Book Post: Bujold, Eger, Aaronovitch, Gaiman and Albertalli

[bearshorty]

There are my June books. I didn't post my May books and I will try to catch up but I wanted to do the June ones at least first.

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold [Vorkosigan Saga], 316pp
This is not the best book in the Vorkosigan Saga, the main mystery is not as good, as I find more family oriented and mental anguish working better

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

It is not the best one but it is still Bujold and it is still written in her highly readable style and there is plenty of funny stuff

That's basically how I feel about Diplomatic Immunity, too. It's not one I've ever been moved to reread, and I think it's one of the weakest books in the series, but it's still Bujold, so it was still worth my while.

Interesting to hear your thoughts on Broken Homes. It is my favorite of the books so far, but I do think the twist at the end is a big part of that -- I was every bit as blindsided by Peter, and Lesley had been a favorite character of mine, too, so it was a huge WHOA and "I need to talk to someone about this right now!" moment for me. (I do agree that the beginning is slow, and the book picked up for me when they went undercover, too.)

There is something about this series that is keeping me at arms' length. Maybe it is the characters, although I really like Peter.

I've seen this at arm's length complaint before from other readers, though I think those were specifically about Peter as POV character. Someone -- it may have even been Aaronovitch, or he might've been part of the conversation at least -- pointed out that you don't get emotion from Peter's voice much: you get funny snark and fannish references and architectural asides, but Peter doesn't talk much about Feelings, and when he does provide some small details that hint to his or other people's emotional state, it's very understated. Part of it might be British stiff upper lip stuff, or policeman stuff, but I remember somebody drawing the connection to Peter being an adult child of an addict (his dad is clean now, but he wasn't when Peter was growing up, though of course he doesn't talk about it much, or in detail), where repressing / being unable to express emotion is one of the traits that can lead to. That distance never bothered me, but IIRC I read that hypothesis between Broken Homes and book 5, and so read Foxglove Summer with that framework in mind, and it worked for me really well.

I do agree that the Faceless Man is not very interesting. We do eventually get to see his motives more, but I can't say that they're particularly interesting motives. The arc does wrap up, and we seem to be starting a new one with the most recent book, but I haven't got enough of a feel for it yet to know what I think about it.

I do love Varvara, and it was Broken Homes (of course) that made me love her. It was one of the very few cases where I was inspired to fannish poetry without prompt or other external reason -- she was just so fun! :) (and I am also impressed that he managed to create a Russian character who feels Russian without descending into stereotype or klyukva, you know?)

I was wondering why you were reading Coraline to Olivia when you mentioned it in an earlier post! It's also funny to me that she loves the movie. I introduced the rodents to it when they were a little older -- it was shortly after it came out in 2009, so L would've been ~8 and O would've been ~6 -- and I don't remember what O thought of it, but L still says that movie traumatized her, haha.

The Eger book sounds fascinating! I don't know that I'm up for reading something like that, but a book about trauma by a psychologist who is herself an Auschwitz survivor definitely sounds like something special!

Interesting to hear that 'Kate' didn't work for you. I haven't read it yet, but my Albertalli-reading buddy who introduced me to the Simon-verse also seemed underwhelmed. I do find that I'm too old for high school (or college) romance these days, but can still enjoy YA that has enough other things going on, so I'm curious if this will be one of those or just a miss. (I was also never a theater kid, and not even theater-adjacent like L, so I could see there not really being anything for me there...)