Reading roundup and book meme
12. Francesca Lia Block, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys -- Eh. I was frankly pretty disappointed. This is the third Weetzie Bat book, and I find that they're on a downward trend as far as my liking of them is concerned. I thought Weetzie Bat was really neat, narratively, a true modern fairy tale, charming and weird and fresh. Witch Baby was OK -- still close to those weird, charming roots, but with a Message much closer to the surface, and generally a good deal more saccharine. And, to be honest, the whole Angel Juan thing was my least favorite thread in Witch Baby -- too prescriptive, in a book that was overall more prescriptive than I would have liked it to be. But, hey, I wanted to stick it out, so I checked out the sequels.
Cherokee Bat continues down the same prescriptive-feeling line and just adds some weirdness -- but not the charming quirky weirdness of Weetzie Bat -- just, weird weirdness. No new development happens with Witch Baby as far as I could tell -- maybe some regression even. Cherokee is boring. And Raphael and Angel Juan are totally meant for each other feel like they're being masculine archetypes more than any real characters throughout most of the book. (But, seriously, I was actually feeling more chemistry, of the UST kind, between Raphael and Angel Juan than between Raphael and Cherokee and Angel Juan and Witch Baby, fated love and shared dreams nonwithstanding. But possibly it's just that fandom's eaten my brain.) And don't get me started on Coyote, the magical Indian. *sigh*
The hooves, the horns, the haunches (and how do wings relate to goats, pray tell?) -- the symbolism is laid on too thick, and even thicker when Cherokee gets a nosebleed just before she and Raphael unravel the mysteries of sex. Similarly, the sinister settings feel totally over the top. There is still some nice imagery here and there, mostly describing Cherokee, and the letters which intersperse the chapters were pretty cute, but the Indian poems didn't add anything to the book for me beyond reminding me of Coyote, which, *sigh*
So, yeah, I'm reading the following books, and actually enjoying Missing Angel Juan more than this outing, but I had to take a break from Block after this one because it just wasn't doing anything for me.
13. Naomi Nash, You are SO Cursed -- I sometimes get a craving for a feather-light YA book set in high school, preferrably with a supernatural angle thrown in (but ideally not a vampire-related supernatural angle) -- it's like Fiddle Faddle -- I can't stomach more than one indulgence every couple of months, but sometimes that's really what I feel like. Sadly, I haven't been lucky in finding just the right flavour of YA Fiddle Faddle since Sweep. (Shut up!). This was... ok. Better than the last non-fantasy YA book I tried, I think, but not what I wanted at all.
Here's the premise: Vicki Marotti is a (pseudo)-goth girl suffering through high school. To defend herself from bullies and protect her outcast friends, she pretends to be a witch, whereas all she really has at her disposal is street magic, but she hasn't told any of her friends that. Vicki herself is supposed to be a softie who is pretending to be this tough witch just to avoid being hurt. Her first person narration is, I suspect, supposed to be hip and fresh and witty. It is brimming with teen slang, real and fake (I'm pretty sure), heroic similes involving Slushie machines, bad breath jokes, wry references to topics like "subtext" and "irony" that Vicki has studied in English class, and other things that supposedly give it atmosphere, I guess. Only one remark in twenty is actually at all amusing, and I kind of hated Vicki mostly because of that.
The cast of characters is flat in the extreme. There are Vicki's loser friends -- a nerdy girl who likes Hello, Kitty, the fat girl, the nervous girl, the transsexual (to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of the latter. Not that he is done any better than the rest, but just that such a character is at all included.) Her nemesis is the pretty, popular yearbook girl. There is the rich, popular Prince Charming, who should have turned out to be too good to be true. It's all very average, as is the plot, which has two parts to it, loosely connected via a deus ex machina device. The second half of the plot comes out of nowhere, I'm pretty sure.
I sort of even feel silly writng about this book, and wouldn't if not for one thing: Vicki really hates high school. I mean, *really*. And it's a bit hard to say whether her own issues are distorting her perception to this degree, or if it's really meant to be that awful. (And if it is, I kind of wonder if the author really hated her high school too.) That kind of vehemence just puzzles me, because I *loved* high school. OK, I know I was lucky -- I went to public school in a liberal and fairly enlighened city, and I attended the best high school in SF, public or private. It was a geek magnet school and proud of it, with strong music/theater/arts and sports programs, award winning debate and journalism teams, the works. And, honestly, it was more genuinely open-minded that Cal, and managed it with far less pretense.
