Reading roundup
39. Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
40. Naomi Novik, Throne of Jade
41. Naomi Novik, Black Powder War -- These books were just the thing I needed to get over my distaste for Tigana, but I actually don't have a whole lot to say about them. I was afraid I wouldn't like them because military fantasy is not necessarily my thing, or the period of the Napoleonic Wars, or the navy background, but none of that turned out to matter. I love the central conceit of dragons as aerial corps in this historical period. I like Laurence. He is the sort of decent, thoughtful, practical man that I would like to be friends with, or work beside. The way one of his first thoughts upon discovering the dragon egg is to return the French captain's sword, the way his concern for his crew, first of the ship and then of Temeraire, and, of course, Temeraire himself, is constantly the driver for his actions, the way he brings Temeraire books and gifts -- he is just a likeable guy and a pleasant POV character. And also the kind of protagonist it was fun to watch getting occasionally embarrassed, by Temeraire, by the informality of the Aerial Corps.
I liked the first book best, the second book least, and the third one in the middle, mostly because I enjoyed the character growth and fish-out-of-water in HMD a lot more than the travelogue and intrigue of the second two books, but at least BPW had Tharkay, and Laurence facing some difficult moral choices, as opposed to mostly just fumbling blind in ToJ. I have to say I'm not overwhelmed with fondness for Temeraire -- for all his intelligence, he is rather juvenile as a character, and I don't find that appealing. I do like the supporting cast generally, especially Maximus and Berkley (especially as a team), and Keynes (the surgeon), and Granby, and, as mentioned earlier, Tharkay and his cynicism and dry wit. I like the difference between the relationship of Laurence and Riley in HMD (Laurence trying to hand over command as visibly as possible and not get in the way even though he has to stay on deck) and in ToJ (the tension between them, over the slaver issue and the discipline of sailors vs aviators and everything else). I like the conundrum Laurence finds himself in with respect to Rankin, and the scene where he pretty much drags him over to the dying Levitas ("Laurence told him very quietly, 'If you can walk, get on your feet; otherwise I will carry you.'"), which, I'll admit, I teared up. I like Laurence having a shot at Bonaparte's back and refusing to take it as a matter of honor but later second guessing the decision after Prussia's war is lost. Oh, and I kind of liked the brave French officer who tries to board Temeraire in the beginning of ToJ and turns out to be the French ambassador's nephew later on -- I hope he shows up again in a later book.
I like the humour of the narration, such as when Jane Roland is gearing up to ask Laurence for his honest opinion of Emily and he thinks she is about to proposition him. And the dragon masturbation jokes amuse my inner 12-year-old boy to no end, as does Riley fleeing from a prospective explanation of the birds and the bees to Temeraire. And Laurence's continued attempts to teach the runners trigonometry, and his perennial embarrassment over Emily's unconcern over gender differences.
I'm not sure I really liked the plot of the second and third books... The war stuff is mildly interesting, but Napoleon is one of my historical crushes, and I find myself rooting for the other side more than for Prussia/Britain. The Lien archenemy thing I find even less interesting, because Lien is boring -- I don't find her a compelling or terribly believable villain at all. And it feels a bit contrived that, powerful as she is, she hasn't defeated absolutely everyone yet. It's explained as her wanting Temeraire to really suffer, and also I guess she has some kind of weird moral code against using divine wind offensively (e.g. against the fleet evacuating at the very end of BPW), but that just seems artificial, I don't know... Also, while I found the description of human/dragon co-existence in China quite interesting (my favorite part of ToJ), and the innovations being implemented by the French to increase human/dragon cooperation even more so, I find Temeraire's quest for dragon rights pretty dull. I mean, I totally sympathize with his goal and everything, I just don't want to read about the obstacles and the arguments for and against.
