Reading roundup
I am so, so behind on books, I don't think I can do my usual fully detailed write-ups with quotes and stuff. I just need to get this stuff out there and the books off the pile on my desk and back to the library.
10. Scott Westerfeld, Goliath (conclusion of the Leviathan trilogy) -- it was better than I was afraid it might be. Spoilers! I wasn't sure how Westerfeld, or the characters, would handle the inevitable reveal that Deryn is a girl. Not badly, as it turned out. Alec sort of figured it out on his own -- well, really, the loris did, but he finally listened, and I thought his reaction was plausible. He felt hurt and betrayed and was a bit shaken that the boy he'd looked up to as an example of manliness was actually a girl, but they talked it out, and it was fine. I particularly liked Alec taking back his heat-of-the-moment words that Deryn isn't a soldier, while still feeling hurt: "I shouldn't have said that. You are a real soldier -- quite a good one, in fact. But you aren't much of a friend." I never much cared for Deryn being in love with Alec (I still can't really see why -- I mean, Alec is a good guy, but I don't see any chemistry there), and Alec figuring that out, but I knew it was coming, and I didn't hate how it was handled, so, OK.
What I hadn't anticipated was that Dr Barlow did not know Deryn was a girl -- I was quite sure she was aware (as a woman herself), and was trolling her some of the time. I do find that a bit difficult to swallow, but Barlow is shown to be someone who is very sharp in certain regards but could probably be oblivious about things below her notice. Still, that was an odd authorial choice, I thought.
I thought Tesla was one of the most interesting things about this installment. I liked the portrayal of crazy genius, a man of contradictions, who wants to become a vegetarian out of moral considerations (though he isn't quite there yet) but would, to the horror of everyone, sacrifice a living ship to bears so that he could continue his studies. I figured out they were looking for the Tunguska meteorite (though not as quickly as someone who was fascinanted by said meteorite as a child and loves Ponedelnik should have figured it out). I'm not sure I totally buy the explanation that Tesla drank his own Kool-Aid and ignored evidence that the damage was meteoritic and not caused by Goliath, but it was a decent explanation, I guess.
I also liked the moral quandry set up for Alec by Volger, having the choice to kill Tesla and save thousands of Austrian lives, even while what Tesla was planning to do was for the sake of sacrificing thousands to end the war early and save millions -- a neat doomsday weapon scenario, handled, I thought, with respect for both sides of the argument. Having Alec make the final decision based on personal considerations sat better with me than if it had been a moral argument that prompted him to kill Tesla or allow him to deploy Goliath, etiher one.
I didn't find the various adventures along the way -- stopovers in Japan, America and Mexico -- particularly interesting, maybe because it was all political and not with any new genepunk worldbuilding, which is what I like best about this series. I did like Russia's Trans-Siberian Trailways ("room enough for two bears to pass in opposite directions without annoying each other") and the underwater fiber system "which stretched from Britain to Australia to Japan [...] made from mile-long strangds of living nervous tissue", and the North/South division in the US also falling along Darwinist (agricultural south) vs Clanker (industrial north) lines because the US was in the middle of the Civil War when Darwin announced his discoveries, and the inception of Ford Walkers towards the end, and I guessed that the Japanese boffins they meet were the founders of Toyota. Also, heh, "Herculean inundation" on the airship, where they flush all the crap from the gut of the ship to put out a fire or as emergency ballast. Also, the manta airships were cool.
11. Naomi Novik, Crucible of Gold -- already here
12. Lev Grossman, The Magician King -- So, I didn't love it as much as The Magicians. It might've actually been a better book, and I do think Julia is a better protagonist than Quentin -- not just more likeable, but actually better. But I'm such a sucker for magic school narratives, and there was no magic school in this, not really. Spoilers!
