book list, August, September, and October 2019
It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in August through October, 2019. 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.
Hexarchate Stories, by Yoon Ha Lee
-----What it says on the tin! I'd actually read all the tiny!fic before on Lee's Dreamwidth, and two of the full-length stories which are available for free online, but the final two were new to me and definitely worth the price of admission. :DDD
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold
-----The latest Penric & Desdemona installment, in which Penric gets captured by pirates on his way home from a document recovery job, and finds himself unexpectedly in charge of two orphan girls who have been similarly captured.
Bryony and Roses, by T. Kingfisher
-----Ursula Vernon does "Beauty and the Beast," heavily inspired by Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter. Contains a lot of thoughts on practical vegetable and herb gardening, plus small clockwork automata, supportive sister relationships, a deeply spooky enchanted mansion, and an appreciation for earnestly terrible poets.
The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher
-----Ursula Vernon does "The Snow Queen," with a lesbian twist. This felt a little unfinished to me -- that is, Gerta and Janna's arc tied up excellently, and the whole plant vision thing played out in a thematically satisfying way, but there were a lot of other threads that felt kind of like... hmm... like more should have happened there if they were going to be in the story at all? That is, they didn't feel like casual asides of worldbuilding for the pure joy of it, but like things that ought to have been addressed by somebody at some point, or even just mentioned as something somebody would go look into later on. But maybe that's just me. Or maybe it's just that I was never quite sure what the average magic level of this world was meant to be, so I was never quite sure how to calibrate my expectations. Eh.
(I quibble because I liked the story a lot, FYI. If I didn't like the bones of the thing, there would be no point thinking about rough bits around the edges.)
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
The Siren Depths, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Stories of the Raksura, vol. I, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Stories of the Raksura, vol. II, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Digger, by Ursula Vernon
-----I started reading this comic some years back but got distracted by life (as one does) and never got past chapter one. It occurred to me recently that this was a shame, so I went back and started over and did not regret that choice in the slightest. :DDD
In summary, Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, a determinedly practical young wombat engineer, tunnels through a patch of bad earth and some unexpected magic, and finds herself in an extremely strange country with no obvious way home. The colorful cast includes a statue of the god Ganesh, a shadow creature that may or may not be a baby demon, various members of a local hyena tribe (most notably an outcast, a hunt leader, and an elder), a helpful librarian, vampire squash, an oracular slug, various members of a sect of ecumenical enforcers known as the Veiled Ones (most notably the captain and a young acolyte with a trouble past), the local hag (part doctor, part witch), a shrew who works as a professional bridge troll, and the sinister forces surrounding a buried god who may or may not be entirely dead.
This worldbuilding in this story is made of batshit purely-for-joy excess, which is why I don't mind the various loose ends one bit. Also, I note that someone has nominated this for Yuletide (character set = Digger, Boneclaw Mother, Ed, and Shadowchild), and I think I will make it one of my offered fandoms. :D
(Tangentially, I now know why Vernon picked "kingfisher" as part of her "not for kids" pen name, which I had previously found inexplicable.)
---------------
Particularly attentive readers may note that I did not finish the next two books in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. This is not because I disliked them! On the contrary, I got about halfway through book two and found it just as good as book one... and also just as bleak, which apparently was not something I had the emotional spoons to handle at the time. So I put the series aside and read other things instead. I will return to them someday when I'm in the mood for something in the "thousands of years of continual slow-motion apocalypse with attendant dystopia" vein. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Hexarchate Stories, by Yoon Ha Lee
-----What it says on the tin! I'd actually read all the tiny!fic before on Lee's Dreamwidth, and two of the full-length stories which are available for free online, but the final two were new to me and definitely worth the price of admission. :DDD
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold
-----The latest Penric & Desdemona installment, in which Penric gets captured by pirates on his way home from a document recovery job, and finds himself unexpectedly in charge of two orphan girls who have been similarly captured.
Bryony and Roses, by T. Kingfisher
-----Ursula Vernon does "Beauty and the Beast," heavily inspired by Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter. Contains a lot of thoughts on practical vegetable and herb gardening, plus small clockwork automata, supportive sister relationships, a deeply spooky enchanted mansion, and an appreciation for earnestly terrible poets.
The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher
-----Ursula Vernon does "The Snow Queen," with a lesbian twist. This felt a little unfinished to me -- that is, Gerta and Janna's arc tied up excellently, and the whole plant vision thing played out in a thematically satisfying way, but there were a lot of other threads that felt kind of like... hmm... like more should have happened there if they were going to be in the story at all? That is, they didn't feel like casual asides of worldbuilding for the pure joy of it, but like things that ought to have been addressed by somebody at some point, or even just mentioned as something somebody would go look into later on. But maybe that's just me. Or maybe it's just that I was never quite sure what the average magic level of this world was meant to be, so I was never quite sure how to calibrate my expectations. Eh.
(I quibble because I liked the story a lot, FYI. If I didn't like the bones of the thing, there would be no point thinking about rough bits around the edges.)
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
The Siren Depths, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Stories of the Raksura, vol. I, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Stories of the Raksura, vol. II, by Martha Wells
-----A reread, because reasons.
Digger, by Ursula Vernon
-----I started reading this comic some years back but got distracted by life (as one does) and never got past chapter one. It occurred to me recently that this was a shame, so I went back and started over and did not regret that choice in the slightest. :DDD
In summary, Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, a determinedly practical young wombat engineer, tunnels through a patch of bad earth and some unexpected magic, and finds herself in an extremely strange country with no obvious way home. The colorful cast includes a statue of the god Ganesh, a shadow creature that may or may not be a baby demon, various members of a local hyena tribe (most notably an outcast, a hunt leader, and an elder), a helpful librarian, vampire squash, an oracular slug, various members of a sect of ecumenical enforcers known as the Veiled Ones (most notably the captain and a young acolyte with a trouble past), the local hag (part doctor, part witch), a shrew who works as a professional bridge troll, and the sinister forces surrounding a buried god who may or may not be entirely dead.
This worldbuilding in this story is made of batshit purely-for-joy excess, which is why I don't mind the various loose ends one bit. Also, I note that someone has nominated this for Yuletide (character set = Digger, Boneclaw Mother, Ed, and Shadowchild), and I think I will make it one of my offered fandoms. :D
(Tangentially, I now know why Vernon picked "kingfisher" as part of her "not for kids" pen name, which I had previously found inexplicable.)
---------------
Particularly attentive readers may note that I did not finish the next two books in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. This is not because I disliked them! On the contrary, I got about halfway through book two and found it just as good as book one... and also just as bleak, which apparently was not something I had the emotional spoons to handle at the time. So I put the series aside and read other things instead. I will return to them someday when I'm in the mood for something in the "thousands of years of continual slow-motion apocalypse with attendant dystopia" vein. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)