book list, September 2008; writing woes
Oct. 1st, 2008 04:24 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 September 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)
New: 6
---Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 16, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: in which Ed and Al travel north to Fort Briggs, on the border of Drachma, in search of May Chang and Scar. Meanwhile, Kimblee is also tracking Scar and Dr. Marcoh, and Roy Mustang continues his plan to overthrow the military dictatorship, despite the loss of his subordinate officers.)
---Hostage to Pleasure, Nalini Singh (romance: 5th in the Psy-Changeling series. I am kind of embarrassed about liking these books -- normally soupies are a much more take-it-or-leave-it amusement for me -- but Singh hooked me with the overarching story thread that carries through each individual book as the secondary plot. This book focuses on Dorian Christensen, a leopard changeling and DarkRiver sentinel, and Ashaya Aleine, an M-Psy reluctantly in charge of a secret, immoral research program designed to turn the Psy into a sort of hive-mind. Singh's world-building is still sketchy and implausible in a number of places, but it's deeper than it strictly needs to be, and she does make some attempt to face the awkwardness of her particular 'soul-bonding' gimmick. She also ventures into slightly murkier moral waters here, since one of the 'villains' in Hostage to Pleasure is Amara Aleine, Ashaya's sociopathic identical twin sister, whom Ashaya has spent her entire life protecting.)
---Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky (nonfiction: Salt: A World History is exactly what the title advertises: stories about the production, trade, and use of salt from our earliest archaeological and written records through to modern times.
Kurlansky's writing is serviceable at best and more often rather clunky, repetitious, and tin-eared -- no one will ever accuse him of being a great prose stylist or a master storyteller. He doesn't have the most developed historical sense, which means that bits of information float in discreet units, bereft of context or full interpretation. And he has a thing about the Basques, which I have noticed turning up in his other work as well -- I think he tends to insert information he knows well (such as Basque history) into historical moments he's less sure of, so as to sound more knowledgeable than he perhaps truly is.
Nevertheless, the stories Kurlansky has to tell are fascinating enough to mostly overcome those difficulties. As a bonus, each chapter can more or less stand on its own, so you can space your reading in bite-sized chunks, as it were -- Salt is a great book to bring to a waiting room or on a bus ride.
In summary, Salt is an interesting book, but with too many flaws for me to recommend buying it. Borrow a copy from the library instead.)
---Cod: The Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky (nonfiction: in which Kurlansky tackles cod rather than salt. This book is shorter and more of a unified story rather than a collection of vaguely related chapters. It contains some of the same information as his other book -- all the stuff on salt cod, European trade and fast days, and lots of mostly irrelevant Basque history -- but provides a lot of new information about fish life cycles, fishing methods, the development of the principle of national waters, and many more details about the trading patterns of colonial New England and maritime Canada. It also ends on a much more ambiguous note, since, in contrast to our abundance of salt, we do seem to be running out of fish.)
---Song of the Beast, Carol Berg (fantasy: in which Aidan MacAllister, a noble musician falsely imprisoned and tortured for seventeen years; Lara, a daughter of the Ridemark; and several Elhim, members of a despised race neither male nor female attempt to free the dragons from their centuries of bondage.
This is the third of Berg's books that I have read, and I didn't like it as much as the other two. For one thing, she always seems to write in a rather dry, distant-sounding first person. This does not always work with the story she's telling or the emotional effect one would assume she's reaching for. For another, the non-gendered nature of the Elhim never came across viscerally, so unless I made a heroic mental effort, they always presented as male to me... which made Lara the only female character, other than a prostitute who dies within the first couple chapters. And finally, Aidan is supposed to be a master musician and composer. This never came across to me either -- it was all telling, no showing -- no attention to beats and rhythms, no distraction by people singing under their breath, etc. I wanted to feel him waking from his captivity and rediscovering his music. I never got that.
But it's not a bad book, far from it. It's just not quite to my taste, despite the rare gift of villains whose motives make perfect sense in context.)
---Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), Tom Vanderbilt (nonfiction: the best book I read this month, hands down. This is part sociology, part psychology, part statistics, part engineering, part history, and all fascinating. It's also a very useful eye-opener about the bad habits you most likely aren't even aware you have, and therefore something of a survival tip book. Also, Vanderbilt can write, and his copy editor is on the ball. It's amazing how badly edited books and clunky writing make you appreciate the good stuff when you find it. Seriously. Read this. It's brilliant.)
Old: 1
---Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll (children's book: I only meant to look up "Jabberwocky," but I got caught up. I tend to forget, after a while, how utterly surreal Carroll's work is -- each scene fails, dream-like, to quite follow waking logic, and Carroll quick-cuts with no regard for rational narrative transitions. And yet, each scene almost makes sense; the thing wouldn't work otherwise, wouldn't keep you scrambling to figure it out, wouldn't produce the conviction that there must be some way to rationalize the whole mess. Also, his poetry is astonishingly catchy, even while it displays the same lack of earth logic. But what really struck me was how much of his work has been absorbed into common culture; there are lines and ideas that hardly seem strange at all until you realize that this is their first appearance anywhere. )
September Total: 7 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 86 books (57 new, 29 old)
---------------
"The Affairs of Dragons" is currently at 4,650 words, and I still have not gotten Kazul properly on-screen, though at least Morwen has now seen her around a corner. Such are the perils of following a story when it veers away from the outline. *grumble*
The thing is, while the outlined version would have been much funnier, it would not have been nearly as good a story. And also, I never really liked Wrede's casual dismissal of princesses and princes -- they may be mostly silly and rather useless in her world, but that's no reason to be rude and condescending toward them. So I am writing a princess who, while not at all used to the real world, is intelligent and reasonable, and while her knight is incompetent at being a knight, he's a good man and clever in other ways. And this allows the conflict to be a true misunderstanding instead of a couple of idiots doing something stupid and annoying.
(Also, it felt somewhat counterproductive to write a female idiot for a ficathon meant to celebrate female characters. Morwen and Kazul do not need me to artificially disable the other characters to help them shine. They're awesome enough to shine on their own.)
New: 6
---Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 16, Hiromu Arakawa (manga: in which Ed and Al travel north to Fort Briggs, on the border of Drachma, in search of May Chang and Scar. Meanwhile, Kimblee is also tracking Scar and Dr. Marcoh, and Roy Mustang continues his plan to overthrow the military dictatorship, despite the loss of his subordinate officers.)
---Hostage to Pleasure, Nalini Singh (romance: 5th in the Psy-Changeling series. I am kind of embarrassed about liking these books -- normally soupies are a much more take-it-or-leave-it amusement for me -- but Singh hooked me with the overarching story thread that carries through each individual book as the secondary plot. This book focuses on Dorian Christensen, a leopard changeling and DarkRiver sentinel, and Ashaya Aleine, an M-Psy reluctantly in charge of a secret, immoral research program designed to turn the Psy into a sort of hive-mind. Singh's world-building is still sketchy and implausible in a number of places, but it's deeper than it strictly needs to be, and she does make some attempt to face the awkwardness of her particular 'soul-bonding' gimmick. She also ventures into slightly murkier moral waters here, since one of the 'villains' in Hostage to Pleasure is Amara Aleine, Ashaya's sociopathic identical twin sister, whom Ashaya has spent her entire life protecting.)
---Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky (nonfiction: Salt: A World History is exactly what the title advertises: stories about the production, trade, and use of salt from our earliest archaeological and written records through to modern times.
Kurlansky's writing is serviceable at best and more often rather clunky, repetitious, and tin-eared -- no one will ever accuse him of being a great prose stylist or a master storyteller. He doesn't have the most developed historical sense, which means that bits of information float in discreet units, bereft of context or full interpretation. And he has a thing about the Basques, which I have noticed turning up in his other work as well -- I think he tends to insert information he knows well (such as Basque history) into historical moments he's less sure of, so as to sound more knowledgeable than he perhaps truly is.