I did like Julia, a lot. (And I totally agree with what cancan_cadenza said ages ago, that Julia must be an Amber reference.) I liked her personality at the beginning, when she was the good student, as brilliant as Quentin. I liked the reason she failed the Brakebills test ("The test was the last of her priorities. It was the least interesting thing in the room."), and her reaction to it, her refusal to be bought off. Her descent into depression was really painful to read, but I thought her entire arc was amazing, searching for Brakebills, finally finding her way to backalley magic and FTB ("Her whole life she'd felt like the last living member of a lost Amazonian tribe, speaking her own extinct dialect, but here, finally, was her ethnic group. They were a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-oins, but they seemed human to her. Or maybe not human, but whatever Julia was, they were too.") and Murs. I don't think her ending as a dryad really worked for me, but I'm not sure any kind of ending would have.
Some Julia quotes:
"They'd never been as good a couple as they looked -- he wasn't a real bona fide nerd, just nerd-friendly, nerd-compativle, and you could only explain your Godel, Escher, Bach references so many times before it starts to be a problem."
"Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view."
I was happy to see Josh having made good for himself, although I was kind of hoping he would return to his palace rather than stay in Fillory, because Fillory is basically boring to me. I liked Poppy, but she seemed very, very different to me from the Poppy in the short story "Endgame" that I had previously read, and I'm not really sure how that story fits into canon -- it doesn't seem to? But, anyway, I liked this Poppy, too, the way she was rational and did not want to stay in Fillory because she found plenty to be fascinated by in the real world. I liked what there was of Eliot and Janet, too, and wished there had been more. Oh, and Penny! I was happy when Penny showed up, and to see what had become of him.
Even though I don't much care for Fillory, I did like some of the takes on fantasy tropes in this book as well, especially the whole thing with the tournament to find the best swordsman, and Bingle appearing cursed, but not being the one to die, and finally following Julia into... wherever, fulfilling his prognostication in a rather surprising way. My surprising bit, though, is this: "'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.' Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much." Also, the sloth was pretty funny.
Then of course there was the actual plot, with the old gods and the golden key, but, honestly, I didn't care (although I did like the vision of the underworld as a rec center nobody ever leaves, and the thing with the passports). I was reading for the prose and for Julia's arc, and for Josh being funny and the other characters popping up.
Other quotes:
"Janet was in charge of relations iwth foreign powers -- Quentin called her Fillory Clinton." (Ow. But also heh.)
"'Jesus Christ' was an expression the younger Fillorians had picked up from their new rulers. It was impossible to explain to them what it actually meant. They were convinced it was something dirty."
"The library was still plagued by outbreaks of flying books -- three weeks ago a whole flock of Far Eastern atlases had taken wing, terrifyingly brod, muscular volumes like albatrosses, and wrecked the circulation area [...]. The books actually found their way out through the front door and roosted in a tree by the welters board, from which they raucously heckled passersby in a babel of languages until they got rained on and dragged themselves sulkily back to the stacks, where they were being aggressively rebound."
"He really couldn't believe the awe in which he used to hold this man. The towering, Gandalfian wizard he once cowered before had been swapped out and replaced with a smug hidebound bureaucrat."
"Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies."
"They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity."
"Quentin had always had reservations about dragons, the real ones anyway, the ones that actually existed. He'd been raised on the tradition of high-flying, gold-hoarding, fire-breathing dragons. Beowulf dragons, Tolkien dragons, Dungeons & Dragons dragons. The news that real dragons lived in rivers and didn't go thrundering around the countryside setting trees on fire had come as a disappointment to him. River dragons sounded colder and slimier and more newtlike than what he'd been hoping for."
"She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship."
"Quentin asked Josh where he thought Cornwall was, then immediately rephrased and said he would give Josh a hundred dollars if he could tell him whether Cornwall was in England, Ireland, or Scotland. Smelling a trick question, Josh went nonlinear and guessed Canada."
"[A]nd finally High C's, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish."
"A three-ring binder: that's what they had by way of a spellbook. And they called it the Spellbinder. That should have tipped Julia off."
"...and even oneiromancy -- dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it."
"Apparently if you're enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted."