People didn't get beat up, except, on very rare occasions, by interlopers -- I think it happened once, maybe, in the four years I attended, off school grounds (we had an open campus). The main complaint you were most likely to have about a fellow student is that he was an arrogant jerk convinced of his own superior intelligence or a teacher's pet (and even so, none were so bad as those I encountered later at Berkeley -- even those who had much more reason to be). We had at least one transsexual student in my year, who attended prom and took her senior portrait in a tux, and our cutest couple (either winner or runner up, can't recall which) was a gay couple (on one half of which I had a bit of a crush -- he was in my AP Language class and we mutually admired each other's writing). So, yeah, I know that kind of thing is rare, probably, and even friends of mine who attended other schools in SF, and elsewhere in California, didn't necessarily enjoy it *quite* as much as I did, but it's just weird for me to encounter that kind of visceral hatred for high school...
Anyway, there's a sequel to this book, apparently, I Am So Jinxed, which is supposed to be even less inspiring. OK...
14. Michelle Sagara, Cast in Shadow -- this is the first book I'd missed without realizing when I picked up Cast in Courtlight. I liked it better than the sequel, actually, although it displays many of the same characteristics that annoyed me in Courtlight. For one thing, this business of not filling the reader in on important details from the past was apparently not an artifact of Courtlight being a sequel but a stylistic choie, because Shadow does the same thing. There is Dark Past between Kaylin, the female protagonist, and Severn (this is a Luna (Harlequin fantasy branch) book, so you can deduce his role, although there's very little romance in this book *or* the sequel), and she (the POV character) keeps dwelling on it at angsty length, but it's not actually elucidated until the middle of the book -- which feels like a total cheat, since all of Kaylin's other, often inane, thoughts are open to us in messy detail. It could still work, if one got the impression that Kaylin just couldn't bear to think about this Dark Past -- but it certainly didn't seem like that to me, so it felt like just a ploy to keep reader suspence. Which is cheating.
Speaking of messy internal monologues -- this book is also written in a kind of jerky stream-of-consciousness which might even be realistic, with loose connections causing Kaylin's mind to leap between present and past, along the lines of (I'm making this up, but only slightly exaggerating): "She stood in the courtyard next to a pillar. The same kind of pillar she had stood next to seven years ago when she had seen white wings blotting out the sky. She had wanted to join them then. Now? Those same decisions had brought her to this courtyard, which had started to fill with the attacking enemies." Right, so, possibly more realistic than tighter mental direction, but the result is that Kaylin comes off as a ditz. And not a *lovable* ditz, either -- this is a person who, as a "Ground Hawk" is the fantasy equivalent of a beat cop / detective -- and she just doesn't make a very competent impression. (I think the internal monologue jerkiness was smoothed out a bit in the second book, or at least I hadn't noticed it as a problem, though, possibly there were bigger problems distracting from it.) Actually, one of the side-effects of the chopped, jerky, sentence-fragmenty narration is that the prose is messy, just hard to follow -- I had to stop and try to puzzle out speakers and antecedents, and when the average sentence is, like, five words long, that's just not right.
So, you can probably tell I didn't like Kaylin any better in this book. There was one element of her character I liked here that is fairly central in Shadow but was mostly (or even totally) absent from Courtlight, because it surprised me -- Kaylin's love of the winged Aerians (who have huge feathery wings, like angels) and desire for flight. I think I remarked in the Courtlight write-up that the Aerians and the Leontines (guess what those look like) weren't dwelt on as much as the other races -- but that's because they get their share in the first book. There are actually some nice worldbuilding details there -- nothing earthshattering, but it's neat that the logistics of sitting in chairs when you have huge wings are given some thought to (offering an Aerian a lavish high-backed chair is a subtle insult), and that male Leontines have multiple pride-wives who seem to wear the pants in the family, so to speak. There's also a nice bit about the Elf-like Barrani, where Kaylin reflects that she is always surprised that they bleed red -- they are immortal and so exalted-looking compared to the mortal races that she thinks they ought to bleed gold. We also meet another mortal race that was only mentioned in passing (if that) in the second book -- the telepathic Tha'alani, who teach Kaylin A Very Special Lesson about tolerance. And there are also Dragons.
One in particular. I finally found a character in this series that I actually like and want to read more about -- and one who is more than a bit player. Tiamaris, the Dragon Hawk, who is both a Dragon Lord Mage slumming and apparently also somebody who really cares about the work the cops/Hawks do. I had been hoping to see some more development of Nightshade, the outcaste Barrani lord, but he is just an enigmatic crime lord, not much more, in this outing, which was a disappointment. I did acquire a fondness for Lord Grammayre, the Aerian chief of police Hawklord who helped raise Kaylin. And then there was Severn, the male lead, whom I started liking better at first (having been underwhelmed by him in the sequel), but then it got too much -- he is *too* dependable,*too* brave, *too* slef-sacrificing, *too* in love with Kaylin. A character like Carey's Joscelin can pull that off because he's got Issues of his own, but Severn doesn't seem to have actual issues -- just a tragic-tough childhood, a Dark Past, and martyrdom coming out of his ears. Which got old.
