Wednesday reading
Actually on Wednesday, who'd have thought it? I just got back yesterday from my visit to New York City, so I still have a lot of comments and emails to reply to. Please bear with me.
Just finished
Ernest Raymond, Tell England. Second half is all about the glory and nobility of fighting at Gallipoli (?!?), while the first half is a classic boarding school tale of romantic friendship. Well worth reading, but I wish there were fic (there isn't), because there are a lot of hints and very little follow-through.
Kameron Hurley, God's War and Infidel. The first two books in a rather good SFF series. Though I had my quibbles with the system of 'magic' in the world, and the plot fell a bit too much into the search-for-person/thing-interspersed-with-action-scenes genre, I found a great deal of the worldbuilding really fascinating. In brief, the series is set on a very polluted planet and focuses on a seemingly endless war between two major nations. Both nations send almost all of their young men off to the front and almost none come home: one has evolved into a patriarchy with extreme polygamy, the other into a matriarchy where men are almost irrelevant to the lives (and loves) of the women on the home front. The series does really interesting things with the gender and general sociocultural consequences of all of this (though fairly binary, there is also a great deal of passing). It never delves as deeply as one might wish but there are all sorts of provocative ideas and, again, I want fic. Including weird AUs where Ralph, Laurie and all the characters from Tell England are at the front, because it does feel like it could be WWI turned up to 11.
Worthwhile posts on the series include:
http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/402024.html
http://marina.dreamwidth.org/tag/books:%20god's%20war
http://fjm.livejournal.com/1125283.html
Currently reading
According to my Kindle I'm 10% of the way through Les Miserables. This in itself feels like an achievement! I did skip the whole of the chapter that tells you about all the obscure things that happened in 1817 (and their very obscurity seems to be the point), but it annoyed me slightly because I felt that if this had been a British novel, I would have got the references.
I've also just started Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law, which already seems wonderfully relevant to any discussion of The Charioteer. At less than 50 pages in we've already had the obligatory references to Plato, The Coral Island, and Lawrence of Arabia. Hope to post a proper review later on, so I'll hold off on further commentary.
Soon to read
All sorts of things...
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/526322.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Just finished
Ernest Raymond, Tell England. Second half is all about the glory and nobility of fighting at Gallipoli (?!?), while the first half is a classic boarding school tale of romantic friendship. Well worth reading, but I wish there were fic (there isn't), because there are a lot of hints and very little follow-through.
Kameron Hurley, God's War and Infidel. The first two books in a rather good SFF series. Though I had my quibbles with the system of 'magic' in the world, and the plot fell a bit too much into the search-for-person/thing-interspersed-with-action-scenes genre, I found a great deal of the worldbuilding really fascinating. In brief, the series is set on a very polluted planet and focuses on a seemingly endless war between two major nations. Both nations send almost all of their young men off to the front and almost none come home: one has evolved into a patriarchy with extreme polygamy, the other into a matriarchy where men are almost irrelevant to the lives (and loves) of the women on the home front. The series does really interesting things with the gender and general sociocultural consequences of all of this (though fairly binary, there is also a great deal of passing). It never delves as deeply as one might wish but there are all sorts of provocative ideas and, again, I want fic. Including weird AUs where Ralph, Laurie and all the characters from Tell England are at the front, because it does feel like it could be WWI turned up to 11.
Worthwhile posts on the series include:
http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/402024.html
http://marina.dreamwidth.org/tag/books:%20god's%20war
http://fjm.livejournal.com/1125283.html
Currently reading
According to my Kindle I'm 10% of the way through Les Miserables. This in itself feels like an achievement! I did skip the whole of the chapter that tells you about all the obscure things that happened in 1817 (and their very obscurity seems to be the point), but it annoyed me slightly because I felt that if this had been a British novel, I would have got the references.
I've also just started Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law, which already seems wonderfully relevant to any discussion of The Charioteer. At less than 50 pages in we've already had the obligatory references to Plato, The Coral Island, and Lawrence of Arabia. Hope to post a proper review later on, so I'll hold off on further commentary.
Soon to read
All sorts of things...
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/526322.html. Please comment there using OpenID.