13. Ursula Vernon, Revenge of the Horned Bunnies (Dragonbreath #6) -- Danny meets and rescues some jackalopes. It was cute, the way all of these books are cute, but not my favorite in the series. I really liked Christiana the nerdy crested lizard ("The sheep brain wasn't gross. [...] It was fascinating. And the fact that it grossed out most of the other girls was a bonus.") and Spencer the annoying little cousin finally getting a chance to use his powers of boring people for good was cool. I continue to really like Danny's parents in their brief appearances ("Danny's mom had spent most of dinner trying to mediate between her sisters [...] who were Not Speaking to Each Other, Thank You. On the drive home, Danny's father had threatened to really poison the mashed potatoes next time, and Danny's mom had said, "Oh honey, don't tempt me!" and had giggled hysterically for the next forty miles."
14. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
15. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
17. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay -- So, I read them. I read the first two books and half the third in about a week, and then had to put down the series and read something fluffier until I felt like coming back to the world again. I liked them, both the first book as a standalone and the trilogy as a whole. Spoilers for all three books!
I really liked Katniss. I usually don't care much for protagonists, and the first person present tense narration doesn't often work for me either, but I really liked Katniss. Early on, I kept mentally comparing her to Katsa (from Graceling), who is basically supposed to have a special talent for survival. Katsa never felt like a coherent character to me (one of my main problems with the book), but Katniss felt absolutely real. She is focused on survival, and that has good implications and bad. She is really good at the Games, and at taking care of anyone she decides is going to survive with her, but she can also be callous and oblivious about things outside her main goal and is not a particularly nice person. I remember when Mockingjay came our, people were criticizing Katniss for being passive a lot in the third book, and I didn't see it as a problem. It made perfect sense to me that once she was finally in a situation where there was nothing she had to do to survive, where she was safe and her and her family's basic needs were satisfied, the realization that a person she was determined to help survive was being tortured and there was nothing she could do to help him would make her fall apart -- what else was there for her to do? (And I thought that having Finnick, a fellow victor and survivor, older than Katniss and so on, falling apart even worse, was ample proof that Katniss wasn't just being weak.) I liked Katniss's difficult relationship with her mother (and the way the book showed that Katniss had been wrong to deride her mother for her depression without there being instantaneous healing between them), and I liked her relationship with Prim, too, in the first book, but I never felt like Prim became a full-fledged character and had a hard time mourning her for her own sake.
I liked a lot of the other characters, too. I'm prettu sick of love triangles, but I thought the one involving Gale and Peeta was actually pretty good, in that they were above petty rivalry with each other, and especially in the way Katniss saw the love triangle. I also thought it was interesting that while Gale was accusing Katniss of choosing, callously, whichever one of them she couldn't survive without or whichever one needed her most, it was Gale himself who kept a sort of calculation going on how far ahead or behind Peeta he was in her affections. I thought his trap being used (probably) to kill Prim was a bit of an easy way out for the love triangle resolution, but I also thought it worked. As for Peeta... well. I quite liked Peeta, but I also think he was too saintly, in a series populated mostly by shade-of-grey characters. The Capitol had to brainwash him to cause any serious drama from him, before he would do anything not entirely pro-Katniss, which I found a tad unbelievable. But we do see everyone through Katniss's eyes, so Peeta being wholly pure makes sense from that perspective even if I don't find him really believable.
I liked a lot of the other tributes, and actually wish we had gotten to see more of them. I liked little Rue (and the entire arc with her, including the gift of District 11 bread and the subsequent gesture of respect in District 11 in Catching Fire), and was really intrigued by Foxface (too bad we never even found out her name...). In the Quarter Quell, I really liked Finnick, and it's his death that upsets me the most. I think he might've actually been my favorite character -- the combination of badassness, humour, confidence, and revealed trauma and loneliness. I also liked Johanna, especially the relationship that grows between her and Katniss when they're training together in District 13, and the way Johanna was reacting to rain/water (which I'd guessed was due to torture in the Capitol's hands). I also really liked Cinna; for much of the first book and even some of the second I'd been hoping that he would show up alive, but it's just not that kind of series, alas. (If people ship Katniss/Cinna, I can totally see why, though I'm personally not shipping anyone in this series.) I also grew to like Katniss's prep team, and the scene where they're readying her for the Quarter Quell games and she has to console them / they can barely work without breaking down was one of the most poignant scenes in the series for me. It took awhile for Haymitch to grow on me, but starting with the Quarter Quell preparations, he did and very much so. I ended up really liking his relationship with Katniss, their tacit understanding of each other and ability to get under each other's skin.