So, the plot. Well, there was plot. It didn't feel like a mystery exactly, even though it followed conventions, on the surface, of reopening a cold case with mysterious ties to the protagonist's past. But very quickly it got to be *about* the protagonist's past, not about an actual mystery, and that weakened the story, I think, by leeching over into another genre. There were a lot of things I don't think were adequately explained, so I didn't buy them -- the felt just like convenient assumptions/axioms, not organic -- like the ages of the sacrifices. Actually, the whole "save the children!" thing felt too put on -- it would've made for a stronger thread, I think, if it wasn't *all* about the children, 'cos that just got repetitive. The one thing that I think may have actually been foreshadowed well -- the identity of the villain -- I was spoiled for, so didn't really get to experience. But apparently the ending is not as closed-ended as the second book had led me to believe, which is curious.
Radom/minor things: there's an extended healing scene in the book which I thought was actually pretty well done, as far as these things go. The denizens of Elantra use magic mirrors as telephones, surveilance cameras, and computers -- which is a bit of a cheat but a) convenient, and b) I kind of like the fact that it's mirrors -- a logical extension of the Snow White story, I think :)
In summary -- I liked this book better than the sequel, and don't think that if I'd read them with the order reversed that would change. Instead of being indifferent, am now vaguely looking forward to the next in the series, Cast in Secret (August 2007), and I sure hope it has more Tiamaris in it.
OK, that got a bit long. And now for a book meme, gacked from lodessa and adelynne:
Paperback, hardback or Trade paperback?
Depends. I prefer paperbacks in general -- they feel cozier. But if it's a book I'm going to reread, hardbacks work better, since they're less fragile. And I like trade paperbacks too, as a kind of intermediate category -- they are smooth and shiny.
Amazon or brick and mortar?
Brick and mortar. I'm terrible at buying books sight unseen -- I'm a sensory shopper, in that I actually have to touch, pet, smell the things I'm buying -- and I especially hate buying books without *physically* browsing. So I don't use Amazon except for new things that I can't wait to get to the bookstore to buy (mostly, HP), or gifts, or stuff I can't find in a brick-and-mortar store. STill feels kind of like cheating.
Barnes & Noble or Borders?
I like the selection at B&N better, but the only thing nearby is a Borders, so, that.
Bookmark or dog-ear?
Neither. Just close the book, then open it at about the right thickness and leaf through it until I find my place. Sure, I end up skimming things I've already read and peeking ahead this way, but I rather like that side-effect. Very occasionally, I'll use a piece of paper already inserted in the book -- like the store or library receipt -- for a bookmark.
Favourite place to read?
It used to be on the bed in my room, back when I had a room of my own. These days, it's on the train or in the bathroom. Because the rodents can't get at me there.
Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
Sort by subject (fantasy, sci-fi, poetry, classics, reference, occult in my office -- the mysteries/thrillers and Russian books are shelved in the livingroom, where they are being encroached upon by the children's books), then roughly in order of favour / arranged for aesthetic pleasantness if there are no strong favourites. Or, rather, it starts out this way, and then the books get pulled out by me and bumped by the rodents and end up being piled haphazardly on top of each other until I need them. I don't have enough books that alphabetizing them by author/title would make any kind of sense.
Keep, throw away, or sell?
Keep. I'm very picky about books I buy -- I typically don't buy a book unless I know I'm going to want to keep it, which is to say, read it more than once or at least browse it after the fact. But also, I'm just a packrat. I wouldn't just get rid of the books I had to read for school either, even when I didn't enjoy them that much in the first place. I very much doubt that I will ever read The Lusiads again, or that it will come in handy in any fashion, but it would feel wrong to sell it somehow.
Keep dust jacket or toss it?
Keep it. Why would you throw it away?
Read with dust jacket or remove it?
Depends. If I'm stashing it in my backpack, where a dust jacket is more likely to get damaged than the underlying hardcover, or if the book is meant as a present for someone and I'm stealth-reading it before I hand it over to them, I'd take the dust jacket off to preserve it better.
Short story or novel?
Novel. I definitely like a well-crafted short story, but they don't give me the same sense of satisfaction that a nice, plump novel does.
Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Harry Potter. I've peeked in on Lemony Snicket (not least because the author is an alum of my high school), and it's someting I may give a shot when I'm really bored / in the mood, but it's not really my thing.
Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
Chapter breaks, unless it's the kind of tired when I fall asleep with the book in hand.
"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"?
Once upon a time.
Buy or borrow?
Borrow. I'm usually "try before you buy" with books, as mentioned above, and the library is my friend.
New or used?
Like lodessa and adelynne, I prefer used books for most everything. I typically only buy new if it's a new book that I can't wait to read (usually, influenced by whether people around me will be talking about it) -- HP gets bought new, as will A Dance with Dragons. Things like Discworld and The Dresden Files wait their turn at the library.
Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse?
Browse, followed by recommendations. I'm likely to check out a book at the library because of a rec or a review, but extremely unlikely to buy something without leafing through it first.
Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Tidy ending, as long as it's not too tidy or convenient. I like closure, even if it's just the temporary closure of a book in the middle of a series.
Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
Nighttime by preference, but morning and afternoon by logistics, since that's when my train rides -- and thus the bulk of my reading time -- are.
Stand-alone or series?
All things being equal, series. I get invested in the world and the characters and want to know more, and series books let me.
Favorite series?
I don't think LotR really counts, being a single book, but here it is anyway.
Harry Potter -- it's not of the same caliber or depth as a number of other things on this list, but it's an undeniably fun series.
Discworld (and, specifically the sub-series of the Watch books), by Terry Pratchett
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin
The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher -- because they're fun, if not exactly Great Art
Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny -- which I find hard to think of as a series, actually, since I read all 10 books in one gulp. When I say they're a favorite, I only mean te first five books.
LeGuin's Earthsea series, on average
Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet, especially, but the Tortall books in general
Asimov's Robots series, specifically, Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, etc.
Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware mysteries.
Favorite children's book?
I have no clue... I remember loving The Hobbit as a kid, and Russian books like Respublica SHKID (how can Wikipedia not have an entry for Respublica SHKID??), Konduit i Shvambraniya, Doroga Uhodit V Dalj (Alexandra Brushtein) -- but are any of these really children's books? Oh, and Volkov's Izumrudnyj Gorod books.
Favorite YA book?
Again, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a YA book. What the heck, I'll go with adelynne's answer of Tithe (by blackholly) since I did quite enjoy it.
Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
I don't know that I've read anything really esoteric. It seems like not many people have heard of the Russian children's books above, but that would be cheating, I guess...
Favorite books read last year?
Storm of Swords, by a large margin
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis (yes, I've only just now read it)
Proven Guilty (Dresden Files, Jim Butcher -- which surprised me a bit)
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (even though I liked it less than American Gods)
Victor Pelevin, Generation P
PTerry, Thud! (though, again, I liked it less than the previous new book, Going Postal)
Favorite books of all time?
Does LotR not count here if I counted it as a series?
Master and Margaret by Mikhail Bulgakov
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Because it's Wilde.
Least favorite book you finished last year?
Let's see -- I'll ignore the "trash" reading -- a silly YA high school romance novel that was basically a chance for my brain to discharge, and the damskie detektivy I read at my mother's because I had nothing better to do. The contenders are:
Sanctuary by Mercedes Lackey -- which dragged on and on
Family Trade by Charles Stross -- which annoyed me with everything from its protagonist to its cover blurb
Predator by Pat Cornwell
This is not to say that I have the same expectations of these books -- the expectations I had (evaluating against previous work for Lackey and Cornwell, open mind for Stross) are taken into account. All three books were a chore to get through, something I couldn't say for any of the other books I'd read, even those that annoyed me -- and didn't deliver much of a payoff in return. Of the three, Predator is my least favorite by a pretty large margin.
What are you reading right now?
Dzur (a Vlad Taltos book) by skzbrust, Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block, and Kushiel's Scion by Jackqueline Carey, but I have a feeling that I'll run out of renewals before I run out of book. Oh, and also I started Eragon. It's... even worse than I was led to expect, so far. I'm not sure how far into it I will be able to get, actually, so I'm not sure that having opened it, read the first page, and then looked at it in despair several times qualifies as "reading".
What are you reading next?
Well, presumably I'm finishing those four. Oh, and Baby Be-Bop, since that's the next book after Missing Angel Juan.
Favorite book to recommend to an eleven-year-old?
I don't know... At that point, I loved Monday Starts on Saturday and Master and Margaret, but I was kind of a weird kid. Oh, and The Hobbit, and Diana Wynne Jones Chrestomanci series, for the non-russophones.
Favorite book to reread?
Monday Starts on Saturday, from above (in Russian).
