book list, November and December 2008

[edenfalling]

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

New: 3
---Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card (science fiction: for me, this is the book that finally ties all the Enderverse novels together into a proper series. You see, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind are one self-contained sequence (the Lusitania trilogy, shall we say?); the Ender's Shadow tetralogy is another. While both sequences are clearly related to Ender's Game, the 'series' always seemed to me to be two series and a standalone that just happened to be set in the same universe and feature many of the same characters.

The good news is that Ender in Exile provides the missing continuity. It's a direct sequel to both Ender's Game and the Shadow tetralogy, as well as a more detailed look at the creation of the interstellar social order that serves as the background of the Lusitania trilogy.

The bad news is that Ender in Exile, well, provides the missing continuity. And while it's a good book in many ways -- among other things it faces several moral issues people have raised with the Enderverse, and even if you don't think Card provides satisfactory answers, he deserves a lot of credit for trying to deal with ethics at all -- it does suffer from 'must fill in the gaps' syndrome. Card had some loose ends he needed to tidy up whether they fit smoothly into the plot and character arcs or not, and while he's a good enough writer to sand down most of the rough edges, there are still some points where I found myself noticing him pulling strings in the background.

But that's a minor issue. It's a new Enderverse novel from Orson Scott Card! What more do you want?)

---Phenomenal Girl 5, A. J. Menden (romance: Lainey Livingston, aka Phenomenal Girl 5, has been accepted into the Elite Hands of Justice... pending a training stint with the most powerful magician in the world, a mostly-retired hero known as the Reincarnist. Together, they fight crime! They also fall in love; it's very cute. Then he dies to save her, and, as per the name, is reborn as a new man who doesn't remember their relationship. Oops. This book is great fun, and if A. J. Menden has not laughed herself silly over comic books (and also watched the new series of Doctor Who), I will be very surprised.)

---Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama (nonfiction: Obama's early life and search to define himself. You know, I am extremely impressed by how well the man can put words together. I even forgive him the occasional slides from past into present tense, since I think they're intentional and intended to convey the immediacy of certain memories. Also, this book was uncomfortable for me at times, as a white woman trying to imagine myself into the shoes of a black man, but I think that makes it even more important to read. I have the luxury of not considering race, and it's good to be reminded that that is a luxury. [And I am not going to go into gender theory here, though I admit to wondering how a white man might react to the book, without having any experience of being a 'them' (blacks, women) instead of being the norm (whites, men) against which everything else is defined.])


Old: 8
---The Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones (fantasy: in which Jamie Hamilton spies on Them, aka some beings he really ought to have known better than to spy on, and is sentenced to wander the worlds until he finds his Home again. They run the worlds as a giant, real-life version of Risk or other war-games, and eventually Jamie and some of his fellow Homeward Bounders try to fight back. I love this book beyond the telling of it.)

---Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones (fantasy: in which the denizen of Sirius, a high luminary, is falsely accused of murder and exiled to Earth in the body of a dog until he can find the missing Zoi which is fingered as the murder weapon. Except it's more complicated than that, and also, there's his new owner Kathleen to look after. A lovely book with a wonderfully bittersweet ending.)

---Westmark, Lloyd Alexander (fantasy: technically this is fantasy, since it's set in a secondary world, but there isn't a single scrap of magic, though there are fantastical coincidences. This is the first volume in a trilogy that chronicles the birth of democracy in the nation of Westmark. We open with Theo, a young printer's apprentice, whose master is killed by agents of the oppressive chief minister, Cabbarus, and his escape starts a rambling journey across the country, populated by intriguing characters: Count Las Bombas and Musket the dwarf, confidence artists; Mickle the orphan, ventriloquist, and former apprentice thief; Florian and his 'children,' would-be revolutionaries. We also cut to pictures of life at the palace in Marianstat, where King Augustine is ailing and obsessed by his dead daughter, and where Doctor Torrens, perhaps the only man who truly wants to cure him rather than indulge his whims, has been exiled and saved by Keller, an outlawed journalist, and his companions Sparrow and Weasel. And all the threads pull together for a dramatic, albeit slightly improbable, climax... which, interestingly, does not cheat and therefore does not resolve everything neatly.)

---The Kestrel, Lloyd Alexander (fantasy: second in the Westmark trilogy, picking up a few years later during Theo's tour of the nation. Regia invades, with the collusion of various generals and nobles. Florian's revolutionaries become guerrillas, and Mickle must take control of the nation and the army after King Augustine's untimely death. Brutal and honest about the ugliness of war, and despite the fantastical coincidences that lead to a truce, the ending is anything but trite.)

---The Beggar Queen, Lloyd Alexander (fantasy: third in the Westmark trilogy, in which Cabbarus returns from exile to set himself up as a dictator, overthrowing Mickle and Florian's attempt to create a sort of constitutional monarchy. More claustrophobic than the first two books, since it's set almost entirely within Marianstat, and driven by a sort of paranoid, nail-biting tension despite the funny moments. And again, the ending is bittersweet at best and every bit of happiness is hard-won. I love this series SO MUCH.)

---Archer's Goon, Diana Wynne Jones (fantasy: in which Howard Sykes discovers that his town is controlled by seven wizards who have been trapped within its boundaries for the past thirteen years, and who think his family is somehow to blame for their imprisonment. Fun and ingenious.)

---The Far Side of Evil, Sylvia Engdahl (science fiction: Elana, a newly graduated agent in the Federation Anthropological Service, is sent to a world in danger of self-destruction to do research on the 'Critical Stage' in which species either destroy themselves or learn to reach beyond their own planets. Her mission is intended to be observation only, but events spin out of control when one of her fellow observers falls in love with a native and tries to save the planet. I loved Engdahl's books when I was in junior high, and I was curious how this one would hold up. She's more preachy and didactic than I recalled, and I am much less inclined to swallow psychic powers as anything other than magic or utter claptrap, but those caveats aside, this is still a powerful story of all the ways people can go terribly wrong even while trying to do the right thing. )

---The Changeling Sea, Patricia McKillip (fantasy: in which Peri, whose father was lost to the sea and whose mother is lost in mourning, hexes the sea and thereby sets off a very tangled set of events that swirl out to engulf the royal family, a sea-dragon, a wandering magician, and all the people in her sleepy, seaside village. Mysterious and aching, but always with the possibility of a safe harbor to welcome you home.)


November & December Total: 11 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 103 books (65 new, 38 old)

...

Man, compared to 2007 (370 books) or 2006 (375 books), my tally sucks beyond the telling of it. I BLAME THE INTERNET. And also my habit of reading magazines instead of books on my lunch break and during slow nights, but mostly the internet. Curse its addictive nature! (Okay, and curse Doctor Who, too, because time spent watching DVDs is time not spent reading.)

I am still reading the same quantity of words. It's just that the composition of those words has shifted -- more fanfic, more magazine articles, fewer books. *sigh* I feel I am betraying my roots.

Ah well, maybe next year I can get back up to at least 200?

Comments

[edenfalling]

I not only read it, I reviewed it in one of my book list posts. *hunts* Yes, here, in 2007. I think it's a bit too didactic for me to *really* love it, but I did like it a lot, because I could very easily see the events happening in a place like Battle School.

[chaos-harmony.livejournal.com]

I remember surprising myself with how fond I was of it - largely because Dink Meeker was originally one of my favorite Enderverse characters, so it was nice seeing him return as a major player in a related story.