The main weakness of the books, to me, were the characters of Snow and Coin. Snow, as the evil-so-evil dictator of the Capitol, with his scent of blood and open sores and prostituting victors and poisoning enemies and only barely avoiding munching live kittens onscreen was bad enough. He made some half-hearted speeches about how it was all for the good of the districts and humanity as a whole, but it was clear he didn't believe that himself, and evil that knows it's being evil and is evil just for the fun of it is really boring. Coin, I thought, was even worse. I wasn't expecting the leader of District 13 to be altruistic and noble, but her being basically the exact same sort of evil as Snow was just lazy and lame and even harder for me to swallow. (Another thing I remember from when the third book came out was people arguing about whether or not Katniss (and Haymitch) really meant their vote in favor of the last Hunger Games using children of Capitol leaders. It seems utterly clear to me that both of them were not really in favor of the games. I guess Katniss felt she needed to vote in favor to make Coin feel that she could be trusted, so that she could pull off the switch with the target? That didn't seem like the most logical plan to me, but I suppose I can buy Katniss feeling she had to vote that way.)
The other thing I remember lots of people arguing about was the ending, whether or not it was realistic that Katniss would have children in the epilogue, after insisting throughout the series that she could never bring children into a world where they could been reaped. To me it made perfect (bittersweet) sense that Katniss would have enough cautious trust in the world to have children even though she was not wholly healed from her time in the Games and everything that followed, and I got the sense that it definitely was worth it for her, even while simultaneously being terrifying (and being a parent in general, even without the horrible things Katniss went through, is not a little bit like that, so the ending worked for me).
In general, the worldbuilding was not bad, if fairly sparse. The basic premise of the games puzzled me for a long time before I read the books, but understanding that they were meant as a punishment, to keep the districts cowed, made them make some sense (and I thought the reasoning behind the various "extra" punishments of the Quarter Quells was pretty neat). I kept wondering about the Romanesque names of the Capitol and District 2, and in general the naming conventions. I liked the story of the mockigjays origin.
I know there's a huge fandom for these books and movie, and I've seen some really pretty fanart and even read a couple of fics, but I don't feel any drive to be fannish about this series, probably because the world is so grim, I don't actually want to spend any more time there.
16. Kate Elliott, Cold Magic -- I'm not entirely sure what I think of this book. I enjoyed it, but it's almost too much stuff. The author herself describes it as an "Afro-Celtic post-Roman steampunk Regency novel with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendents of troodons" (which is actually leaving out quite a lot of stuff!). Spoilers!
The worldbuilding is actually really neat, but I almost wish she'd chosen to focus on individual pieces of it rather than dumping the whole things on the readers. See, this is a world where Carthage fought Rome to a standstill and was not destroyed, but there was a Carthaginian exodus anyway, and so there are lots of Phoenician ladies all over the place now, including the Hassi Barahal ladies who are our protagonists. And Rome is still a center of power, too. And then there was a salt plague in Africa at the height of the Mali empire, which led to the African diaspora, which mainly seems to have led to the North being populated by tribes of mixed African/Celtic bloodlines. (I'm actually surprised that this book/series has not garnered more attention for the "pretty much everyone is non-white" aspect, because I thought that was pretty cool.) And there's also an ice age. And there was a revolutionary war of some kind, quite recently. And over in North America, there are trolls, which are apparently sentient dinosaurs, who seem to be the primary source of technology/steampunk in this world. And that's before we even get to any magic, of which there is also some. There are cold mages, whose magic is pretty cool (pun not intended), and bards/djeliw with mystical powers, and spirits. And a were-cat. And people who dream true dreams. There's a lot of stuff going on, basically, and some of it is data-dumped (fairly gracefully) and some of it you just grow to infer from what's going on. But, a lot of stuff. And then there are the politics, magic vs technology, the rule of cold mages vs mundane lords vs revolutionaries, and everybody has some points and nobody is exactly an angel.
