Reading Friday, 5/10
A little late, partly because I forgot I'd finished anything until Goodreads reminded me.
What did you just finish reading?
Books
B.R. Collins, Mazecheat - YA sf set in a future or alternate England where the only way out of acid-rain-drenched poverty is to win a virtual reality game. Gamerunners frequently hire mazecheats to program them cheatcodes. The first book, Gamerunner, focused on Ric, the pampered son of the chief game developer, Daed. (Ric = Icarus, Daed = Daedalus, the game (the Maze) = the Labyrinth. That no one recognizes their Greek antecedents and that they are apparently polytheists is what inclines me to think this is alternate rather than future.) The first book was the weakest of Collins' books, basically because Ric is a self-centered privileged idiot who takes far too long to realize that his privilege doesn't extend to other people. By the second corpse, I could not stop thinking, "Kid, how many of your friends are you going to get killed before you wise up?" Spoiler: More than two.
Mazecheat shifts the focus to Ario (= Ariadne), the eponymous cheat, whose career got trashed two weeks ago as collateral damage to Ric's shenanigans (she's never met him) and who is desperate to regain her cred before boss/big brother figure Dion (= Dionysus) kicks her out of the Workshop into the streets. A successful gamerunner invites her to make the score of a lifetime in defeating the latest game mods and naturally everything goes wrong. This is infinitely superior to its prequel just on the grounds that Ario is not an idiot, but it's still one of Collins' less interesting novels. Since I figure some of you would like to know: Ario is black and bisexual.
Lily Hoang, Changing - an experimental novella/long prose poem about the recurring conflicts and relationships in the life of a young Vietnamese American woman, with a structure modeled on the I Ching, and recurrent imagery from "Jack and Jill." The unnamed narrator (the little girl, the sister little sister) disagrees frequently with the Translator, and the reader, whom she addresses directly, is sometimes "you lover" and sometimes "you reader" (the reader of her narrative, the reader of the oracles). As far as I can tell, this succeeds in what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do doesn't appeal to me.
Claire Kent, Nameless and Escorted: erotic romance novels distinguished by heroines with massive boundary issues, heroes who are supposed to be charming and in control and just come across as incredibly repressed, and a style which subsitutes repetitions about the characters' established issues for any demonstration of them. Possibly I am not the ideal reader for erotic romance. I wanted less sex and more character development.
Sequential art
Warren Ellis & Salvador Larocca, newuniversal
A "White Event" creates four superhumans who are meant to lead to the next stage of human evolution yadda yadda yadda. There have been previous White Events, though, and the last one had two of the superhumans pair up and conceive a child -- whereupon the NSA decided to kill them all to prevent humans from becoming obsolete.
This was an attempt to do a new Marvel continuity with many fewer ties to the traditional comicsverse -- occasionally names you know are mentioned, but they're never major and their lives don't hew closely to the lives of their counterparts. (In 1954, Tony Stark escapes from capitivity in Korea in a flying robot suit. Then an NSA assassin verifies that his superengineering powers are the result of a White Event and shoots him in the head.)
This is intriguing and got cancelled after six issues in the middle of a storyline. There's a single-issue story that depicts a White Event in pre-history (boring) and a single-issue story that depicts the White Event in the 50s that created the current NSA protocol (neat). Probably too frustrating to be worth it, unless you're interested in how it instersects with Jonathan Hickman's Avengers (I am).
Kaori Yuki, Grand Guignol Orchestra Volumes 4-5
Last week's Manga Moveable Feast reminded me I had not read my favorite cracktastic idilicious mangaka in quite some time. Fortunately, I had two unread volumes hanging around. This series involves a Guignol virus that turns people into zombies and/or marionettes, a girl disguised as a boy, a man everyone mistakes for a woman, weapons strikes that appear to destroy cities from near-Earth orbit, a mad adolescent queen, her tormented pining advisor, her guilty older brother, a sculptor who makes portraits of people dying in agony after being infected by the Guignol virus, a cackling murderer in a cat mask, a castrated nun, an oligarchy apparently run by very elderly children, a metric ton of Alice in Wonderland imagery, and evil dolls.
Pretty much your standard Kaori Yuki.
The last half of Volume 5 is devoted to a completely unrelated story that makes even less sense than Kaori Yuki's stories usually do. I do not even know how to begin summarizing it. I may have to do a full recap.
What are you currently reading?
Kerry Greenwood's Medea, a competent but not particularly compelling historical novel, and Heiress of Russ: 2012 ed. Connie Wilkins & Steve Berman, which doesn't suit my taste nearly as much as last year's edition. There's only one outstanding story ("To Follow the Waves" by Amal el-Mohtar), and the rest are a blur of pleasant mediocrity except for the one that is downright awful. It's just as likely this is editorial taste as changes in the available selection (last year the main editor was Joselle Vanderhooft), since the second story Wilkins picked from Steam Powered is not the one I would have chosen. (El-Mohtar's was the first, and I would have gone for it, too.)
What did you acquire this week?
I went to a Dessa concert (which was ♥ ♥ ♥ AWESOME ♥ ♥ ♥) and picked up her poetry/incidental prose collection, Spiral Bound.
Oh, and I got my rewards from the Off*Beat kickstarter, epub versions of Off*Beat 1-2 by Jen Lee Quick. I'm very glad Book 3 is finally being published.
cups brewed at DW
What did you just finish reading?
