book list, August 2007
Sep. 2nd, 2007 01:48 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 August 2007. I got kind of long-winded in my summaries and reactions this month. Sorry about that.
New: 16
---Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (fiction: Heathcliff is obsessed with Catherine Earnshaw, and manages, over the course of two generations, to nearly ruin both the Earnshaw and Linton families, only to be thwarted in the end by either madness or Catherine's ghost. This is not a romance. It's a sociological study of how the social isolation of the countryside could drive the propertied classes in England completely crazy, and an illustration of the problem of evil. The novel is told in frame stories, which I find interesting because nobody ever mentions it.)
---Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch (fantasy: sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, in which we learn what Locke and Jean have been up to in the two years since they fled Camorr. Lynch throws a lot of plot threads into the air, and though he does manages to catch most of them and weave them back together, the book lacks the overwhelming narrative drive of its predecessor. Also, the romance subplot failed to convince me. Still, it's a good book!)
---Logan's Run, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (science fiction: stupid, stupid, stupid. The sociological projections are absurd, the world-building makes no sense, the writers attempt to pass off the conclusion of a bad romance plot arc as the conclusion of a bad action/adventure plot arc, and even Logan's characterization is this close to nonexistent. I especially dislike the persistent objectification of women.)
---The Sea Change, Patricia Bray (fantasy: middle book of a trilogy, in which the soul of a dying monk was shoved into the body of a rebellious prince in an attempt to turn the prince into a puppet ruler... except both prince and monk have other ideas. Workmanlike.)
---Jack Knife, Virginia Baker (science fiction: in which one man goes back to Victorian London and two other people are sent back to stop him from changing history. Unfortunately, they arrive four years too late, during the height of the Ripper killings. You can tell this is Baker's first novel -- there's some awkwardness in the structure, the villain failed to convince me, and I think the romance subplot was unnecessary -- but it held my attention.)
---Tanner's Scheme, Lora Leigh (romance: pornography, pure and simple, and not even good pornography. Why is it that romance writers who have interesting ideas -- I love the notion of genetically modified humans raised as assassins, who then escape and campaign for their civil rights -- just use them as throwaway background for badly-written sex scenes? There's almost more sex in this book than story! And the characterization stinks.)
---How to Lose an Extraterrestrial in 10 Days, Susan Grant (romance: I laughed myself sick at the poor, abused trappings of space opera that Grant attempts to drape over her romance plot. This book suffers from 'all planets are monocultures' syndrome, from 'all interstellar societies must be monarchial/autocratic' syndrome, and especially from 'aliens can do psychologically implausible things with no justification because they're aliens... even though they're human enough to love and have kids with humans' syndrome. We also have 'shoehorn a socially relevant charitable cause in as one of the main character's interests!' syndrome, though that's more a romance cliché than a bad space opera cliché.)
---Silver Master, Jayne Castle [pseud. of Jayne Ann Krentz] (romance: another attempt to spice up a trite romance plot with sci-fi trappings. This one's not quite as laughable as Grant's, probably because Krentz has her planet populated by stranded Terran colonists rather than aliens, but otherwise... yeah. Trite. It's cute, though, and the sex is fairly restrained.)
---Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson (nonfiction: Johnson argues that the human brain loves to figure things out, and seeks stimuli that require us to work rather than vegetate passively. Therefore, while the content of pop culture may be a lowest-common-denominator situation, the form of pop culture has become more and more demanding over time, especially since the development of recording technology that allows us to watch TV episodes more than once. Fascinating and engagingly written, though perhaps somewhat superficial.)
---Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, Chris Crawford (nonfiction: a guy who used to design computer games and who now designs interactive story worlds talks about his field. Interesting, but I'm not interested in his level of interactivity; I'm a storyteller, not a story facilitator. I'm also not a computer programmer, but if you can do basic algebra, nothing in this book should be beyond you.)