Anyway, besides the kitchen sink worldbuilding, there are other interesting things. I liked Bee the cousin more than I liked Cat the protagonist, I have to admit, but mostly I liked how close the two girls were. Even when Cat finds out she is not a Hassi Barahal at all, and her aunt and uncle aren't blood family, she never for a moment wibbles over Bee not really being her cousin -- it just doesn't ever cross her mind. I quite liked when it looked like Bee was the really important one on the two, because it's refreshing not to hav the protagonist be the Chosen One, but of course that's sort of reversed in the final reveal. Still, I'm glad that Bee's dream powers seem to be important as well. I really liked Cat's half-brother Rory, the were-cat, and especially the easy relationship he instantly develops with Bee: "Be spectacular, Cousin."
I was unsold on Andevai (Cat's arranged-marriage husband) for a long time, because having a rough life is not an excuse for being a jerk, but once he seemed to change his mind about killing Cat and wandered into the spirit world and was sat on by cats, I started liking him more. I also really like the fact that, while she is clearly attracted to him and he apparently fell for her on first sight, this is not considered a valid basis for an actual relationship, because attraction and one hot kiss don't actually trump everything else between them. I do find Andevai's obsession with his wardrobe hilarious, and that Cat is both amused by this and also really likes looking at him in his finery. Also, I am totally rooting for Bee and Barry Amadou.
Randomly: "cold steel in the hand of a cold mage" = Morganti weapon, apparently, more or less.
Anyway, I do intend to read on the series, especially now that I've mostly figured out what's going on.
18. Holly Black, Black Heart -- So, I didn't love this one as much as Red Glove. Still enjoyed it, but the second book definitely stands as my favorite. I thought this one had some of the same features that didn't work very well for me in White Cat, despite the wonderful premise of the world. Spoilers! Cassel is on his own too much, brooding (Barron doesn't really count, although I did enjoy their interaction and almost-reconciliation, sorta, in this one).
Sam and Daneca are characters I care about more than Cassel himself, and there weren't enough of them in this book for me, although I did like the way their fight was handled, especially Sam's "Just tell me why he's better than me" when he finds out that Daneca's been seeing someone else. I did like Daneca falling for Barron, and Barron apparently falling for her, and Cassel tossing the photo from Barron's wallet for complex reasons and being disconcerted by how much happier Daneca looked in that photo than he'd ever seen her with Sam.
I also very much enjoyed the time Cassel and Sam spent drinking with Cassel's grandfather, who is another favorite character of mine. In fact, Desi was one of my favorite things about this book ("You take anything in your coffee, government leech?", and showing Sam his collecting of naughty pictures of women not wearing gloves, featuring Cassel's grandmother, and generally being awesome in a low-key way.)
All the stuff with the federal agents and Cassel transforming himself into Patton was rather difficult to swallow, even though of course I saw the transformation coming. I did like that Lila knew it was him the whole time but was justifiably worried that he was going to end up being shot by someone else. And her response: "You can't go around making plans that have you getting killed as a by-product. Eventually oneof them is going to work." (And I knew, when he signed the papers, that it was the invisible ink pen coming up again, but that was pretty well planted/foreshadowed.)
Speaking of Lila, I thought this was one of the better ways of handling a long-running "they love each other but think it's unrequited" thing, which I'm deathly sick of otherwise. I did think it was quite believable that Cassel would believe that, whatever Lila might have felt for him when they were kids, him being the reason she spent years in a cage would mean she couldn't love him, and his mother's interference with emotional working making things even worse, and Lila was reading the signs correctly, just not the emotion behind them. And I really like Cassel's line, "You're not sentenced to me." (I also liked the way it is acknowledged that being a cat for several years would make it difficult for Lila to catch up in school, however smart she is.)
On the Lila and Cassel note, I liked the way both their first time and Desi's porn collection underscore the worldbuilding, where constantly having to wear gloves eroticizes bare hands.