Books
B.R. Collins, Mazecheat - YA sf set in a future or alternate England where the only way out of acid-rain-drenched poverty is to win a virtual reality game. Gamerunners frequently hire mazecheats to program them cheatcodes. The first book, Gamerunner, focused on Ric, the pampered son of the chief game developer, Daed. (Ric = Icarus, Daed = Daedalus, the game (the Maze) = the Labyrinth. That no one recognizes their Greek antecedents and that they are apparently polytheists is what inclines me to think this is alternate rather than future.) The first book was the weakest of Collins' books, basically because Ric is a self-centered privileged idiot who takes far too long to realize that his privilege doesn't extend to other people. By the second corpse, I could not stop thinking, "Kid, how many of your friends are you going to get killed before you wise up?" Spoiler: More than two.
Mazecheat shifts the focus to Ario (= Ariadne), the eponymous cheat, whose career got trashed two weeks ago as collateral damage to Ric's shenanigans (she's never met him) and who is desperate to regain her cred before boss/big brother figure Dion (= Dionysus) kicks her out of the Workshop into the streets. A successful gamerunner invites her to make the score of a lifetime in defeating the latest game mods and naturally everything goes wrong. This is infinitely superior to its prequel just on the grounds that Ario is not an idiot, but it's still one of Collins' less interesting novels. Since I figure some of you would like to know: Ario is black and bisexual.
Lily Hoang, Changing - an experimental novella/long prose poem about the recurring conflicts and relationships in the life of a young Vietnamese American woman, with a structure modeled on the I Ching, and recurrent imagery from "Jack and Jill." The unnamed narrator (the little girl, the sister little sister) disagrees frequently with the Translator, and the reader, whom she addresses directly, is sometimes "you lover" and sometimes "you reader" (the reader of her narrative, the reader of the oracles). As far as I can tell, this succeeds in what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do doesn't appeal to me.
Claire Kent, Nameless and Escorted: erotic romance novels distinguished by heroines with massive boundary issues, heroes who are supposed to be charming and in control and just come across as incredibly repressed, and a style which subsitutes repetitions about the characters' established issues for any demonstration of them. Possibly I am not the ideal reader for erotic romance. I wanted less sex and more character development.
Sequential art
Warren Ellis & Salvador Larocca, newuniversal
A "White Event" creates four superhumans who are meant to lead to the next stage of human evolution yadda yadda yadda. There have been previous White Events, though, and the last one had two of the superhumans pair up and conceive a child -- whereupon the NSA decided to kill them all to prevent humans from becoming obsolete.
This was an attempt to do a new Marvel continuity with many fewer ties to the traditional comicsverse -- occasionally names you know are mentioned, but they're never major and their lives don't hew closely to the lives of their counterparts. (In 1954, Tony Stark escapes from capitivity in Korea in a flying robot suit. Then an NSA assassin verifies that his superengineering powers are the result of a White Event and shoots him in the head.)
This is intriguing and got cancelled after six issues in the middle of a storyline. There's a single-issue story that depicts a White Event in pre-history (boring) and a single-issue story that depicts the White Event in the 50s that created the current NSA protocol (neat). Probably too frustrating to be worth it, unless you're interested in how it instersects with Jonathan Hickman's Avengers (I am).
Kaori Yuki, Grand Guignol Orchestra Volumes 4-5
Last week's Manga Moveable Feast reminded me I had not read my favorite cracktastic idilicious mangaka in quite some time. Fortunately, I had two unread volumes hanging around. This series involves a Guignol virus that turns people into zombies and/or marionettes, a girl disguised as a boy, a man everyone mistakes for a woman, weapons strikes that appear to destroy cities from near-Earth orbit, a mad adolescent queen, her tormented pining advisor, her guilty older brother, a sculptor who makes portraits of people dying in agony after being infected by the Guignol virus, a cackling murderer in a cat mask, a castrated nun, an oligarchy apparently run by very elderly children, a metric ton of Alice in Wonderland imagery, and evil dolls.
Pretty much your standard Kaori Yuki.
The last half of Volume 5 is devoted to a completely unrelated story that makes even less sense than Kaori Yuki's stories usually do. I do not even know how to begin summarizing it. I may have to do a full recap.
What are you currently reading?
Kerry Greenwood's Medea, a competent but not particularly compelling historical novel, and Heiress of Russ: 2012 ed. Connie Wilkins & Steve Berman, which doesn't suit my taste nearly as much as last year's edition. There's only one outstanding story ("To Follow the Waves" by Amal el-Mohtar), and the rest are a blur of pleasant mediocrity except for the one that is downright awful. It's just as likely this is editorial taste as changes in the available selection (last year the main editor was Joselle Vanderhooft), since the second story Wilkins picked from Steam Powered is not the one I would have chosen. (El-Mohtar's was the first, and I would have gone for it, too.)
What did you acquire this week?
I went to a Dessa concert (which was ♥ ♥ ♥ AWESOME ♥ ♥ ♥) and picked up her poetry/incidental prose collection, Spiral Bound.
Oh, and I got my rewards from the Off*Beat kickstarter, epub versions of Off*Beat 1-2 by Jen Lee Quick. I'm very glad Book 3 is finally being published.
cups brewed at DW