Random things: I like the epilogues, which are not related tot he action but are "excerpts" from scientific papers of the period, especially the elided mention of Longwings ("Though the breed was first considered intractable, during the reign of Elizaberth I new methods of harnessing were developed which secured the general domestication of the breed"). I like Iskierka's name (I'm assuming it means "little spark" in Polish, which is adorable). But Arkady's name constantly throws me out of the story, because I'm so used to thinking of it as a Russian name.
Oh, and, ETA, since I forgot to mention it earlier: I really liked that the Chinese military aviators were overwhelmingly women, and the Mulan story allusion that was behind that.
I've got a hold out on Empire of Ivory (book #4) at the library, so I will be reading that next.
42. Jane Yolen, Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (short stories) -- I have a feeling I've read most of the stories in this book (possibly even all of them), but I'm pretty sure I haven't read this actual book, and I only vaguely recalled the majority of them. But I still generally enjoyed it.
"Tough Alice" -- Alice learns to fight her own battles, in Wonderland and in the real world. One of my least favorite stories in the collection, actually -- kind of trite. Although some of the wordplay is fun.
"Mama Gone" -- mother vampire in Appalachia. This is my favorite story, and though I've read it at least three times now, it never fails to make me tear up for pretty much the entirety of it. I love the narrator's voice, and the general flavor of the setting, and it just gets me every time.
"Harlyn's Fairy" -- fantasy-loving girl living with her aunt discovers fairies in the garden. Also not a favorite, although I like the allusions to Tolkien and Harlyn's offhand mental references to her crazy mother. And that the aunt may be against escapism and thinks Harlyn is making up stuff, but they are both still on the same side.
"Phoenix Farm" -- girl whose father walked out on the family hatches a phoenix egg. I don't think I've read this one before, and I really liked it. The symbolism is pretty heavy, but the young narrator's voice is fresh and touching, and I love this line, about some cynical graffiti: "The grammar bothered me more than what it said." (That's just such a neat character detail!)
"Sea Dragon of Fife" -- boy catches and kills sea dragon that killed his two older brothers. I'm not terribly impressed by the story, but the narration is pretty fun, especially the running joke about the McLeods being extremely taciturn.
"Wilding" -- girl transformed into an animal for fun escapes murderer in Central Park. This is one of the stories that did make an impression on an earlier reading, so I guess I liked it. On a re-read, I liked the futuristic slang, and also the "Max" reference.
"The Baby-Sitter" -- a sort-of horror story where some kind of haunting presence in a house gobbles up an intruder. It's a fun story, but I have a bit of an issue with the genre...
"Bolundeers" -- father's ghost drives off menacing "bolundeers" from the compost pile. This is another story I remembered pretty well from a prior read, but I hadn't liked it much originally, and this time I liked it a lot more. Possibly it has to do with being a parent now, and having a better understanding for what kind of stress the father's death would have on the mother, the teen girl, and the little brother. This time, it packed much more of an emotional punch, especially the part about Brancy juggling day-to-day stuff like homework and compost with dealing with the loss.
"The Bridge's Complaint" -- a retelling of Three Billigoats Gruff from the bridge's POV, which happens to be sympathetic to the troll. I don't think I've read this one before. The narration was... clever, I guess, but I didn't much care for the story.
"Brandon and the Aliens" -- gross pet-eating animals invade a town, kid decides to battle them. Cute story, but not much of a lasting impression.
"Winter's King" -- a very lyrical short tale about a boy born "dead" in the middle of a winter storm. I read this in After the King and liked it there, and I still like it, though a reread doesn't seem to add anything much to it. I do like the motif of "a minor third".
"Lost Girls" -- modern girl and daughter of a divorced nutritionist and a lawyer ends up in Neverland and unionizes the Wendies. Nice satirical story, with a suitably creepy Peter and Wendy. I could've sworn I've read this before, even though it seems to be one of the stories written specifically for this collection...
