that I haven't read and get through it in about fifteen minutes, and when I finish, they always boggle at me, going "How the hell did you finish it so fast?!"

[drich.livejournal.com]

*delurk*

First off, I really like your monthly reading round-up. I usually find something listed that I should take a closer look at, or was already on my to-do list. (The Lies of Locke Lamora this time around.)

That said, you should check out Jim Butcher's other original series. There's the Dresden Files which is a kind of urban fantasy/noir blend at 8 volumes currently, and at least one fantasy series. I highly recommend them. And it may or may not be a selling point but this fall the Sci-Fi channel will be airing a new series based on the Dresden Files. I'm hoping they don't massacre it.

[edenfalling]

Sure! I will do this tomorrow, when I have time to put my thoughts in order.

[edenfalling]

The curse of reading fast is that nothing ever lasts you very long, and then you have to go find something else to read. *sigh* Oh well, at least writing helps keep me distracted!

[edenfalling]

Aha! I have heard some good things about the Dresden Files. I will have to see if my library has any of them. (Probably not, but you never know -- the collection keeps surprising me.)

I have no tv, so the show has no effect one way or the other, really. *shrug*

[yuenoclow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. Though, with books I like, I tend to re-read them so many times I can nearly recite the things words for word. ^^'

[edenfalling]

Okay.

What I mean by 'would never work' isn't that the individual pieces of the society are impossible in and of themselves, or that it doesn't work within the story. What I mean is that it doesn't make sense on its own terms. The fairy society only makes sense when viewed as, essentially, a collection of plot devices.

First of all, no fairy in the book acts like a real adult, even though some of them are supposed to be in positions of authority. This makes perfect sense for the universe of a children's book, but does not speak well of a culture's ability to keep order and maintain itself.

Second, the combination of magic and super-advanced science is not organic. That is, there's really no explanation of how and why those two things fit together. Fairies are magical because they're fairies, and they have sci-fi technology because it looks 'cool' on the page and allows Colfer's plot to work.

Third, there are a lot of little internal contradictions, like the way the LEP forces go on and on about whether various phrasings are or are not invitations... when it's revealed, at the end of the story, that if they're not invited into a building, they vomit. So why would they have to argue over whether Holly was actually invited into that Italian town to stop the troll? She didn't vomit; therefore, the cry for help was an invitation, right? Little inconsistencies like that bug me.

Finally, the fairy society is clearly set up to mirror and mock bits and pieces of modern Western societies. They talk about environmentalism and decry human pollution, but they also have fairy 'hippies' and so on. They are only recently integrating women into their crack police force, which mirrors the feminist movement in the past fifty or so years. It's perfectly rational for the fairies to be influenced by human societies, but given that Colfer says at the start of the story that fairies have lived all over the world, why are they only mirroring Europe and North America?

You see? Colfer seems to have decided that he wanted his fairies to have certain characteristics, and certain abilities and faults, and he designed a society to produce them without really paying any attention to internal coherence or to whether such a society would actually come to exist on its own. This is fine -- he doesn't need an internally consistent fairy society for a light adventure/caper story -- but it does mean that the book lacks a certain depth.

Hmm. Also, he mentions inter-species conflicts within the fairy world, but doesn't really explain how the society is governed, nor when they moved from royalty to (apparently) some sort of Council-based government. And the Lower Elements Police (LEP) is a name created to support a joke; I rather doubt that, left to their own devices, the fairies would call themselves 'lower elements.' I bet they'd just call such things 'the police,' 'the army,' and so on.

I hope that helps!

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, when you put it like that, such a society isn't very plausible... Your comments were very helpful (and I love how your reviews always seem to make sense. I think I get it now ^^ . Thank you very much for your time and attention.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and a ")" was supposed to be between the "sense" and the dot. Sorry about that!