Operation "Fifty in Twelve": June Round-Up
Ugh. UGH. It's the last day of July, and I finally can bring myself to do the June round-up for my reading challenge. I blame it on the heat and summer and basically the weather. It's been especially bad this year. Physically, I usually don't have a problem with heat (I don't have any cardiovascular problems, don't get dizzy spells or any other heat related problems) but this year, I feel the lack of sleep due to heat, combined with another serious spell of iron deficiency which means I keep constantly yawning and have difficulties concentrating and am generally grumpy. Also, due to the heat already starting early in the morning and staying until way into the night, I haven't gone on a run in almost two weeks, and it's starting to piss me off. Mostly, because there's not really an end in sight for this shit and I have a bad feeling that I might not get to run at all until the end of August. So, yeah, I'm totally not in a good mood.
But some things just need to get done, anyway, and this is one of them. June surprisingly yielded more books finished than I thought, mostly because I started it off with something really long and at times unwieldy and then was afraid I might run out of things to read (I started out with an entire shelf full of unread or half-finished books. It's still about three-quarters full. Yes, you may now laugh hysterically) but yeah. It was an okay reading month. So, let's have a look.
Winter of Ice and Iron, Rachel Neumeier
Ironically, I started this back at the end of May, when we had a first (less hot) heat wave here and I was annoyed at 23°C in the bedroom (I'm now at 25°C and higher at my parents' and at least 28°C in my own bedroom. I. Hate. Summer.). So what could be better than reading a fantasy that takes place in bitter winter? Exactly. That said, in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced. Neumeier does a good job at descriptions and invoking a suitable fantasy atmosphere but I couldn't really get access to her characters. There were none I could really identify with, and I found her male main character to be pretty much insuffrably conceited and arrogant at too many times (which is guaranteed to turn me off rooting for him). The idea of her basic concept - making rulers through a literal tie between the ruling family and their land - is good and something I haven't yet encountered in fantasy but the implementation often felt... unnecessary complicated, and really, making the names of the Immanent Powers that the rulers are tied to ridiculously long and nearly unpronouncable definitely was taking it too far. It annoyed me so much that I was close to giving up a few times. As for the plot, it's sufficiently exciting, and I did like the end. It's also a stand-alone, meaning you won't have to wait for any more sequels or start collecting the series (as you have so often in fantasy), which was a welcome change.
Rating: * * */* * * * *
The Viscount Who Loved Me, Julia Quinn
Yeeeeees, another Julia Quinn re-read. I just felt in the mood for it, and The Viscount Who Loved Me is guaranteed to cheer me up. I just love its heroine for her feistiness and her pluck and her fierce protectiveness of her younger (step)sister and I love the loving and supportive relationship the heroine has with her stepmother. I'm also a big fan of the hero, for his devotion to his family and the big heart beneath an arrogant surface. This story is one of loyalty between sisters and finding a partner who's your equal and getting over prejudice, and I will probably re-read it another two-thousand times or something because it's just really entertaining and heart-warming and hot. If Shonda Rhimes makes true on her announcement to make the Bridgertons into a Netflix show, this is one of the Bridgerton books you just have to read (you know, in preparation and everything!). It's fun, it's hot, it's just really, really good.
Rating: * * * * */* * * * *
A Reaper at the Gates, Sabaa Tahir
Third part of the Ember in the Ashes saga, and hotly anticipated by me. Reaper takes everything to a new level, pushing the Martial Empire into an all out war and getting the Resistance running. It's a gruesome book, not holding back with the violence and grime of war and guerilla fights. It also has supernatural beings such as effrit and jinn galore, and isn't afraid to mix politics in, too. I still love Helene and suffered most through her parts (because, oh God, Tahir really doesn't spare her any grief) and I'm getting closer to liking Laia, after all. I still can't abide Elias because honestly? As fantasy heroes go, he's a pretty stupid one, and I hate stupid heroes, most of all if their stupidity results in people dying and no one really holding them responsible for it. I'm still annoyed by the romance between Laia und Elias (I just don't see it. It's supposed to be epic and all that, but I honestly find it mostly annoying and boring), and I'd have liked to read a lot more about Helene and her much more complicated, much more interesting romance. I just hope we'll get more of that in the next (and supposedly) last book but I have a really bad feeling about the ending of that book :S
Rating: * * * */* * * * *
The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd
I read The Secret Life of Bees a few years ago and remembered that I loved Monk Kidd's engaged and vivid style of writing her uncompromising stand towards racism and misogyny. Monk Kidd writes story of female solidarity and of women finding their way in a world that makes it really, really hard for them. Mothers and daughters are a big thing for Monk Kidd, as well, so when I came across this one while seeing if she has written anything else lately, I decided to see if I'd like it as much as The Secret Life of Bees. I did! It's actually a biographic novel, chronicling the life of the Grimké sisters, pioneers of the American feminist movement and the anti-slavery movement, parallel to that of a black slave girl living in the Grimké house, Handful. Taking place in the early 19th century in the Deep South, this book is devoid of any misguided romanticising of the South. Monk Kidd stands firmly at the side of the slaves and never leaves it, giving a clear-eyed portray of the antebellum South as a place where slave lives were worth nothing, and a white woman's place was in the house, overseeing those slaves and of three women who all want to leave the confines and cruelties of the South behind. Monk Kidd projects a complicated and complex web of relationships, of injuries and healing, not sparing the white Grimké sisters Handful's rightful fury at white people and her suffering at the hands of them. This makes for a bit of heavy summer reading, but Monk Kidd's engaging style makes it impossible to put the book down, anyway. Absolutely recommend it!