43. Elizabeth Bear, Dust -- I liked it. Not sure if I liked it the same, more or less than Undertow, but I liked it. But... I feel like I liked it for the wrong reasons... I didn't care about Rien. I didn't care about Perceval, or about their unusual love or great and noble sacrifice. The characters I liked the most, the ones I was rooting for to survive were Gavin the basilisk, Hero Ng, and Dust himself. A laser-cutting torch animated with the soul fragment of a dead woman, the fragment memory of a dead man preserved in a peach, and a splinter of an AI. Oh, an Pinion -- a nanite colony. Possibly there's something wrong with me, to be mourning Dust and Pinion more than Rien at the end. But maybe it's just that Bear's writing about the, well, not inanimate, and not inhuman (because the Exalt are not exactly human either -- nobody in this book really is), but the less human entities is so vivid. I even felt for the suit of power armor that Rien never got to name. Oh, and Inkling. The... near-personhood of all these entities was great. But I feel like I'm missing out on the more human part of the story.
The Conn family (which I figured came from Com before it was more clearly implied) seems like a sort of Amber in space (there's even a brother/father named Benedick)... but unlike the real Amberites, the Conn siblings are mostly not terribly interesting and not very sympathetic. I feel like I could like Tristen if there was actually more time spent on him, but the rest were pretty uncompelling. Of course, they're not meant to be the focus -- Perceval and Rien are -- but still.
Oh, and I guessed that Gavin was "Cynric Conn" as soon as Cat told Rien the story. The race through Inkling's radioactive shortcut was quite terrible. Well written, of course, but terrible. I never want to read through that again, because, *brrr*. Radiation sickness is a particular bugbear of mine. Oh, and the casually implied sort-of cannibalism of Samael using the frozen bodies ("Samael has had to use some for raw material. For their water and carbon and amino acids.") is also pretty horrific.
I noticed the writing less than I did in Undertow, especially in the first portion of the book. I did catch that Mallory never gets referred to by pronoun (it was mostly natural, there were just one or two spots where I noticed that it had been elided. I appreciate that, because the sie/hir stuff (which gets applied to Head here) I do find kind of grating. I liked the description of Perceval fighting her own senses and chemically-generated emotions furnished for Dust's seduction ("drugged on her own chemicals," and that whole passage).
Other cool lines:
[On Mallory] "That is no Ben Kenobi. More une belle quelquesomething sans merci."
"Don't be silly. [...] I don't love you. You shouldn't change yourself for me."
"Maybe we shouldn’t just waltz out into the line of fire after him, Rien started to say, but maybe there was something in the knightly code of conduct that also said you had to be fucking stupid all the time"
"It is not a gift of freedom [...] not to seize everything that it is in your power to seize."
"After the council of war, Rien's mother brought her cookies."
"Maybe she, Rien, should become a sorcerer. Or an angel.* Then she could be an asshole, too, and if anybody commented on it, she could shrug and present her union card." (*and, eep, foreshadowing...)
Oh, and the space tarot! I love that it has six suits! And that one of them is "Wires". This gives me geeky pleasure on so many levels at once. :D
And -- this is totally unrelated to anything else -- as I was reading through, I noticed how bodily functions were integrated into the narrative (Rien menstruates, and needs to pee before she and Mallory get it on, and, my favorite instance: "'You can't escape,' [Dust] said. 'I'm sure your precautions are examplary. May I pee?'"), and that was actually really cool. You don't get a lot of that in lit...
I should comment on something. I used to hate sci-fantasy or anything that resembled sci-fantasy with a passion when I was a teen -- I wrote a versified diatribe against it, even -- and I still feel like it's cheating. But I've found, in the Steerswoman books, for example, that I don't mind science fiction which uses some of the tropes or conventions or vocabulary of fantasy. I actually find it really kind of neat. And I do here, too. The basilisk that used to be a laser-cutting torch, the dragon-like thing that's a reactor coolant leak, what might as well be enchanted fruit, the fallen angels, the unblades -- I actually really like it all. Because it's really sci-fi, and it's really cool.
Once I finished, I did what I did with Undertow and looked through matociquala's "dust" tag. Apparently, the Elric allusion I was getting from Tristen was intentional.
I do want to read the sequel when it comes out.