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
These are books I can actually sit down and re-read start to finish, whereas with others I prefer to dip in and out, browsing and skimming.
Do you ever smell books?
I do! Especially library books, or used books that look like they have an interesting history. I have this tiny little second-hand book of Wilde's plays that smells of candlewax. And love sniffing it.
Do you ever read Primary source documents?
Well, not for fun.
Cherokee Bat continues down the same prescriptive-feeling line and just adds some weirdness -- but not the charming quirky weirdness of Weetzie Bat -- just, weird weirdness. No new development happens with Witch Baby as far as I could tell -- maybe some regression even. Cherokee is boring. And Raphael and Angel Juan are totally meant for each other feel like they're being masculine archetypes more than any real characters throughout most of the book. (But, seriously, I was actually feeling more chemistry, of the UST kind, between Raphael and Angel Juan than between Raphael and Cherokee and Angel Juan and Witch Baby, fated love and shared dreams nonwithstanding. But possibly it's just that fandom's eaten my brain.) And don't get me started on Coyote, the magical Indian. *sigh*
The hooves, the horns, the haunches (and how do wings relate to goats, pray tell?) -- the symbolism is laid on too thick, and even thicker when Cherokee gets a nosebleed just before she and Raphael unravel the mysteries of sex. Similarly, the sinister settings feel totally over the top. There is still some nice imagery here and there, mostly describing Cherokee, and the letters which intersperse the chapters were pretty cute, but the Indian poems didn't add anything to the book for me beyond reminding me of Coyote, which, *sigh*
So, yeah, I'm reading the following books, and actually enjoying Missing Angel Juan more than this outing, but I had to take a break from Block after this one because it just wasn't doing anything for me.
13. Naomi Nash, You are SO Cursed -- I sometimes get a craving for a feather-light YA book set in high school, preferrably with a supernatural angle thrown in (but ideally not a vampire-related supernatural angle) -- it's like Fiddle Faddle -- I can't stomach more than one indulgence every couple of months, but sometimes that's really what I feel like. Sadly, I haven't been lucky in finding just the right flavour of YA Fiddle Faddle since Sweep. (Shut up!). This was... ok. Better than the last non-fantasy YA book I tried, I think, but not what I wanted at all.
Here's the premise: Vicki Marotti is a (pseudo)-goth girl suffering through high school. To defend herself from bullies and protect her outcast friends, she pretends to be a witch, whereas all she really has at her disposal is street magic, but she hasn't told any of her friends that. Vicki herself is supposed to be a softie who is pretending to be this tough witch just to avoid being hurt. Her first person narration is, I suspect, supposed to be hip and fresh and witty. It is brimming with teen slang, real and fake (I'm pretty sure), heroic similes involving Slushie machines, bad breath jokes, wry references to topics like "subtext" and "irony" that Vicki has studied in English class, and other things that supposedly give it atmosphere, I guess. Only one remark in twenty is actually at all amusing, and I kind of hated Vicki mostly because of that.
The cast of characters is flat in the extreme. There are Vicki's loser friends -- a nerdy girl who likes Hello, Kitty, the fat girl, the nervous girl, the transsexual (to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of the latter. Not that he is done any better than the rest, but just that such a character is at all included.) Her nemesis is the pretty, popular yearbook girl. There is the rich, popular Prince Charming, who should have turned out to be too good to be true. It's all very average, as is the plot, which has two parts to it, loosely connected via a deus ex machina device. The second half of the plot comes out of nowhere, I'm pretty sure.
I sort of even feel silly writng about this book, and wouldn't if not for one thing: Vicki really hates high school. I mean, *really*. And it's a bit hard to say whether her own issues are distorting her perception to this degree, or if it's really meant to be that awful. (And if it is, I kind of wonder if the author really hated her high school too.) That kind of vehemence just puzzles me, because I *loved* high school. OK, I know I was lucky -- I went to public school in a liberal and fairly enlighened city, and I attended the best high school in SF, public or private. It was a geek magnet school and proud of it, with strong music/theater/arts and sports programs, award winning debate and journalism teams, the works. And, honestly, it was more genuinely open-minded that Cal, and managed it with far less pretense.
People didn't get beat up, except, on very rare occasions, by interlopers -- I think it happened once, maybe, in the four years I attended, off school grounds (we had an open campus). The main complaint you were most likely to have about a fellow student is that he was an arrogant jerk convinced of his own superior intelligence or a teacher's pet (and even so, none were so bad as those I encountered later at Berkeley -- even those who had much more reason to be). We had at least one transsexual student in my year, who attended prom and took her senior portrait in a tux, and our cutest couple (either winner or runner up, can't recall which) was a gay couple (on one half of which I had a bit of a crush -- he was in my AP Language class and we mutually admired each other's writing). So, yeah, I know that kind of thing is rare, probably, and even friends of mine who attended other schools in SF, and elsewhere in California, didn't necessarily enjoy it *quite* as much as I did, but it's just weird for me to encounter that kind of visceral hatred for high school...
