book list, March 2009

[edenfalling]

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in March 2009. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions. I reserve the right to spoil all hell out of any book if spoilery bits are what I feel like talking about.)

New: 3
---The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them, Amy Dickinson (memoir: the writer of "Ask Amy," a nationally syndicated advice column, tells her life story, focusing on her experience as a single mother after her divorce, but with frequent digressions into her childhood. Freeville is a suburb of Ithaca [well, more or less], so this was a local interest book at our store, which is how I stumbled across it. It's... how does one put this... uplifting, I think? And also warm and funny and sad and truthful and sort of like wrapping yourself in a fuzzy blanket with a cup of hot chocolate and saying, "Yes, that's what life is like.")

---Angels' Blood, Nalini Singh (romance/urban fantasy: the start of a new series for Singh, though I think this one falls more on the urban fantasy side than the romance side, since I believe we will be following one pair of protagonists through several books rather than switching to a new focus couple in each volume. Anyway. In a world that is far more similar to our own than it has any right to be, given the existence of vampires and oddly non-religious angels, vampire hunter Elena Deveraux is hired by the archangel Raphael to track an archangel gone rogue.

This book was odd to read at first, because I kept tripping against a 'but angels aren't like that!' reaction. Once I was able to disconnect and treat Singh's 'angels' as more of a magical human subspecies than anything with religious significance, that was okay. The gender role stuff was harder to get past. There is a tendency, in a lot of genre romance -- and especially in paranormal romance -- to go on about women wanting their men to be 'real' men: strong and dominating, and only saved from being abusive and scarily controlling by the power of true love. Since I don't believe in the power of true love [at least not in that sense], this often reads, to me, as either disingenuous D/s fantasy or justification of wife-beating. And given the power differential between Elena and Raphael, and the way he manipulates her thoughts a couple times, the dynamics veer close enough to coercion and rape that I am uncomfortable accepting them as a sexual pairing, let alone a romantic pairing.

I think Singh is somewhat aware of that problem, since the brief glimpse of the sequel shows Elena and Raphael having an argument instead of being all fluffy-sugar-happy, but still. I am also twitchy about Dimitri, Raphael's vampire servant, who plays manipulation games with his scent. He is presented as more of a good guy than not -- he's loyal, he was made into a vampire against his will, he's more or less honorable -- and yet he comes across as noticeably sexist, if not outright misogynistic, and his behavior toward Elena is flat-out sexual harassment.

So yeah. Interesting world; interesting characters; smooth, clear writing; lots of issues.)

---Princep's Fury, Jim Butcher (fantasy: fifth book of the Codex Alera, in which Tavi and his legion accompany the Canim invaders back to their homeland, only to discover that the Vord have nearly overrun the whole continent. Meanwhile, Gaius announces that the Vord have also begun to invade Alera; he sends Amara and Bernard to spy on them, and Isana to make peace with the Icemen in order to free the northern legions for this new war. While I still don't care that much about Amara and Bernard, I have become very fond of Isana and Tavi. This surprises me, since I disliked Isana at first and so far as I could tell, Tavi had no discernable personality until book 3, but hey, I like a twist now and then. *grin* Also, Butcher has finished most of his setup by now, and this book is consequently nonstop tension, with, I have to say, a hell of a cliffhanger at the end.)


Old: 4
---The Darkangel, Margaret Ann Pierce (fantasy: book 1 of the Darkangel trilogy, in which Aeriel attempts to avenge her mistress, Eoduin, who was kidnapped by an icarus -- a wingèd vampire, the son of the lorelei -- and finds herself kidnapped to be his servant for a year. This is clearly a fantasy, with magic and kingdoms and so on, but the gimmick is that it's set on the moon, thousands of years in the future, after people from Earth seeded the moon with life and then abandoned it to return home.)

---A Gathering of Gargoyles, Margaret Ann Pierce (fantasy: book 2 of the Darkangel trilogy, in which Aeriel despairs over Irrylath's inability to start any sort of normal relationship, and sets out across the Sea of Dust on a quest to interpret the second part of Ravenna's rime.)

---The Pearl of the Soul of the World, Margaret Ann Pierce (fantasy: book 3 of the Darkangel trilogy, in which Irrylath and the massed armies of the many lands march on the Witch's mere, while Aeriel follows a separate task assigned by Ravenna, in hopes of reclaiming the world from the clutches of entropy. The ending is very unusual for a fantasy with a love story at its heart. I want to make a longer post about this series sometime in the next few days; hopefully, I will not get distracted before I get my thoughts on paper.)

---The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman, Mark Hempel, et al (comics: ninth volume of Sandman, in which Dream's actions all draw together toward an inevitable conclusion. Did he plan it? Not consciously, I'm sure. Subconsciously... maybe. I like Hempel's stylized, jagged art. I also have a mad urge to tell the story of what happened to the three winged girls in the grisly fairy-tale Rose Walker hears in England.)


March Total: 7 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a ridiculous amount of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 21 books (7 new, 14 old)

Comments

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Well, you could argue that the "odd" ending continues to reflect the female-centricness, with Aeriel "growing up" out of her desires for love and marriage and setting them aside for greater causes . . . (at least, that's based on what I remember of it all, having last read it over 10 years ago).