40. Naomi Novik, Throne of Jade
41. Naomi Novik, Black Powder War -- These books were just the thing I needed to get over my distaste for Tigana, but I actually don't have a whole lot to say about them. I was afraid I wouldn't like them because military fantasy is not necessarily my thing, or the period of the Napoleonic Wars, or the navy background, but none of that turned out to matter. I love the central conceit of dragons as aerial corps in this historical period. I like Laurence. He is the sort of decent, thoughtful, practical man that I would like to be friends with, or work beside. The way one of his first thoughts upon discovering the dragon egg is to return the French captain's sword, the way his concern for his crew, first of the ship and then of Temeraire, and, of course, Temeraire himself, is constantly the driver for his actions, the way he brings Temeraire books and gifts -- he is just a likeable guy and a pleasant POV character. And also the kind of protagonist it was fun to watch getting occasionally embarrassed, by Temeraire, by the informality of the Aerial Corps.
I liked the first book best, the second book least, and the third one in the middle, mostly because I enjoyed the character growth and fish-out-of-water in HMD a lot more than the travelogue and intrigue of the second two books, but at least BPW had Tharkay, and Laurence facing some difficult moral choices, as opposed to mostly just fumbling blind in ToJ. I have to say I'm not overwhelmed with fondness for Temeraire -- for all his intelligence, he is rather juvenile as a character, and I don't find that appealing. I do like the supporting cast generally, especially Maximus and Berkley (especially as a team), and Keynes (the surgeon), and Granby, and, as mentioned earlier, Tharkay and his cynicism and dry wit. I like the difference between the relationship of Laurence and Riley in HMD (Laurence trying to hand over command as visibly as possible and not get in the way even though he has to stay on deck) and in ToJ (the tension between them, over the slaver issue and the discipline of sailors vs aviators and everything else). I like the conundrum Laurence finds himself in with respect to Rankin, and the scene where he pretty much drags him over to the dying Levitas ("Laurence told him very quietly, 'If you can walk, get on your feet; otherwise I will carry you.'"), which, I'll admit, I teared up. I like Laurence having a shot at Bonaparte's back and refusing to take it as a matter of honor but later second guessing the decision after Prussia's war is lost. Oh, and I kind of liked the brave French officer who tries to board Temeraire in the beginning of ToJ and turns out to be the French ambassador's nephew later on -- I hope he shows up again in a later book.
I like the humour of the narration, such as when Jane Roland is gearing up to ask Laurence for his honest opinion of Emily and he thinks she is about to proposition him. And the dragon masturbation jokes amuse my inner 12-year-old boy to no end, as does Riley fleeing from a prospective explanation of the birds and the bees to Temeraire. And Laurence's continued attempts to teach the runners trigonometry, and his perennial embarrassment over Emily's unconcern over gender differences.
I'm not sure I really liked the plot of the second and third books... The war stuff is mildly interesting, but Napoleon is one of my historical crushes, and I find myself rooting for the other side more than for Prussia/Britain. The Lien archenemy thing I find even less interesting, because Lien is boring -- I don't find her a compelling or terribly believable villain at all. And it feels a bit contrived that, powerful as she is, she hasn't defeated absolutely everyone yet. It's explained as her wanting Temeraire to really suffer, and also I guess she has some kind of weird moral code against using divine wind offensively (e.g. against the fleet evacuating at the very end of BPW), but that just seems artificial, I don't know... Also, while I found the description of human/dragon co-existence in China quite interesting (my favorite part of ToJ), and the innovations being implemented by the French to increase human/dragon cooperation even more so, I find Temeraire's quest for dragon rights pretty dull. I mean, I totally sympathize with his goal and everything, I just don't want to read about the obstacles and the arguments for and against.
Random things: I like the epilogues, which are not related tot he action but are "excerpts" from scientific papers of the period, especially the elided mention of Longwings ("Though the breed was first considered intractable, during the reign of Elizaberth I new methods of harnessing were developed which secured the general domestication of the breed"). I like Iskierka's name (I'm assuming it means "little spark" in Polish, which is adorable). But Arkady's name constantly throws me out of the story, because I'm so used to thinking of it as a Russian name.