Anyway, there's a sequel to this book, apparently, I Am So Jinxed, which is supposed to be even less inspiring. OK...
14. Michelle Sagara, Cast in Shadow -- this is the first book I'd missed without realizing when I picked up Cast in Courtlight. I liked it better than the sequel, actually, although it displays many of the same characteristics that annoyed me in Courtlight. For one thing, this business of not filling the reader in on important details from the past was apparently not an artifact of Courtlight being a sequel but a stylistic choie, because Shadow does the same thing. There is Dark Past between Kaylin, the female protagonist, and Severn (this is a Luna (Harlequin fantasy branch) book, so you can deduce his role, although there's very little romance in this book *or* the sequel), and she (the POV character) keeps dwelling on it at angsty length, but it's not actually elucidated until the middle of the book -- which feels like a total cheat, since all of Kaylin's other, often inane, thoughts are open to us in messy detail. It could still work, if one got the impression that Kaylin just couldn't bear to think about this Dark Past -- but it certainly didn't seem like that to me, so it felt like just a ploy to keep reader suspence. Which is cheating.
Speaking of messy internal monologues -- this book is also written in a kind of jerky stream-of-consciousness which might even be realistic, with loose connections causing Kaylin's mind to leap between present and past, along the lines of (I'm making this up, but only slightly exaggerating): "She stood in the courtyard next to a pillar. The same kind of pillar she had stood next to seven years ago when she had seen white wings blotting out the sky. She had wanted to join them then. Now? Those same decisions had brought her to this courtyard, which had started to fill with the attacking enemies." Right, so, possibly more realistic than tighter mental direction, but the result is that Kaylin comes off as a ditz. And not a *lovable* ditz, either -- this is a person who, as a "Ground Hawk" is the fantasy equivalent of a beat cop / detective -- and she just doesn't make a very competent impression. (I think the internal monologue jerkiness was smoothed out a bit in the second book, or at least I hadn't noticed it as a problem, though, possibly there were bigger problems distracting from it.) Actually, one of the side-effects of the chopped, jerky, sentence-fragmenty narration is that the prose is messy, just hard to follow -- I had to stop and try to puzzle out speakers and antecedents, and when the average sentence is, like, five words long, that's just not right.
So, you can probably tell I didn't like Kaylin any better in this book. There was one element of her character I liked here that is fairly central in Shadow but was mostly (or even totally) absent from Courtlight, because it surprised me -- Kaylin's love of the winged Aerians (who have huge feathery wings, like angels) and desire for flight. I think I remarked in the Courtlight write-up that the Aerians and the Leontines (guess what those look like) weren't dwelt on as much as the other races -- but that's because they get their share in the first book. There are actually some nice worldbuilding details there -- nothing earthshattering, but it's neat that the logistics of sitting in chairs when you have huge wings are given some thought to (offering an Aerian a lavish high-backed chair is a subtle insult), and that male Leontines have multiple pride-wives who seem to wear the pants in the family, so to speak. There's also a nice bit about the Elf-like Barrani, where Kaylin reflects that she is always surprised that they bleed red -- they are immortal and so exalted-looking compared to the mortal races that she thinks they ought to bleed gold. We also meet another mortal race that was only mentioned in passing (if that) in the second book -- the telepathic Tha'alani, who teach Kaylin A Very Special Lesson about tolerance. And there are also Dragons.
One in particular. I finally found a character in this series that I actually like and want to read more about -- and one who is more than a bit player. Tiamaris, the Dragon Hawk, who is both a Dragon Lord Mage slumming and apparently also somebody who really cares about the work the cops/Hawks do. I had been hoping to see some more development of Nightshade, the outcaste Barrani lord, but he is just an enigmatic crime lord, not much more, in this outing, which was a disappointment. I did acquire a fondness for Lord Grammayre, the Aerian chief of police Hawklord who helped raise Kaylin. And then there was Severn, the male lead, whom I started liking better at first (having been underwhelmed by him in the sequel), but then it got too much -- he is *too* dependable,*too* brave, *too* slef-sacrificing, *too* in love with Kaylin. A character like Carey's Joscelin can pull that off because he's got Issues of his own, but Severn doesn't seem to have actual issues -- just a tragic-tough childhood, a Dark Past, and martyrdom coming out of his ears. Which got old.
