What I'm reading
Recently finished:
Blood of Dragons, Robin Hobb - last of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Enjoyable; not as wrenching or impressive a series or conclusion as there is to the Tawny Man or the Liveship books, but reasonably satisfying.
Some niggles (with spoilers)
I do feel this series didn't need to be stretched out over four books, and I found the plotlines involving Malta, Reyn and Selden rather unsatisfying. The politics of Chalced never really developed enough for me to believe in the overthrow of the Duke, apart from the effective scenes between him and his Chancellor. I found it surprising in previous books that Selden wasn't in danger of sexual as well as physical abuse, and after reading Sophia McDougall's essay on The Rape of James Bond, it was particularly noticeable in this book.
But it was Malta and Reyn's stories I particularly struggled with; I just couldn't accept that they would have been as uninvolved with the dragons as they are in the first book, especially given that Tintaglia had been around for quite a while when the cocoons first hatched (do cocoons hatch, or only eggs?). It just seemed a device to stop them going on the journey. And at the end, when they are involved, I kept expecting them to do something (surely the fingerprints on Malta's neck were going to lead that way?) and then they just didn't. What I do mostly like are the characters of the dragons themselves, and Thymara. Sometimes she does get a little self-pitying, but I like her growing up and that she has the chance to make her own mistakes and decisions and not be turned into a reward for good behaviour or longstanding yearning.
Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis, Robert Beaken. This was 99p in the Kindle sale, and I picked it up mainly because of Lang's brief appearances in Susan Howatch's Glittering Images. Beaken argues that Lang's primateship is often underestimated, that he worked more closely with Baldwin over the abdication than has been recognised, and was an effective leader, particularly in the run-up to and early part of the Second World War, whose opposition to Nazism and later to the carpet bombing of German cities has been overshadowed by that of Bishop Bell. The atmosphere of the book is a little stuffy - but a stuffiness that I recognised as the atmosphere Howatch writes about. The undemonstrative Anglo-Catholic very-much-not-papalist piety Beaken describes is like that of Charles Ashworth, with Bishop Barnes of Birmingham in the background jumping up and down and shouting 'No Popery!' like Neville Aysgarth.
Beaken takes issue with A L Rowse, Alan Wilkinson and David Starkey's descriptions of Lang as a repressed homosexual, and argues that although he did have close relationships with some of his chaplains and was possibly over-dependent on some of them, he also wished he had married, fell in love with and proposed to a woman when he was first Archbishop of York, and had close and possibly over-dependent relationships with women too, including an actress, Ann Todd.
One rather charming fact: Lang published a romantic Jacobite novel, The Young Clanroy in 1895 while he was a vicar in Oxford ' a tale of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion of the boy-meets-girl, loses-girl, gets-girl variety'. He once asked Queen Victoria 'if he might keep his sentimental loyalty to Prince Charles Edward Stuart? "Certainly, provided of course that it remains strictly sentimental." replied the queen.' [lack of caps as in original; it's the annoying IB Tauris house style where everything is lower case if possible, leading to stupidities such as describing Alan Campbell Don as 'chaplain to the speaker'.]
Jack Glass, Adam Roberts. The only BSFA-nominated novel I've managed to read so far, and this one mostly because at the awards discussion meeting it was described as a detective novel (in space, of course). Which it is; three interlinked ones:
One of these mysteries is a prison story. One is a regular whodunit. One is a locked-room mystery. I can't promise that they're necessarily presented to you in that order; but it should be easy for you to work out which is which, and to sort them out accordingly. Unless you find that each of them is all three at once, in which case I'm not sure I can help you.
I was slightly disappointed that this narrator wasn't the voice for the whole novel, and I'm not sure all three sections are equally successful (though based on other reviews I've read, everyone has a different idea of which one is the best), but I enjoyed this.
Currently reading:
Also from the Kindle sale, Greece, the Hidden Centuries, David Brewer - a history of Greek experiences under Ottoman rule, from the fall of Constantinople to the War of Independence, arguing that it was a lot more complicated than Turks Evil, Greeks Good.
Next up:
All the short fiction nominated for the BSFA award before Eastercon.
This entry was originally posted at http://coughingbear.dreamwidth.org/162922.html and has
comments. Comment here or there using OpenID.
