book list, May 2007
Jun. 2nd, 2007 11:13 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 May 2007.
New: 13
---Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Robert D. Kaplan (nonfiction: a combined history, cultural analysis, and travelogue, focusing on former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. It was written in the early 1990s and provides both a snapshot of the first years after the fall of communism, and a good prediction of the trajectory of the Balkans over the next 15 years. I found this book particularly interesting because I visited Romania in 1997, and Kaplan's description of Romania rings true to my own experience there.)
---Domnei, James Branch Cabell (fantasy: Cabell is weird. He's also probably as obscure as Lord Dunsany by this point, which is a pity, because he has a marvelous sureness of tone and a deft touch with irony. Domnei combines two stories of chivalrous love -- 'women worship,' as he terms it -- neither of which turns out quite as one might expect. Cabell plays with clichés, and then rips them neatly to shreds and laughs at you for expecting them. And yet, there's something deeper under the irony, something that keeps the stories from being mere reactionary wisps.)
---The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: in which a young woman in trouble meets a tired man from a people dedicated to hunting down the remnants of a magical menace that destroyed a previous high society. Stuff happens, they end up being joint participants in a puzzling bit of magic, and they fall in love along the way. Slight but well-written, and Bujold nearly redeems herself from the stock 'nobody in my family understands me!' cliché she starts with. Nearly.)
---How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman, M.D. (nonfiction: pretty much what the title says, quite readable, and very interesting. I recommend it.)
---We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (science fiction: the earliest dystopian novel, before Brave New World or 1984. Zamyatin, an ardent Russian revolutionary, was squeezed out and silenced for his refusal to accept totalitarianism. This book is beautiful, poetic, and heart-breaking. Read it.)
---Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson (young adult: a coming of age story set in the 1940s, on a Chesapeake Bay island. I don't think it's quite as good as Bridge to Terabithia, but it shows some of the same themes: the importance of dreams, and imagination, and family, and the way it's easy to label one thing as the source of all your troubles when really life is too complicated to sum up like that.)
---Feast of Souls, C. S. Friedman (fantasy: the first of a trilogy, set in a world where magic drains a witch's life, but magisters -- all male -- have found a way to get around that, for a sinister price. A young woman determined to be the first female magister, a touchy political situation in a great empire, and the revival of soul-eating beasts long thought extinct, all collide messily. The book is clearly part of a larger story, and I can't evaluate it properly without knowing what's to come.)
---Dr. Bloodmoney, Philip K. Dick (science fiction: the mildest post-nuclear-war story I've ever read, and in that sense perhaps the most realistic, despite the surrealism of other plot elements. On one hand, it feels vaguely autistic -- people don't react emotionally in ways that feel quite 'right' to me, or connect properly with each other -- and on the other, Dick is fervently determined to prove the importance of human connections. )
---Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Stephen Brown, ed. (nonfiction: descriptions of various types of birds that spend all or part of the year in the Refuge, lots of pictures, and various pleas to keep the land clear of human interference, particularly oil drilling.)
---Nana vol. 5, Ai Yazawa (manga: young adults in Tokyo; love, sex, and rock. It's not my usual thing, but it's very well done, and the sense of searching, of not knowing where you want to be nor how to get to there, resonates with me and pulls me past Nana K's obsession with romance and fashion. The art's quirky, but it grows on you.)
---Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle vol. 12, CLAMP (manga: the conclusion of the flying race arc. Still awfully cute, though I hope we get back to the more serious side in vol. 13.)
---Wild Adapter vol. 2, Kazuya Minekura (manga: the story of two young men, a strange drug case, and various underworld machinations in greater metropolitan Tokyo. Film noir, horror, and science fiction run together through a blender, with generous subtext.)
---Trigun Maximum vol. 11, Yasuhiro Nightow (manga: still on crack, and I'm still peeved about what happened in vol. 10, but we're definitely reaching the climax, and Nightow is finally explaining a number of previously confusing things.)
Old: 28
---The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin (nonfiction: exactly what the title says. Even when I disagree with Le Guin, she makes me think; that's valuable.)
---Fruits Basket vol. 15, Natsuki Takaya (manga: the story of a girl and the very strange family she becomes involved with and tries to heal.)
---Wild Adapter vol. 1, Kazuya Minekura (manga: the story of two young men, a strange drug case, and various underworld machinations in greater metropolitan Tokyo. Film noir, horror, and science fiction run together through a blender, with generous subtext. This volume is mostly introduction.)
---Saiyuki vols. 1-9, Kazuya Minekura (manga: four guys and a jeep travel west to save the world, but the journey is more important than the destination. This is brilliant and I love it.)
---Saiyuki Reload vols. 1-7, Kazuya Minekura (manga: continuation of Saiyuki)
---Lucifer vols. 2-9, Mike Carey, Peter Gross, et al (comics: what the devil did after retiring as the king of hell. Wheels within wheels within wheels. I'm not completely convinced that all the pieces hold together in the cold light of logic and hindsight, but it catches me up and convinces me completely while I'm reading.)
---But I Digress, Peter David (nonfiction: a collection of opinion columns written for Comics Buyer's Guide in the early 1990s. Peter David amuses me.)
