book list, April 2008

[edenfalling]

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in April 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)


New: 6
---Lungbarrow, Marc Platt (sci-fi: a Doctor Who tie-in novel, featuring the Seventh Doctor. I read this as an ebook on a BBC website. I found it kind of 'meh,' honestly. You can tell that Platt's trying to tie in a number of continuity threads that needed explanations or conclusions, and that interferes with the narrative flow. Also, this has the common fanfiction problem of assuming that you already know and like the characters; if you have no prior knowledge of them or their backstories, you're left a bit at sea emotionally, even if you can more or less work out who's who and what's going on.)

---Small Favor, Jim Butcher (fantasy: Book 10 of the Dresden Files. When unknown supernatural forces kidnap the ruler of Chicago's underworld, Mab, the Faerie Queen of Winter, calls in one of the two favors Harry owes her. Then things get complicated. I love this series. Each book can more or less stand on its own, but they also build on each other, so that each is a little deeper and richer than the last, and Harry's actions have consequences that he can't evade forever.)

---The Dragons of Babel, Michael Swanwick (fantasy: a companion novel to The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I read the first book when I was about eleven or twelve years old, which probably explains both why it hit me like a punch to the gut and why I only vaguely remember it now. It wasn't like anything else I'd ever read, and large chunks flew right over my head at the time, but the feel of the book -- earthy, hallucinatory, by hairpin turns grindingly prosaic and impossibly otherworldly, uncompromising, despairing, triumphant, haunting -- stuck with me. The Dragons of Babel has that same feel... only this time I'm old enough to understand as well as experience. And it is brilliant.)

---The Children of Húrin, J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien (fantasy: the novel-length and more 'present' version of the tragedy of Túrin and his family. The Silmarillion is still my favorite of all the Middle-Earth books -- I grew up reading fairy-tales and myths and religious stories, and the stories of the First Age have that same cut-down 'told' quality that is intensely familiar and soothing to me -- but I like this version too. It brings the people to life, and gives a much more poignant sense that maybe things didn't have to end so horribly, if a single thing here or there had gone just a shade differently. The beginning is bloody awful, though; the first pages are nothing but meaningless names and backstory, and if I hadn't already known what was going on and trusted Tolkien to go somewhere decent with the story, I would've given up in disgust.)

---Wild Adapter vol. 4, Kazuya Minekura (manga: 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. In this volume, Kubota is arrested as a murder suspect; Tokito enlists a reporter and Kubota's old girlfriend in his attempt to figure out what's going on.)

---Godchild vol. 8, Kaori Yuki (manga: a young nobleman and his manservant in Victorian England, with poison, murder, and random supernatural elements. Creepy gothic weirdness, moral ambiguity, and very pretty art. In this volume, we reach the end of the story, with the predictable everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink climax and a Surprise Villain!!! twist, which is timed very badly and is not at all well foreshadowed, judging by the hideously clunky pages wherein said Secret Villain explains it all. Riff is love, though, and Cain refusing to leave him at the end... yeah, okay, I'll forgive the stupidity for that. Mostly.)


Old: 0


April Total: 6 books (plus a LOT of magazines, a few newspapers, and a LOT of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 47 books (30 new, 17 old)


...It's not quite as dire as last month -- 6 is more than 4 -- but still, this is annoying. I think I'll start bringing books to work again instead of reading magazines during slow hours.

Comments

[eatsyourface.livejournal.com]

I finished GodChild recently, too. =\ Thought the same thing about Augusta. The plot in general wasn't strong (it was kinda... WHY!), but the characters saved it for me.

re: Jim Butcher: word.

[edenfalling]

One of these days, I really must get around to trying Butcher's 'swords and horses' series...

[eatsyourface.livejournal.com]

=\ I tried it. Was not impressed on my initial reading, but it takes forever and a half for me to get into a new series, so I could be wrong.

[edenfalling]

My reluctance is mostly that I've already read a zillion stories about the downtrodden boy on the edge of the great empire who gets caught up in great events and turns out to have talents that surprise everyone, plus the obligatory war and cast of thousands. And okay, yeah, it can be done well, and there are always new twists to be applied, but in the end... been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

The Dresden Files, on the other hand, are something I hadn't read a zillion times before. Maybe two or three times, in slight variations -- for example, P. N. Elrod has an interesting series about a vampire private eye in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and there's Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mysteries, which are sort of forensic wizardry crossed with Sherlock Holmes and a bit of James Bond, in an alternate history version of Europe -- but still, the books had a sort of aliveness and 'freshness' that swords'n'horses just doesn't anymore.

Which is, of course, completely hypocritical of me, since I have written/am writing a few things that could fairly be called swords'n'horses myself... but hey, nobody's ever perfectly consistent, and I kind of squint hard and insist that the sociological and character aspects outweigh the 'empire in turmoil and a downtrodden young man rises to unexpected prominence' aspects. Or they will, whenever I finish all my fanfiction WIPs and get back to writing original fiction on a more regular basis. *sigh*

[eatsyourface.livejournal.com]

I wasn't too enthralled by the concept; the opening was really quite generic, the writing was meh (what worked for The Dresden Files didn't work here), and the characters wasn't enough to keep me hooked.

The reason TDF so amazingly fun is that Butcher can tell a good story there and that his characters are yay!fun. (Seriously. Marcone, Harry, Murphy, Kincaide, The Archive, Sanya, Michael, Ms Gard. They are sheer awesomeness.)

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

The Fury books? I'd recommend them. Personally I actually like them more than Dresden, but even if High Fantasy isn't interesting to you they've definitely got Butcher's hand to them... Like most of the elements I've seen in the Dresden Files, there actually isn't anything new in the way of concepts or characters, but the 'stock' archetypes and twists are carried out with such consummate skill that they're actually the better for being familiar, I think.

[edenfalling]

As I said, it's not that I in any way dislike High Fantasy -- when it's done well -- just that I've sort of built up a tolerance for the tropes and my attention is therefore much less easily grabbed. I also think it's far too easy for writers of High Fantasy to fall into imitations of Tolkien instead of taking the time and effort to strike out into somewhere different -- to mine their own depths for new myths rather than recycle old ones.

On that note: I read, somewhere, a theory to the effect that people read speculative literature looking for the experience of the new and/or unfamiliar. And some people only want a little bit of otherness, find their comfort level quickly, and stay there for decades. Other people explore for a while, and gradually settle down as they age -- maybe they get nostalgic for the particular types of otherness they read as kids or teenagers. Others are always pushing for the ragged edge of discomfort, as far from normal and familiar as they can get. And still others kind of wander around in slightly less daunting pastures, but never quite settle down for good...

(Or something like that, I don't quite remember the conceit.)

I think I fall into the fourth category, though. I don't like the ragged edge, and there are certain things I will probably never be particularly interested in -- a lot of hard sf, for instance, mostly because I'm not that enamored of technology per se -- but I do keep getting bored of things after a while, and wanting something new, with that same frisson of possibility that I've loved as long as I can remember.

Then again, maybe it's just that I'm a serial obsessive and I burn out on each new interest sooner or later. Who knows! :-)