Blood of Dragons, Robin Hobb - last of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Enjoyable; not as wrenching or impressive a series or conclusion as there is to the Tawny Man or the Liveship books, but reasonably satisfying.
Some niggles (with spoilers)
I do feel this series didn't need to be stretched out over four books, and I found the plotlines involving Malta, Reyn and Selden rather unsatisfying. The politics of Chalced never really developed enough for me to believe in the overthrow of the Duke, apart from the effective scenes between him and his Chancellor. I found it surprising in previous books that Selden wasn't in danger of sexual as well as physical abuse, and after reading Sophia McDougall's essay on The Rape of James Bond, it was particularly noticeable in this book.
But it was Malta and Reyn's stories I particularly struggled with; I just couldn't accept that they would have been as uninvolved with the dragons as they are in the first book, especially given that Tintaglia had been around for quite a while when the cocoons first hatched (do cocoons hatch, or only eggs?). It just seemed a device to stop them going on the journey. And at the end, when they are involved, I kept expecting them to do something (surely the fingerprints on Malta's neck were going to lead that way?) and then they just didn't. What I do mostly like are the characters of the dragons themselves, and Thymara. Sometimes she does get a little self-pitying, but I like her growing up and that she has the chance to make her own mistakes and decisions and not be turned into a reward for good behaviour or longstanding yearning.
Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis, Robert Beaken. This was 99p in the Kindle sale, and I picked it up mainly because of Lang's brief appearances in Susan Howatch's Glittering Images. Beaken argues that Lang's primateship is often underestimated, that he worked more closely with Baldwin over the abdication than has been recognised, and was an effective leader, particularly in the run-up to and early part of the Second World War, whose opposition to Nazism and later to the carpet bombing of German cities has been overshadowed by that of Bishop Bell. The atmosphere of the book is a little stuffy - but a stuffiness that I recognised as the atmosphere Howatch writes about. The undemonstrative Anglo-Catholic very-much-not-papalist piety Beaken describes is like that of Charles Ashworth, with Bishop Barnes of Birmingham in the background jumping up and down and shouting 'No Popery!' like Neville Aysgarth.
Beaken takes issue with A L Rowse, Alan Wilkinson and David Starkey's descriptions of Lang as a repressed homosexual, and argues that although he did have close relationships with some of his chaplains and was possibly over-dependent on some of them, he also wished he had married, fell in love with and proposed to a woman when he was first Archbishop of York, and had close and possibly over-dependent relationships with women too, including an actress, Ann Todd.
One rather charming fact: Lang published a romantic Jacobite novel, The Young Clanroy in 1895 while he was a vicar in Oxford ' a tale of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion of the boy-meets-girl, loses-girl, gets-girl variety'. He once asked Queen Victoria 'if he might keep his sentimental loyalty to Prince Charles Edward Stuart? "Certainly, provided of course that it remains strictly sentimental." replied the queen.' [lack of caps as in original; it's the annoying IB Tauris house style where everything is lower case if possible, leading to stupidities such as describing Alan Campbell Don as 'chaplain to the speaker'.]
Jack Glass, Adam Roberts. The only BSFA-nominated novel I've managed to read so far, and this one mostly because at the awards discussion meeting it was described as a detective novel (in space, of course). Which it is; three interlinked ones:
One of these mysteries is a prison story. One is a regular whodunit. One is a locked-room mystery. I can't promise that they're necessarily presented to you in that order; but it should be easy for you to work out which is which, and to sort them out accordingly. Unless you find that each of them is all three at once, in which case I'm not sure I can help you.
I was slightly disappointed that this narrator wasn't the voice for the whole novel, and I'm not sure all three sections are equally successful (though based on other reviews I've read, everyone has a different idea of which one is the best), but I enjoyed this.
Currently reading:
Also from the Kindle sale, Greece, the Hidden Centuries, David Brewer - a history of Greek experiences under Ottoman rule, from the fall of Constantinople to the War of Independence, arguing that it was a lot more complicated than Turks Evil, Greeks Good.
Next up:
All the short fiction nominated for the BSFA award before Eastercon.
This entry was originally posted at http://coughingbear.dreamwidth.org/162922.html and has
comments. Comment here or there using OpenID.