May Total: 41 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 176 books (101 new, 75 old)
New: 13
---Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Robert D. Kaplan (nonfiction: a combined history, cultural analysis, and travelogue, focusing on former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. It was written in the early 1990s and provides both a snapshot of the first years after the fall of communism, and a good prediction of the trajectory of the Balkans over the next 15 years. I found this book particularly interesting because I visited Romania in 1997, and Kaplan's description of Romania rings true to my own experience there.)
---Domnei, James Branch Cabell (fantasy: Cabell is weird. He's also probably as obscure as Lord Dunsany by this point, which is a pity, because he has a marvelous sureness of tone and a deft touch with irony. Domnei combines two stories of chivalrous love -- 'women worship,' as he terms it -- neither of which turns out quite as one might expect. Cabell plays with clichés, and then rips them neatly to shreds and laughs at you for expecting them. And yet, there's something deeper under the irony, something that keeps the stories from being mere reactionary wisps.)
---The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: in which a young woman in trouble meets a tired man from a people dedicated to hunting down the remnants of a magical menace that destroyed a previous high society. Stuff happens, they end up being joint participants in a puzzling bit of magic, and they fall in love along the way. Slight but well-written, and Bujold nearly redeems herself from the stock 'nobody in my family understands me!' cliché she starts with. Nearly.)
---How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman, M.D. (nonfiction: pretty much what the title says, quite readable, and very interesting. I recommend it.)
---We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (science fiction: the earliest dystopian novel, before Brave New World or 1984. Zamyatin, an ardent Russian revolutionary, was squeezed out and silenced for his refusal to accept totalitarianism. This book is beautiful, poetic, and heart-breaking. Read it.)
---Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson (young adult: a coming of age story set in the 1940s, on a Chesapeake Bay island. I don't think it's quite as good as Bridge to Terabithia, but it shows some of the same themes: the importance of dreams, and imagination, and family, and the way it's easy to label one thing as the source of all your troubles when really life is too complicated to sum up like that.)
---Feast of Souls, C. S. Friedman (fantasy: the first of a trilogy, set in a world where magic drains a witch's life, but magisters -- all male -- have found a way to get around that, for a sinister price. A young woman determined to be the first female magister, a touchy political situation in a great empire, and the revival of soul-eating beasts long thought extinct, all collide messily. The book is clearly part of a larger story, and I can't evaluate it properly without knowing what's to come.)
---Dr. Bloodmoney, Philip K. Dick (science fiction: the mildest post-nuclear-war story I've ever read, and in that sense perhaps the most realistic, despite the surrealism of other plot elements. On one hand, it feels vaguely autistic -- people don't react emotionally in ways that feel quite 'right' to me, or connect properly with each other -- and on the other, Dick is fervently determined to prove the importance of human connections. )
---Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Stephen Brown, ed. (nonfiction: descriptions of various types of birds that spend all or part of the year in the Refuge, lots of pictures, and various pleas to keep the land clear of human interference, particularly oil drilling.)
---Nana vol. 5, Ai Yazawa (manga: young adults in Tokyo; love, sex, and rock. It's not my usual thing, but it's very well done, and the sense of searching, of not knowing where you want to be nor how to get to there, resonates with me and pulls me past Nana K's obsession with romance and fashion. The art's quirky, but it grows on you.)
---Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle vol. 12, CLAMP (manga: the conclusion of the flying race arc. Still awfully cute, though I hope we get back to the more serious side in vol. 13.)
---Wild Adapter vol. 2, Kazuya Minekura (manga: the story of two young men, a strange drug case, and various underworld machinations in greater metropolitan Tokyo. Film noir, horror, and science fiction run together through a blender, with generous subtext.)
---Trigun Maximum vol. 11, Yasuhiro Nightow (manga: still on crack, and I'm still peeved about what happened in vol. 10, but we're definitely reaching the climax, and Nightow is finally explaining a number of previously confusing things.)
Old: 28
---The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin (nonfiction: exactly what the title says. Even when I disagree with Le Guin, she makes me think; that's valuable.)
---Fruits Basket vol. 15, Natsuki Takaya (manga: the story of a girl and the very strange family she becomes involved with and tries to heal.)
---Wild Adapter vol. 1, Kazuya Minekura (manga: the story of two young men, a strange drug case, and various underworld machinations in greater metropolitan Tokyo. Film noir, horror, and science fiction run together through a blender, with generous subtext. This volume is mostly introduction.)
---Saiyuki vols. 1-9, Kazuya Minekura (manga: four guys and a jeep travel west to save the world, but the journey is more important than the destination. This is brilliant and I love it.)
---Saiyuki Reload vols. 1-7, Kazuya Minekura (manga: continuation of Saiyuki)
---Lucifer vols. 2-9, Mike Carey, Peter Gross, et al (comics: what the devil did after retiring as the king of hell. Wheels within wheels within wheels. I'm not completely convinced that all the pieces hold together in the cold light of logic and hindsight, but it catches me up and convinces me completely while I'm reading.)
---But I Digress, Peter David (nonfiction: a collection of opinion columns written for Comics Buyer's Guide in the early 1990s. Peter David amuses me.)
May Total: 41 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 176 books (101 new, 75 old)