---The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar, Mark C. Baker (nonfiction: Baker argues that languages can be categorized according to very fundamental rules of grammar, and that small differences in the 'recipe' of a language lead to great differences in the 'cake' form of that language. This, he says, explains both how languages can be incomprehensible to non-speakers, and how children can learn wildly different languages with equal ease. I'm not sure I agree with all his arguments, and the 'periodic table of languages' analogy is clearly just a publishing hook, but I learned a lot from reading this. Basically comprehensible even without any proper background in linguistics.)
---Nana vol. 6, Ai Yazawa (manga: young adults in Tokyo; love, sex, and rock. Not my usual thing, but it's 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.)
---YuYu Hakusho vol. 12, Yoshihiro Togashi (manga: "like caffeinated crack," still more of the Dark Tournament arc)
---Godchild vol. 6, Kaori Yuki (manga: a young English nobleman and his manservant in Victorian/Edwardian times, with poison, murder, and random supernatural elements. Creepy gothic weirdness, moral ambiguity, and very pretty art.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 11 [Carnage], Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: Oh. My. God. I suspect this would have more impact if I'd read vols. 3-10, but still. Oh, Peter. Oh, Gwen. I am going to wibble quietly in the corner for a bit now.)
---Ultimate X-Men vol. 8 [New Mutants], Brian Michael Bendis, David Finch, et al (comics: people are suspicious of Xavier but supportive of civil rights, so they attempt to throw a different group of mutants into the spotlight. Then hardline human supremacists send in the Sentinels. Eh, whatever. Honestly, I don't give a damn about any part of the Ultimate Marvel universe except Spider-Man, even when Bendis is writing said other parts; the worldview is too pretentiously edgy and cynical. [Also, Mark Millar is a hack, and Ult. X-Men is hobbled by his legacy.])
Old: 9
---Rose Daughter, Robin McKinley (fantasy: a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast," quieter and more equivocal than her first such retelling. I especially like the ending, which solves one of the problems I began to have with the traditional ending as I got older.)
---Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (fantasy: see my reaction from 2005)
---Watership Down, Richard Adams (fiction/fantasy: one of my favorite books. A small group of rabbits leave their doomed warren and set out on a quest for a new home. A beautiful story, and a relatively unsentimental and believable attempt to anthropomorphize animals.)
---The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (fiction/fantasy: I cried the first time I read this. On rereading, I am surprised at how normal Clare and Henry's story is, all things considered. This is a 'one impossible element' type of fantasy, and the rest of the world remains resolutely down to earth.)
---The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum (fiction: in which a man with amnesia attempts to find his life, while fleeing enemies both in the criminal world and the American intelligence service. This is really a love story; the thriller stuff is just the trappings. Apropos of nothing in particular, there's one throwaway line that cracks me up every time I read it. After a secret meeting of Treadstone 71, Gordon Webb says that he's heading to a private airfield in Madison, NJ. Well, I grew up in Madison, NJ. The first time I read that line, I had to call my dad and say, "Hey, there aren't any secret airfields in town that I somehow never knew about, right?" We're pretty sure Ludlum just made it up. *grin*)
---The Bourne Supremacy, Robert Ludlum (fiction: in which someone calling himself Jason Bourne begins a series of assassinations in Asia, and the US government resorts to kidnapping the real Bourne's wife in order to make him hunt the killer. This turns out to be a really stupid mistake...)
---Lord Demon, Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold (fantasy: in which Kai Wren, a noted bottle-maker and former warrior, gets caught up in political machinations against his will, and eventually must fight to determine the future of his entire race. Not bad, but the ending is a cop-out, and I can't help thinking Zelazny would have fixed that if he'd lived to finish the novel himself.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vols. 1-2 [Power and Responsibility; Learning Curve], Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: in which Bendis decompresses Peter's origin story, and then sets an inexperienced, idealistic kid against the man who heads an organized crime empire. I'd forgotten how much I like this series. I read the first 15 issues or so back in '01-'02, when Marvel was putting up whole issues on the web. They had a viewing program that showed a whole page at 1/4-1/3 size, and then enlarged individual panels as you clicked on them, which was visually very interesting. Anyway, by mid to late 2002 I lost interest due to my depression, Marvel yanked everything down, and money troubles kept me from buying the trades. *sigh*)
Month Total: 25 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 271 books (151 new, 120 old)
New: 16
---Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (fiction: Heathcliff is obsessed with Catherine Earnshaw, and manages, over the course of two generations, to nearly ruin both the Earnshaw and Linton families, only to be thwarted in the end by either madness or Catherine's ghost. This is not a romance. It's a sociological study of how the social isolation of the countryside could drive the propertied classes in England completely crazy, and an illustration of the problem of evil. The novel is told in frame stories, which I find interesting because nobody ever mentions it.)
---Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch (fantasy: sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, in which we learn what Locke and Jean have been up to in the two years since they fled Camorr. Lynch throws a lot of plot threads into the air, and though he does manages to catch most of them and weave them back together, the book lacks the overwhelming narrative drive of its predecessor. Also, the romance subplot failed to convince me. Still, it's a good book!)
---Logan's Run, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (science fiction: stupid, stupid, stupid. The sociological projections are absurd, the world-building makes no sense, the writers attempt to pass off the conclusion of a bad romance plot arc as the conclusion of a bad action/adventure plot arc, and even Logan's characterization is this close to nonexistent. I especially dislike the persistent objectification of women.)
---The Sea Change, Patricia Bray (fantasy: middle book of a trilogy, in which the soul of a dying monk was shoved into the body of a rebellious prince in an attempt to turn the prince into a puppet ruler... except both prince and monk have other ideas. Workmanlike.)
---Jack Knife, Virginia Baker (science fiction: in which one man goes back to Victorian London and two other people are sent back to stop him from changing history. Unfortunately, they arrive four years too late, during the height of the Ripper killings. You can tell this is Baker's first novel -- there's some awkwardness in the structure, the villain failed to convince me, and I think the romance subplot was unnecessary -- but it held my attention.)
---Tanner's Scheme, Lora Leigh (romance: pornography, pure and simple, and not even good pornography. Why is it that romance writers who have interesting ideas -- I love the notion of genetically modified humans raised as assassins, who then escape and campaign for their civil rights -- just use them as throwaway background for badly-written sex scenes? There's almost more sex in this book than story! And the characterization stinks.)
---How to Lose an Extraterrestrial in 10 Days, Susan Grant (romance: I laughed myself sick at the poor, abused trappings of space opera that Grant attempts to drape over her romance plot. This book suffers from 'all planets are monocultures' syndrome, from 'all interstellar societies must be monarchial/autocratic' syndrome, and especially from 'aliens can do psychologically implausible things with no justification because they're aliens... even though they're human enough to love and have kids with humans' syndrome. We also have 'shoehorn a socially relevant charitable cause in as one of the main character's interests!' syndrome, though that's more a romance cliché than a bad space opera cliché.)
---Silver Master, Jayne Castle [pseud. of Jayne Ann Krentz] (romance: another attempt to spice up a trite romance plot with sci-fi trappings. This one's not quite as laughable as Grant's, probably because Krentz has her planet populated by stranded Terran colonists rather than aliens, but otherwise... yeah. Trite. It's cute, though, and the sex is fairly restrained.)
---Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson (nonfiction: Johnson argues that the human brain loves to figure things out, and seeks stimuli that require us to work rather than vegetate passively. Therefore, while the content of pop culture may be a lowest-common-denominator situation, the form of pop culture has become more and more demanding over time, especially since the development of recording technology that allows us to watch TV episodes more than once. Fascinating and engagingly written, though perhaps somewhat superficial.)
---Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, Chris Crawford (nonfiction: a guy who used to design computer games and who now designs interactive story worlds talks about his field. Interesting, but I'm not interested in his level of interactivity; I'm a storyteller, not a story facilitator. I'm also not a computer programmer, but if you can do basic algebra, nothing in this book should be beyond you.)
---The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar, Mark C. Baker (nonfiction: Baker argues that languages can be categorized according to very fundamental rules of grammar, and that small differences in the 'recipe' of a language lead to great differences in the 'cake' form of that language. This, he says, explains both how languages can be incomprehensible to non-speakers, and how children can learn wildly different languages with equal ease. I'm not sure I agree with all his arguments, and the 'periodic table of languages' analogy is clearly just a publishing hook, but I learned a lot from reading this. Basically comprehensible even without any proper background in linguistics.)