Oh, and, ETA, since I forgot to mention it earlier: I really liked that the Chinese military aviators were overwhelmingly women, and the Mulan story allusion that was behind that.
I've got a hold out on Empire of Ivory (book #4) at the library, so I will be reading that next.
42. Jane Yolen, Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (short stories) -- I have a feeling I've read most of the stories in this book (possibly even all of them), but I'm pretty sure I haven't read this actual book, and I only vaguely recalled the majority of them. But I still generally enjoyed it.
"Tough Alice" -- Alice learns to fight her own battles, in Wonderland and in the real world. One of my least favorite stories in the collection, actually -- kind of trite. Although some of the wordplay is fun.
"Mama Gone" -- mother vampire in Appalachia. This is my favorite story, and though I've read it at least three times now, it never fails to make me tear up for pretty much the entirety of it. I love the narrator's voice, and the general flavor of the setting, and it just gets me every time.
"Harlyn's Fairy" -- fantasy-loving girl living with her aunt discovers fairies in the garden. Also not a favorite, although I like the allusions to Tolkien and Harlyn's offhand mental references to her crazy mother. And that the aunt may be against escapism and thinks Harlyn is making up stuff, but they are both still on the same side.
"Phoenix Farm" -- girl whose father walked out on the family hatches a phoenix egg. I don't think I've read this one before, and I really liked it. The symbolism is pretty heavy, but the young narrator's voice is fresh and touching, and I love this line, about some cynical graffiti: "The grammar bothered me more than what it said." (That's just such a neat character detail!)
"Sea Dragon of Fife" -- boy catches and kills sea dragon that killed his two older brothers. I'm not terribly impressed by the story, but the narration is pretty fun, especially the running joke about the McLeods being extremely taciturn.
"Wilding" -- girl transformed into an animal for fun escapes murderer in Central Park. This is one of the stories that did make an impression on an earlier reading, so I guess I liked it. On a re-read, I liked the futuristic slang, and also the "Max" reference.
"The Baby-Sitter" -- a sort-of horror story where some kind of haunting presence in a house gobbles up an intruder. It's a fun story, but I have a bit of an issue with the genre...
"Bolundeers" -- father's ghost drives off menacing "bolundeers" from the compost pile. This is another story I remembered pretty well from a prior read, but I hadn't liked it much originally, and this time I liked it a lot more. Possibly it has to do with being a parent now, and having a better understanding for what kind of stress the father's death would have on the mother, the teen girl, and the little brother. This time, it packed much more of an emotional punch, especially the part about Brancy juggling day-to-day stuff like homework and compost with dealing with the loss.
"The Bridge's Complaint" -- a retelling of Three Billigoats Gruff from the bridge's POV, which happens to be sympathetic to the troll. I don't think I've read this one before. The narration was... clever, I guess, but I didn't much care for the story.
"Brandon and the Aliens" -- gross pet-eating animals invade a town, kid decides to battle them. Cute story, but not much of a lasting impression.
"Winter's King" -- a very lyrical short tale about a boy born "dead" in the middle of a winter storm. I read this in After the King and liked it there, and I still like it, though a reread doesn't seem to add anything much to it. I do like the motif of "a minor third".
"Lost Girls" -- modern girl and daughter of a divorced nutritionist and a lawyer ends up in Neverland and unionizes the Wendies. Nice satirical story, with a suitably creepy Peter and Wendy. I could've sworn I've read this before, even though it seems to be one of the stories written specifically for this collection...