Rating: * * * * */* * * * *
Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage, Gordon Corera
June's lone non-fiction book, and quite honestly, a bit of a disappointment. Cyber warfare is still The Next Big Thing in security studies (or okay, one of them), so I decided to brush up on it a bit and get some of the basics. This sounded like it would provide a really good foundation, and it did start with World War I, so I thought it was a good investment. Sadly, it became clear really, really fast that apparently, Corera is of the impression that cyber warfare (and its forerunners) is a men's world, and basically has no place for women, except as background noise that is "pretty" and "admires" the movers and shakers of signals intelligence and cyber warfare. This guy managed to write and publish a book about computers and signals intelligence in 2017 without even once mentioning Ada Lovelace, Hedi Lamarr or Grace Hopper (or Konrad Zuse, which is kind of amazing since he mentioned so many other men). No word about how Britain would have never cracked the Enigma codes if it hadn't been for all the brilliant women working in Bletchley Park or how the US Navy depended so much on Grace Hopper's skills and experience that they had to re-activate her several times. Women get mentioned by name maybe three times in the entire book, while the rest is populated by scores and scores of men, and Corera doesn't even once seem to pause and wonder "Why the fuck is that, and am I doing this wrong?" It annoyed the hell out of me, and Corera getting basic facts like Markus Wolf not having been "the head of the Stasi" or Konrad Zuse being the inventor if the first programmable computer (instead of Alan Turing or that other British guy he kept mentioning) wrong didn't help at all. I did learn a lot about cyber security but I kept wondering how much I could actually believe when the author isn't even able to keep basic, easy to look up and check facts straight. So... yeah, a disappointment, and my quest to find some actually helpful books on the matter continues. Maybe I should read Hayden, after all...
Rating: * * /* * * * *
Book count as of June: 31/50
So, how are you? Beating the heat? Hating it? Reading anything? Tell me!
But some things just need to get done, anyway, and this is one of them. June surprisingly yielded more books finished than I thought, mostly because I started it off with something really long and at times unwieldy and then was afraid I might run out of things to read (I started out with an entire shelf full of unread or half-finished books. It's still about three-quarters full. Yes, you may now laugh hysterically) but yeah. It was an okay reading month. So, let's have a look.
Winter of Ice and Iron, Rachel Neumeier
Ironically, I started this back at the end of May, when we had a first (less hot) heat wave here and I was annoyed at 23°C in the bedroom (I'm now at 25°C and higher at my parents' and at least 28°C in my own bedroom. I. Hate. Summer.). So what could be better than reading a fantasy that takes place in bitter winter? Exactly. That said, in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced. Neumeier does a good job at descriptions and invoking a suitable fantasy atmosphere but I couldn't really get access to her characters. There were none I could really identify with, and I found her male main character to be pretty much insuffrably conceited and arrogant at too many times (which is guaranteed to turn me off rooting for him). The idea of her basic concept - making rulers through a literal tie between the ruling family and their land - is good and something I haven't yet encountered in fantasy but the implementation often felt... unnecessary complicated, and really, making the names of the Immanent Powers that the rulers are tied to ridiculously long and nearly unpronouncable definitely was taking it too far. It annoyed me so much that I was close to giving up a few times. As for the plot, it's sufficiently exciting, and I did like the end. It's also a stand-alone, meaning you won't have to wait for any more sequels or start collecting the series (as you have so often in fantasy), which was a welcome change.
