book list, May 2008
Jun. 1st, 2008 12:39 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 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)
New: 4
---The Sharing Knife: Legacy, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: continuation of The Sharing Knife: Beguilement. Now married, Fawn and Dag return to Dag's people -- the Lakewalkers -- and have just as much trouble as they did with Fawn's family. There's another battle with a malice, Fawn [and therefore readers] learns more about the nature of magic and the history of the world, and Bujold resolves the getting-together portion of her romance while segueing smoothly into a larger story about an attempt to cope with the overarching problems of her created world. This is a quiet, reflective book, and I like that the great challenge facing the world isn't any standard evil overlord or army of invading nonhumans -- instead, it's a grinding, small-scale war of attrition, the slow rediscovery of technology, the interplay of several demographic trends, and the general inability of people to talk across cultures, or to let go of the past.)
---The Sharing Knife: Passage, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: after leaving the Lakewalker camp at Hickory Lake, Dag and Fawn journey south to the sea. Along the way, they gain several traveling companions, experiment with new magic, and confront both entrenched prejudice and a villain du jour. This continues the small-scale tone of the previous two books; Bujold is slowly working from particular and personal problems up to the major problems that face this world. And she doesn't offer trite and easy solutions, because life doesn't ever offer easy solutions real world problems.)
---Tangled Webs, Anne Bishop (fantasy: a year or so after the end of the Dark Jewels trilogy, Jaenelle Angelline decides to create a 'spooky house' incorporating landen misunderstanding about the Blood. Then someone gets the idea to create a similar, deadly house and use it to trap some of her family. Fast, fun, and with the same seductive edge of the rest of the series... though it also has Bishop's tendency to whack you over the head with the stupid self-centeredness of her villains. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, it makes it more satisfying when they get killed. On the other hand, it dulls the moral complexity of their inevitable executions and thus loses edge and darkness.)
---The Barabaig: East African Cattle-Herders, George J. Klima (nonfiction: a brief ethnological overview of the Barabaig, a smallish cattle-herding ethnic group from Tanzania. This was written in 1970, based on fieldwork done from 1955 to 1959, so it includes information on how Barabaig culture was changing from its traditional forms. There are noticeable traces of sexism in some of Klima's word choices and analyses, but nothing really deliberate-seeming; I think it's more a general artifact of American culture at the time.)
Old: 4
---Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (fantasy: a Discworld novel, one of the standalones. Brutha, a novice in the church of Om, discovers that his god is currently incarnated as a tortoise, and he seems to be the only one who can hear the divine voice. Also, his country is in the grip of a cruel and hidebound theocracy, and currently at war with Ephebe. When Pratchett is accused of writing stealth literature, this book is one of the chief exhibits. It's also very funny. *grin*)
---Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Commander Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey meets Captain Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, under difficult circumstances. They fall in love. Unfortunately, political intrigue and war interfere. This is an understated book, which I love. My one real problem is that Barrayar feels like a much more thought-out and internally coherent society than Beta -- odd, considering Cordelia is the POV character and is from Beta. On the other hand, the Betans' inability to be rational about spies, and their disregard for Cordelia's civil rights seem far less implausible to me now than they did several years ago. Which is a sad comment on my own society.)
---Komarr, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Miles, in his new role as Imperial Auditor, goes to Komarr to investigate a suspicious space accident, gets caught up in a deadly conspiracy, and falls in love. Unfortunately, Ekaterin Vorsoisson is already married.)
---Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Miles' and Ekaterin's honeymoon is cut short by a complicated military and diplomatic muddle involving a Komarran trade fleet, its Barrayaran military escort, and the quaddie station at which they're docked. What could possibly make this worse? How about Cetagandan involvement, and the very real possibility of missing their own children's births.)
May Total: 8 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 55 books (34 new, 21 old)
...And so, over the past three months, I've moved from 4 to 6 to 8 -- still very few books, for me, but the totals are moving in the right direction. I suppose I'm adjusting to having unlimited internet access again.
I've also been cutting back on magazine reading. For a while, I was using nearly my full quota of stripped magazines, but that seems to have been mostly a temporary enthusiasm. I'm still reading Newsweek, Time, The Nation, National Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker on my lunchbreaks and during the slow parts of closing shifts... but that means I don't need to take them home. And I'm not really all that interested in most of our other magazines, not regularly or in depth, at any rate.
(I also read The Economist, but I like that one enough that I subscribe to it, and have done for the past three years, ever since I had a stable address. It's much less parochial than the other major newsmagazines, and has a much higher news-to-infotainment ratio. Also, they're quite upfront about their particular editorial biases, which is helpful for figuring out when to take their analysis with a grain of salt.)