So, the plot. Well, there was plot. It didn't feel like a mystery exactly, even though it followed conventions, on the surface, of reopening a cold case with mysterious ties to the protagonist's past. But very quickly it got to be *about* the protagonist's past, not about an actual mystery, and that weakened the story, I think, by leeching over into another genre. There were a lot of things I don't think were adequately explained, so I didn't buy them -- the felt just like convenient assumptions/axioms, not organic -- like the ages of the sacrifices. Actually, the whole "save the children!" thing felt too put on -- it would've made for a stronger thread, I think, if it wasn't *all* about the children, 'cos that just got repetitive. The one thing that I think may have actually been foreshadowed well -- the identity of the villain -- I was spoiled for, so didn't really get to experience. But apparently the ending is not as closed-ended as the second book had led me to believe, which is curious.
Radom/minor things: there's an extended healing scene in the book which I thought was actually pretty well done, as far as these things go. The denizens of Elantra use magic mirrors as telephones, surveilance cameras, and computers -- which is a bit of a cheat but a) convenient, and b) I kind of like the fact that it's mirrors -- a logical extension of the Snow White story, I think :)
In summary -- I liked this book better than the sequel, and don't think that if I'd read them with the order reversed that would change. Instead of being indifferent, am now vaguely looking forward to the next in the series, Cast in Secret (August 2007), and I sure hope it has more Tiamaris in it.
OK, that got a bit long. And now for a book meme, gacked from lodessa and adelynne:
Paperback, hardback or Trade paperback?
Depends. I prefer paperbacks in general -- they feel cozier. But if it's a book I'm going to reread, hardbacks work better, since they're less fragile. And I like trade paperbacks too, as a kind of intermediate category -- they are smooth and shiny.
Amazon or brick and mortar?
Brick and mortar. I'm terrible at buying books sight unseen -- I'm a sensory shopper, in that I actually have to touch, pet, smell the things I'm buying -- and I especially hate buying books without *physically* browsing. So I don't use Amazon except for new things that I can't wait to get to the bookstore to buy (mostly, HP), or gifts, or stuff I can't find in a brick-and-mortar store. STill feels kind of like cheating.
Barnes & Noble or Borders?
I like the selection at B&N better, but the only thing nearby is a Borders, so, that.
Bookmark or dog-ear?
Neither. Just close the book, then open it at about the right thickness and leaf through it until I find my place. Sure, I end up skimming things I've already read and peeking ahead this way, but I rather like that side-effect. Very occasionally, I'll use a piece of paper already inserted in the book -- like the store or library receipt -- for a bookmark.
Favourite place to read?
It used to be on the bed in my room, back when I had a room of my own. These days, it's on the train or in the bathroom. Because the rodents can't get at me there.
Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
Sort by subject (fantasy, sci-fi, poetry, classics, reference, occult in my office -- the mysteries/thrillers and Russian books are shelved in the livingroom, where they are being encroached upon by the children's books), then roughly in order of favour / arranged for aesthetic pleasantness if there are no strong favourites. Or, rather, it starts out this way, and then the books get pulled out by me and bumped by the rodents and end up being piled haphazardly on top of each other until I need them. I don't have enough books that alphabetizing them by author/title would make any kind of sense.
Keep, throw away, or sell?
Keep. I'm very picky about books I buy -- I typically don't buy a book unless I know I'm going to want to keep it, which is to say, read it more than once or at least browse it after the fact. But also, I'm just a packrat. I wouldn't just get rid of the books I had to read for school either, even when I didn't enjoy them that much in the first place. I very much doubt that I will ever read The Lusiads again, or that it will come in handy in any fashion, but it would feel wrong to sell it somehow.
Keep dust jacket or toss it?
Keep it. Why would you throw it away?
Read with dust jacket or remove it?
Depends. If I'm stashing it in my backpack, where a dust jacket is more likely to get damaged than the underlying hardcover, or if the book is meant as a present for someone and I'm stealth-reading it before I hand it over to them, I'd take the dust jacket off to preserve it better.
Short story or novel?
Novel. I definitely like a well-crafted short story, but they don't give me the same sense of satisfaction that a nice, plump novel does.
Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Harry Potter. I've peeked in on Lemony Snicket (not least because the author is an alum of my high school), and it's someting I may give a shot when I'm really bored / in the mood, but it's not really my thing.
Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
Chapter breaks, unless it's the kind of tired when I fall asleep with the book in hand.
"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"?
Once upon a time.
Buy or borrow?
Borrow. I'm usually "try before you buy" with books, as mentioned above, and the library is my friend.