Rating: * * */* * * * *
The Viscount Who Loved Me, Julia Quinn
Yeeeeees, another Julia Quinn re-read. I just felt in the mood for it, and The Viscount Who Loved Me is guaranteed to cheer me up. I just love its heroine for her feistiness and her pluck and her fierce protectiveness of her younger (step)sister and I love the loving and supportive relationship the heroine has with her stepmother. I'm also a big fan of the hero, for his devotion to his family and the big heart beneath an arrogant surface. This story is one of loyalty between sisters and finding a partner who's your equal and getting over prejudice, and I will probably re-read it another two-thousand times or something because it's just really entertaining and heart-warming and hot. If Shonda Rhimes makes true on her announcement to make the Bridgertons into a Netflix show, this is one of the Bridgerton books you just have to read (you know, in preparation and everything!). It's fun, it's hot, it's just really, really good.
Rating: * * * * */* * * * *
A Reaper at the Gates, Sabaa Tahir
Third part of the Ember in the Ashes saga, and hotly anticipated by me. Reaper takes everything to a new level, pushing the Martial Empire into an all out war and getting the Resistance running. It's a gruesome book, not holding back with the violence and grime of war and guerilla fights. It also has supernatural beings such as effrit and jinn galore, and isn't afraid to mix politics in, too. I still love Helene and suffered most through her parts (because, oh God, Tahir really doesn't spare her any grief) and I'm getting closer to liking Laia, after all. I still can't abide Elias because honestly? As fantasy heroes go, he's a pretty stupid one, and I hate stupid heroes, most of all if their stupidity results in people dying and no one really holding them responsible for it. I'm still annoyed by the romance between Laia und Elias (I just don't see it. It's supposed to be epic and all that, but I honestly find it mostly annoying and boring), and I'd have liked to read a lot more about Helene and her much more complicated, much more interesting romance. I just hope we'll get more of that in the next (and supposedly) last book but I have a really bad feeling about the ending of that book :S
Rating: * * * */* * * * *
The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd
I read The Secret Life of Bees a few years ago and remembered that I loved Monk Kidd's engaged and vivid style of writing her uncompromising stand towards racism and misogyny. Monk Kidd writes story of female solidarity and of women finding their way in a world that makes it really, really hard for them. Mothers and daughters are a big thing for Monk Kidd, as well, so when I came across this one while seeing if she has written anything else lately, I decided to see if I'd like it as much as The Secret Life of Bees. I did! It's actually a biographic novel, chronicling the life of the Grimké sisters, pioneers of the American feminist movement and the anti-slavery movement, parallel to that of a black slave girl living in the Grimké house, Handful. Taking place in the early 19th century in the Deep South, this book is devoid of any misguided romanticising of the South. Monk Kidd stands firmly at the side of the slaves and never leaves it, giving a clear-eyed portray of the antebellum South as a place where slave lives were worth nothing, and a white woman's place was in the house, overseeing those slaves and of three women who all want to leave the confines and cruelties of the South behind. Monk Kidd projects a complicated and complex web of relationships, of injuries and healing, not sparing the white Grimké sisters Handful's rightful fury at white people and her suffering at the hands of them. This makes for a bit of heavy summer reading, but Monk Kidd's engaging style makes it impossible to put the book down, anyway. Absolutely recommend it!
Rating: * * * * */* * * * *
Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage, Gordon Corera
June's lone non-fiction book, and quite honestly, a bit of a disappointment. Cyber warfare is still The Next Big Thing in security studies (or okay, one of them), so I decided to brush up on it a bit and get some of the basics. This sounded like it would provide a really good foundation, and it did start with World War I, so I thought it was a good investment. Sadly, it became clear really, really fast that apparently, Corera is of the impression that cyber warfare (and its forerunners) is a men's world, and basically has no place for women, except as background noise that is "pretty" and "admires" the movers and shakers of signals intelligence and cyber warfare. This guy managed to write and publish a book about computers and signals intelligence in 2017 without even once mentioning Ada Lovelace, Hedi Lamarr or Grace Hopper (or Konrad Zuse, which is kind of amazing since he mentioned so many other men). No word about how Britain would have never cracked the Enigma codes if it hadn't been for all the brilliant women working in Bletchley Park or how the US Navy depended so much on Grace Hopper's skills and experience that they had to re-activate her several times. Women get mentioned by name maybe three times in the entire book, while the rest is populated by scores and scores of men, and Corera doesn't even once seem to pause and wonder "Why the fuck is that, and am I doing this wrong?" It annoyed the hell out of me, and Corera getting basic facts like Markus Wolf not having been "the head of the Stasi" or Konrad Zuse being the inventor if the first programmable computer (instead of Alan Turing or that other British guy he kept mentioning) wrong didn't help at all. I did learn a lot about cyber security but I kept wondering how much I could actually believe when the author isn't even able to keep basic, easy to look up and check facts straight. So... yeah, a disappointment, and my quest to find some actually helpful books on the matter continues. Maybe I should read Hayden, after all...
Rating: * * /* * * * *
Book count as of June: 31/50
So, how are you? Beating the heat? Hating it? Reading anything? Tell me!