New: 4
---The Sharing Knife: Legacy, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: continuation of The Sharing Knife: Beguilement. Now married, Fawn and Dag return to Dag's people -- the Lakewalkers -- and have just as much trouble as they did with Fawn's family. There's another battle with a malice, Fawn [and therefore readers] learns more about the nature of magic and the history of the world, and Bujold resolves the getting-together portion of her romance while segueing smoothly into a larger story about an attempt to cope with the overarching problems of her created world. This is a quiet, reflective book, and I like that the great challenge facing the world isn't any standard evil overlord or army of invading nonhumans -- instead, it's a grinding, small-scale war of attrition, the slow rediscovery of technology, the interplay of several demographic trends, and the general inability of people to talk across cultures, or to let go of the past.)
---The Sharing Knife: Passage, Lois McMaster Bujold (fantasy: after leaving the Lakewalker camp at Hickory Lake, Dag and Fawn journey south to the sea. Along the way, they gain several traveling companions, experiment with new magic, and confront both entrenched prejudice and a villain du jour. This continues the small-scale tone of the previous two books; Bujold is slowly working from particular and personal problems up to the major problems that face this world. And she doesn't offer trite and easy solutions, because life doesn't ever offer easy solutions real world problems.)
---Tangled Webs, Anne Bishop (fantasy: a year or so after the end of the Dark Jewels trilogy, Jaenelle Angelline decides to create a 'spooky house' incorporating landen misunderstanding about the Blood. Then someone gets the idea to create a similar, deadly house and use it to trap some of her family. Fast, fun, and with the same seductive edge of the rest of the series... though it also has Bishop's tendency to whack you over the head with the stupid self-centeredness of her villains. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, it makes it more satisfying when they get killed. On the other hand, it dulls the moral complexity of their inevitable executions and thus loses edge and darkness.)
---The Barabaig: East African Cattle-Herders, George J. Klima (nonfiction: a brief ethnological overview of the Barabaig, a smallish cattle-herding ethnic group from Tanzania. This was written in 1970, based on fieldwork done from 1955 to 1959, so it includes information on how Barabaig culture was changing from its traditional forms. There are noticeable traces of sexism in some of Klima's word choices and analyses, but nothing really deliberate-seeming; I think it's more a general artifact of American culture at the time.)
Old: 4
---Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (fantasy: a Discworld novel, one of the standalones. Brutha, a novice in the church of Om, discovers that his god is currently incarnated as a tortoise, and he seems to be the only one who can hear the divine voice. Also, his country is in the grip of a cruel and hidebound theocracy, and currently at war with Ephebe. When Pratchett is accused of writing stealth literature, this book is one of the chief exhibits. It's also very funny. *grin*)
---Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Commander Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey meets Captain Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, under difficult circumstances. They fall in love. Unfortunately, political intrigue and war interfere. This is an understated book, which I love. My one real problem is that Barrayar feels like a much more thought-out and internally coherent society than Beta -- odd, considering Cordelia is the POV character and is from Beta. On the other hand, the Betans' inability to be rational about spies, and their disregard for Cordelia's civil rights seem far less implausible to me now than they did several years ago. Which is a sad comment on my own society.)
---Komarr, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Miles, in his new role as Imperial Auditor, goes to Komarr to investigate a suspicious space accident, gets caught up in a deadly conspiracy, and falls in love. Unfortunately, Ekaterin Vorsoisson is already married.)
---Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction: in which Miles' and Ekaterin's honeymoon is cut short by a complicated military and diplomatic muddle involving a Komarran trade fleet, its Barrayaran military escort, and the quaddie station at which they're docked. What could possibly make this worse? How about Cetagandan involvement, and the very real possibility of missing their own children's births.)
May Total: 8 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 55 books (34 new, 21 old)
...And so, over the past three months, I've moved from 4 to 6 to 8 -- still very few books, for me, but the totals are moving in the right direction. I suppose I'm adjusting to having unlimited internet access again.
I've also been cutting back on magazine reading. For a while, I was using nearly my full quota of stripped magazines, but that seems to have been mostly a temporary enthusiasm. I'm still reading Newsweek, Time, The Nation, National Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker on my lunchbreaks and during the slow parts of closing shifts... but that means I don't need to take them home. And I'm not really all that interested in most of our other magazines, not regularly or in depth, at any rate.
(I also read The Economist, but I like that one enough that I subscribe to it, and have done for the past three years, ever since I had a stable address. It's much less parochial than the other major newsmagazines, and has a much higher news-to-infotainment ratio. Also, they're quite upfront about their particular editorial biases, which is helpful for figuring out when to take their analysis with a grain of salt.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-01 09:23 am (UTC)I'm not so much interested in her several fantasy series as I am in her Vorkosigan books, especially the earlier ones. Even now, after countless re-readings, I can't help but giggle madly as Miles has his usual, er, excessive initiative schemes.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-01 07:02 pm (UTC)Just a bit, yeah. :-)
Her fantasies tend to be quieter books, which is actually not surprising. Shards of Honor and Falling Free, her two science fiction books with the least connection to Miles (Ethan of Athos is on the borderline, since Miles is very definitely referenced, and since Elli Quinn has taken him as her hero and example), are also quieter. So I think a lot of the madcap pace and tone of the Vorkosigan books is attributable to Miles himself, rather than to Bujold's predilections as a writer.