Didn't much care for the B plot (the pseudo-blackmailing and the Dean and all that, though it did unfold excitingly enough). And I quite liked Gage, especially the way he apparently hung out with Lila in their early teens, trying on Lila's mother's clothes and stuff. I hope he gets his heriloom gun back from Mina Lange. I also liked the revelation of the thing between Zacharov and Cassel's mother (and Zacharov's sort of admiration for her: "There's something about her-- Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling -- terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits -- or if she has any, she hasn't found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything."), and that Cassel's father knew. And her working Patton at Zacharov's orders, rather than out of some sudden political interest, made a lot more sense.
Things end with a hook open for a sequel -- the diamond still at large, and all the stuff about Cassel's father's family. I know Holly Black has said she wouldn't be averse to returning to the same world and characters to tell more stories, and I'd be very happy if she does.
Oh, and I enjoyed the shoutout to both Mortal Instruments, via a walk-on named Jace, and Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, via the TV show he was watching.
19. Steampunk!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant -- so, I actually don't even like steampunk. But I was in the mood for more after Cold Magic, and this collection had a lot of names I recognized, so I went for it, and quite enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the editors' decision to allow stories set anywhere and any-when except actual Victorian London -- that was refreshing, even though Victorian steampunk London is what I went in expecting. Spoilers for individual stories
"Some Fortunate Future Day", by Cassandra Clare -- a Gothic-feeling piece with a girl alone in a house with creepy dolls and a time machine, determined to make her happy ending with a rescued soldier. Suitably creepy.
"The Last Ride of the Glory Girls", by Libba Bray -- I'm used to Bray's short stories being really powerful, and I didn't think this one was as good as some of the others I read. It took me a while to get used to the "Wild West" narration (the setting is on a different planet, though), but I ended up liking the mechanical genius narrator Addie, and the worldbuilding with the Believers. The Glory Girls were an interestingly diverse cast without the diversity feeling anvilicious. I didn't really care about the plot, and the ending was too open-ended for my taste, but it was an enjoyable story.
"Clockwork Fagin", by Cory Doctrow -- actually the first thing by Doctrow I've ever read, not counting blog posts. Dark humour, but the story worked for me, and I was even engrossed in the plot. I did think the ending was a bit too happy considering the setting, but after the darkness of the story's beginning that was OK. It doesn't make me want to run out and read more Doctrow, but it didn't turn me off him, either.
"Hand in Glove", by Ysabeau Wilce -- set in Califa, although during a different era than the Flora stories. It had some of the same flavor as the Flora books but less charm, though I still liked the story. There's a crime, an animated hand is the murderer, and a plucky policewoman is trying to revolutionize the police force to look at evidence rather than just beat up suspects. I liked that the golden boy detective, while a bit of a cad, certainly, did not turn out to be truly a bad guy. And I liked the chimp scientist, and Etreyo setting a trap for the hand using her former rat catcher skills. I'd been hoping for more from a Califa story, but it was fun.
"The Ghost in Cwmlech Manor", by Delia Sherman -- one of the stories I really liked, largely for the narration. I liked both the spunky narrator, Tacy, (who wants to be an engineer), and her sensible mam, and Mistress Angharad the ghost, and the abstracted Sir Arthur, the new baron, who doesn't believe in ghosts. I liked the way Tacy's musical ear was actually a disadvantage in trying to control the automatons with a pipe that had been designed by a tone-deaf inventor, and I liked the plot and the resolution, and just about everything about this story. I keep being surprised when I read a Delia Sherman story and enjoy it, because I really didn't care much for "The Fall of the Kings" (which she co-authored with an author I do enjoy), but I guess I should stop holding that against her...
"Gethsemane", by Elizabeth Knox -- I'm not sure that I would really classify this as steampunk, or even SFF, but it was an interesting story. The writing was lovely, and I liked the way things were foreshadowed and revealed, like, "You ask how we know what the doctor thought. Well -- he survived." I liked McMahon and was glad that he survived, and the ending is not happy, but fitting.
"The Summer People", by Kelly Link -- I always like Link's short stories, and I like short stories with ~faeries in them, and I liked this one. I did like Ophelia much better than the protagonist Fran. The story, too, is only very nominally steampunk, although the description of the miniature steampunk setups in the Summer People's house was really neat. Anyway, I liked it a lot, though I don't have much to say about it.