43. Elizabeth Bear, Dust -- I liked it. Not sure if I liked it the same, more or less than Undertow, but I liked it. But... I feel like I liked it for the wrong reasons... I didn't care about Rien. I didn't care about Perceval, or about their unusual love or great and noble sacrifice. The characters I liked the most, the ones I was rooting for to survive were Gavin the basilisk, Hero Ng, and Dust himself. A laser-cutting torch animated with the soul fragment of a dead woman, the fragment memory of a dead man preserved in a peach, and a splinter of an AI. Oh, an Pinion -- a nanite colony. Possibly there's something wrong with me, to be mourning Dust and Pinion more than Rien at the end. But maybe it's just that Bear's writing about the, well, not inanimate, and not inhuman (because the Exalt are not exactly human either -- nobody in this book really is), but the less human entities is so vivid. I even felt for the suit of power armor that Rien never got to name. Oh, and Inkling. The... near-personhood of all these entities was great. But I feel like I'm missing out on the more human part of the story.
The Conn family (which I figured came from Com before it was more clearly implied) seems like a sort of Amber in space (there's even a brother/father named Benedick)... but unlike the real Amberites, the Conn siblings are mostly not terribly interesting and not very sympathetic. I feel like I could like Tristen if there was actually more time spent on him, but the rest were pretty uncompelling. Of course, they're not meant to be the focus -- Perceval and Rien are -- but still.
Oh, and I guessed that Gavin was "Cynric Conn" as soon as Cat told Rien the story. The race through Inkling's radioactive shortcut was quite terrible. Well written, of course, but terrible. I never want to read through that again, because, *brrr*. Radiation sickness is a particular bugbear of mine. Oh, and the casually implied sort-of cannibalism of Samael using the frozen bodies ("Samael has had to use some for raw material. For their water and carbon and amino acids.") is also pretty horrific.
I noticed the writing less than I did in Undertow, especially in the first portion of the book. I did catch that Mallory never gets referred to by pronoun (it was mostly natural, there were just one or two spots where I noticed that it had been elided. I appreciate that, because the sie/hir stuff (which gets applied to Head here) I do find kind of grating. I liked the description of Perceval fighting her own senses and chemically-generated emotions furnished for Dust's seduction ("drugged on her own chemicals," and that whole passage).
Other cool lines:
[On Mallory] "That is no Ben Kenobi. More une belle quelquesomething sans merci."
"Don't be silly. [...] I don't love you. You shouldn't change yourself for me."
"Maybe we shouldn’t just waltz out into the line of fire after him, Rien started to say, but maybe there was something in the knightly code of conduct that also said you had to be fucking stupid all the time"
"It is not a gift of freedom [...] not to seize everything that it is in your power to seize."
"After the council of war, Rien's mother brought her cookies."
"Maybe she, Rien, should become a sorcerer. Or an angel.* Then she could be an asshole, too, and if anybody commented on it, she could shrug and present her union card." (*and, eep, foreshadowing...)
Oh, and the space tarot! I love that it has six suits! And that one of them is "Wires". This gives me geeky pleasure on so many levels at once. :D
And -- this is totally unrelated to anything else -- as I was reading through, I noticed how bodily functions were integrated into the narrative (Rien menstruates, and needs to pee before she and Mallory get it on, and, my favorite instance: "'You can't escape,' [Dust] said. 'I'm sure your precautions are examplary. May I pee?'"), and that was actually really cool. You don't get a lot of that in lit...
I should comment on something. I used to hate sci-fantasy or anything that resembled sci-fantasy with a passion when I was a teen -- I wrote a versified diatribe against it, even -- and I still feel like it's cheating. But I've found, in the Steerswoman books, for example, that I don't mind science fiction which uses some of the tropes or conventions or vocabulary of fantasy. I actually find it really kind of neat. And I do here, too. The basilisk that used to be a laser-cutting torch, the dragon-like thing that's a reactor coolant leak, what might as well be enchanted fruit, the fallen angels, the unblades -- I actually really like it all. Because it's really sci-fi, and it's really cool.
Once I finished, I did what I did with Undertow and looked through matociquala's "dust" tag. Apparently, the Elric allusion I was getting from Tristen was intentional.
I do want to read the sequel when it comes out.