New or used?
Like lodessa and adelynne, I prefer used books for most everything. I typically only buy new if it's a new book that I can't wait to read (usually, influenced by whether people around me will be talking about it) -- HP gets bought new, as will A Dance with Dragons. Things like Discworld and The Dresden Files wait their turn at the library.
Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse?
Browse, followed by recommendations. I'm likely to check out a book at the library because of a rec or a review, but extremely unlikely to buy something without leafing through it first.
Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Tidy ending, as long as it's not too tidy or convenient. I like closure, even if it's just the temporary closure of a book in the middle of a series.
Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
Nighttime by preference, but morning and afternoon by logistics, since that's when my train rides -- and thus the bulk of my reading time -- are.
Stand-alone or series?
All things being equal, series. I get invested in the world and the characters and want to know more, and series books let me.
Favorite series?
I don't think LotR really counts, being a single book, but here it is anyway.
Harry Potter -- it's not of the same caliber or depth as a number of other things on this list, but it's an undeniably fun series.
Discworld (and, specifically the sub-series of the Watch books), by Terry Pratchett
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin
The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher -- because they're fun, if not exactly Great Art
Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny -- which I find hard to think of as a series, actually, since I read all 10 books in one gulp. When I say they're a favorite, I only mean te first five books.
LeGuin's Earthsea series, on average
Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet, especially, but the Tortall books in general
Asimov's Robots series, specifically, Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, etc.
Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware mysteries.
Favorite children's book?
I have no clue... I remember loving The Hobbit as a kid, and Russian books like Respublica SHKID (how can Wikipedia not have an entry for Respublica SHKID??), Konduit i Shvambraniya, Doroga Uhodit V Dalj (Alexandra Brushtein) -- but are any of these really children's books? Oh, and Volkov's Izumrudnyj Gorod books.
Favorite YA book?
Again, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a YA book. What the heck, I'll go with adelynne's answer of Tithe (by blackholly) since I did quite enjoy it.
Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
I don't know that I've read anything really esoteric. It seems like not many people have heard of the Russian children's books above, but that would be cheating, I guess...
Favorite books read last year?
Storm of Swords, by a large margin
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis (yes, I've only just now read it)
Proven Guilty (Dresden Files, Jim Butcher -- which surprised me a bit)
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (even though I liked it less than American Gods)
Victor Pelevin, Generation P
PTerry, Thud! (though, again, I liked it less than the previous new book, Going Postal)
Favorite books of all time?
Does LotR not count here if I counted it as a series?
Master and Margaret by Mikhail Bulgakov
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Because it's Wilde.
Least favorite book you finished last year?
Let's see -- I'll ignore the "trash" reading -- a silly YA high school romance novel that was basically a chance for my brain to discharge, and the damskie detektivy I read at my mother's because I had nothing better to do. The contenders are:
Sanctuary by Mercedes Lackey -- which dragged on and on
Family Trade by Charles Stross -- which annoyed me with everything from its protagonist to its cover blurb
Predator by Pat Cornwell
This is not to say that I have the same expectations of these books -- the expectations I had (evaluating against previous work for Lackey and Cornwell, open mind for Stross) are taken into account. All three books were a chore to get through, something I couldn't say for any of the other books I'd read, even those that annoyed me -- and didn't deliver much of a payoff in return. Of the three, Predator is my least favorite by a pretty large margin.
What are you reading right now?
Dzur (a Vlad Taltos book) by skzbrust, Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia Block, and Kushiel's Scion by Jackqueline Carey, but I have a feeling that I'll run out of renewals before I run out of book. Oh, and also I started Eragon. It's... even worse than I was led to expect, so far. I'm not sure how far into it I will be able to get, actually, so I'm not sure that having opened it, read the first page, and then looked at it in despair several times qualifies as "reading".
What are you reading next?
Well, presumably I'm finishing those four. Oh, and Baby Be-Bop, since that's the next book after Missing Angel Juan.
Favorite book to recommend to an eleven-year-old?
I don't know... At that point, I loved Monday Starts on Saturday and Master and Margaret, but I was kind of a weird kid. Oh, and The Hobbit, and Diana Wynne Jones Chrestomanci series, for the non-russophones.
Favorite book to reread?
Monday Starts on Saturday, from above (in Russian).
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
These are books I can actually sit down and re-read start to finish, whereas with others I prefer to dip in and out, browsing and skimming.
Do you ever smell books?
I do! Especially library books, or used books that look like they have an interesting history. I have this tiny little second-hand book of Wilde's plays that smells of candlewax. And love sniffing it.
Do you ever read Primary source documents?
Well, not for fun.