Nevertheless, the stories Kurlansky has to tell are fascinating enough to mostly overcome those difficulties. As a bonus, each chapter can more or less stand on its own, so you can space your reading in bite-sized chunks, as it were -- Salt is a great book to bring to a waiting room or on a bus ride.
In summary, Salt is an interesting book, but with too many flaws for me to recommend buying it. Borrow a copy from the library instead.)
---Cod: The Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky (nonfiction: in which Kurlansky tackles cod rather than salt. This book is shorter and more of a unified story rather than a collection of vaguely related chapters. It contains some of the same information as his other book -- all the stuff on salt cod, European trade and fast days, and lots of mostly irrelevant Basque history -- but provides a lot of new information about fish life cycles, fishing methods, the development of the principle of national waters, and many more details about the trading patterns of colonial New England and maritime Canada. It also ends on a much more ambiguous note, since, in contrast to our abundance of salt, we do seem to be running out of fish.)
---Song of the Beast, Carol Berg (fantasy: in which Aidan MacAllister, a noble musician falsely imprisoned and tortured for seventeen years; Lara, a daughter of the Ridemark; and several Elhim, members of a despised race neither male nor female attempt to free the dragons from their centuries of bondage.
This is the third of Berg's books that I have read, and I didn't like it as much as the other two. For one thing, she always seems to write in a rather dry, distant-sounding first person. This does not always work with the story she's telling or the emotional effect one would assume she's reaching for. For another, the non-gendered nature of the Elhim never came across viscerally, so unless I made a heroic mental effort, they always presented as male to me... which made Lara the only female character, other than a prostitute who dies within the first couple chapters. And finally, Aidan is supposed to be a master musician and composer. This never came across to me either -- it was all telling, no showing -- no attention to beats and rhythms, no distraction by people singing under their breath, etc. I wanted to feel him waking from his captivity and rediscovering his music. I never got that.
But it's not a bad book, far from it. It's just not quite to my taste, despite the rare gift of villains whose motives make perfect sense in context.)
---Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), Tom Vanderbilt (nonfiction: the best book I read this month, hands down. This is part sociology, part psychology, part statistics, part engineering, part history, and all fascinating. It's also a very useful eye-opener about the bad habits you most likely aren't even aware you have, and therefore something of a survival tip book. Also, Vanderbilt can write, and his copy editor is on the ball. It's amazing how badly edited books and clunky writing make you appreciate the good stuff when you find it. Seriously. Read this. It's brilliant.)
Old: 1
---Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll (children's book: I only meant to look up "Jabberwocky," but I got caught up. I tend to forget, after a while, how utterly surreal Carroll's work is -- each scene fails, dream-like, to quite follow waking logic, and Carroll quick-cuts with no regard for rational narrative transitions. And yet, each scene almost makes sense; the thing wouldn't work otherwise, wouldn't keep you scrambling to figure it out, wouldn't produce the conviction that there must be some way to rationalize the whole mess. Also, his poetry is astonishingly catchy, even while it displays the same lack of earth logic. But what really struck me was how much of his work has been absorbed into common culture; there are lines and ideas that hardly seem strange at all until you realize that this is their first appearance anywhere. )
September Total: 7 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date: 86 books (57 new, 29 old)
---------------
"The Affairs of Dragons" is currently at 4,650 words, and I still have not gotten Kazul properly on-screen, though at least Morwen has now seen her around a corner. Such are the perils of following a story when it veers away from the outline. *grumble*
The thing is, while the outlined version would have been much funnier, it would not have been nearly as good a story. And also, I never really liked Wrede's casual dismissal of princesses and princes -- they may be mostly silly and rather useless in her world, but that's no reason to be rude and condescending toward them. So I am writing a princess who, while not at all used to the real world, is intelligent and reasonable, and while her knight is incompetent at being a knight, he's a good man and clever in other ways. And this allows the conflict to be a true misunderstanding instead of a couple of idiots doing something stupid and annoying.
(Also, it felt somewhat counterproductive to write a female idiot for a ficathon meant to celebrate female characters. Morwen and Kazul do not need me to artificially disable the other characters to help them shine. They're awesome enough to shine on their own.)