---Nana vol. 6, Ai Yazawa (manga: young adults in Tokyo; love, sex, and rock. Not my usual thing, but it's 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.)
---YuYu Hakusho vol. 12, Yoshihiro Togashi (manga: "like caffeinated crack," still more of the Dark Tournament arc)
---Godchild vol. 6, Kaori Yuki (manga: a young English nobleman and his manservant in Victorian/Edwardian times, with poison, murder, and random supernatural elements. Creepy gothic weirdness, moral ambiguity, and very pretty art.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 11 [Carnage], Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: Oh. My. God. I suspect this would have more impact if I'd read vols. 3-10, but still. Oh, Peter. Oh, Gwen. I am going to wibble quietly in the corner for a bit now.)
---Ultimate X-Men vol. 8 [New Mutants], Brian Michael Bendis, David Finch, et al (comics: people are suspicious of Xavier but supportive of civil rights, so they attempt to throw a different group of mutants into the spotlight. Then hardline human supremacists send in the Sentinels. Eh, whatever. Honestly, I don't give a damn about any part of the Ultimate Marvel universe except Spider-Man, even when Bendis is writing said other parts; the worldview is too pretentiously edgy and cynical. [Also, Mark Millar is a hack, and Ult. X-Men is hobbled by his legacy.])
Old: 9
---Rose Daughter, Robin McKinley (fantasy: a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast," quieter and more equivocal than her first such retelling. I especially like the ending, which solves one of the problems I began to have with the traditional ending as I got older.)
---Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (fantasy: see my reaction from 2005)
---Watership Down, Richard Adams (fiction/fantasy: one of my favorite books. A small group of rabbits leave their doomed warren and set out on a quest for a new home. A beautiful story, and a relatively unsentimental and believable attempt to anthropomorphize animals.)
---The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (fiction/fantasy: I cried the first time I read this. On rereading, I am surprised at how normal Clare and Henry's story is, all things considered. This is a 'one impossible element' type of fantasy, and the rest of the world remains resolutely down to earth.)
---The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum (fiction: in which a man with amnesia attempts to find his life, while fleeing enemies both in the criminal world and the American intelligence service. This is really a love story; the thriller stuff is just the trappings. Apropos of nothing in particular, there's one throwaway line that cracks me up every time I read it. After a secret meeting of Treadstone 71, Gordon Webb says that he's heading to a private airfield in Madison, NJ. Well, I grew up in Madison, NJ. The first time I read that line, I had to call my dad and say, "Hey, there aren't any secret airfields in town that I somehow never knew about, right?" We're pretty sure Ludlum just made it up. *grin*)
---The Bourne Supremacy, Robert Ludlum (fiction: in which someone calling himself Jason Bourne begins a series of assassinations in Asia, and the US government resorts to kidnapping the real Bourne's wife in order to make him hunt the killer. This turns out to be a really stupid mistake...)
---Lord Demon, Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold (fantasy: in which Kai Wren, a noted bottle-maker and former warrior, gets caught up in political machinations against his will, and eventually must fight to determine the future of his entire race. Not bad, but the ending is a cop-out, and I can't help thinking Zelazny would have fixed that if he'd lived to finish the novel himself.)
---Ultimate Spider-Man vols. 1-2 [Power and Responsibility; Learning Curve], Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, et al (comics: in which Bendis decompresses Peter's origin story, and then sets an inexperienced, idealistic kid against the man who heads an organized crime empire. I'd forgotten how much I like this series. I read the first 15 issues or so back in '01-'02, when Marvel was putting up whole issues on the web. They had a viewing program that showed a whole page at 1/4-1/3 size, and then enlarged individual panels as you clicked on them, which was visually very interesting. Anyway, by mid to late 2002 I lost interest due to my depression, Marvel yanked everything down, and money troubles kept me from buying the trades. *sigh*)
Month Total: 25 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 271 books (151 new, 120 old)