"Peace in Our Time", by Garth Nix -- nope, I don't think I'll ever find a Garth Nix short story I'll really like. This one was fine enough, but I forgot about it as soon as I finished reading. I did like the anti-steampunk, bio-based returned-from-the-stars post-human visitor with her blue blob of agony and gills and "She went outside and took a message swift from her pocket, licking the bird to wake it before she sent it aloft". I guess what it comes down to is that this is a much simpler story than most of the other stories in this book -- one gimmick and one joke and that's it.
"Nowhere Fast", by Christopher Rowe -- post-apocalyptic US where personal vehicles are forbidden and everybody rides bicycles and (apparently) has mandatory community service. It wasn't bad, but it didn't grip me, though I did like the fact that the post-apocalyptic ultra-environmentalists weren't unequivocally the good guys.
"Steam Girl", by Dylan Horrocks -- not necessarily SFF either -- depending on whether the Steam Girl stories are completely made up or actually the truth, but I liked it a lot. The high school setting, the narration, the tension between the fantastic self-insert worlds and the characters in real life, everything was both interesting and well done. And the story within a story was fun, too.
"Everything Amiable and Obliging", by Holly Black -- this is very much like an Asimov robot story set in Victorian times. A girl falls in love with her robotic dancing instructor, and there's rumination on whether or not he can really love her, and the conflict between obedience and ensuring she doesn't come to harm, which is basically Three Laws stuff. The setting does give it an interesting twist, because it leads to things like this: "'Tell me one thing, cousin,' Sophie said. 'Nicholas serves you. He cannot help putting your desires before his own. Does that not bother you?' 'Does it bother Father that Mother cares for his house, gives parties to his friends, and heaps the table with victuals that are to his tastes rather than her own?'"
"The Oracle Engine", by M.T.Anderson -- another writer I hadn't read before. The story is narrated as a Roman history, featuring, basically, the first supercomputer, and there's self-fulfilling prophecies and dramatic irony and all kinds of cool things like that. I also liked the worldbuilding a lot, the mating of steampunk with classical mythology, where Prometheus is viewed as the first Mechanist, and Odysseus is credited with making the giant horse automaton that destroyed Troy, and Deadalus fashioned his wings to run on solar power and fell because he flew into a cloud, while Icarus "flying higher, receiving all the beams of Phoebus, stayed buoyant, reached the land, and so became the first to give the gift of flight to human men." Also, it features the line: "I believe [...] that an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this." (whatever I never claimed my sense of humour was highbrow. :P)
There were also two graphic short stories, "Seven Days Beset by Demons" (by Shawn Cheng) -- an illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins in a steampunk setting which didn't do anything for me, and "Finishing School" (by Kathleen Jennings) which seemed interesting but which I found really difficult to follow, and I think would've enjoyed more as a regular short story, not a comic.
10. Scott Westerfeld, Goliath (conclusion of the Leviathan trilogy) -- it was better than I was afraid it might be. Spoilers! I wasn't sure how Westerfeld, or the characters, would handle the inevitable reveal that Deryn is a girl. Not badly, as it turned out. Alec sort of figured it out on his own -- well, really, the loris did, but he finally listened, and I thought his reaction was plausible. He felt hurt and betrayed and was a bit shaken that the boy he'd looked up to as an example of manliness was actually a girl, but they talked it out, and it was fine. I particularly liked Alec taking back his heat-of-the-moment words that Deryn isn't a soldier, while still feeling hurt: "I shouldn't have said that. You are a real soldier -- quite a good one, in fact. But you aren't much of a friend." I never much cared for Deryn being in love with Alec (I still can't really see why -- I mean, Alec is a good guy, but I don't see any chemistry there), and Alec figuring that out, but I knew it was coming, and I didn't hate how it was handled, so, OK.
What I hadn't anticipated was that Dr Barlow did not know Deryn was a girl -- I was quite sure she was aware (as a woman herself), and was trolling her some of the time. I do find that a bit difficult to swallow, but Barlow is shown to be someone who is very sharp in certain regards but could probably be oblivious about things below her notice. Still, that was an odd authorial choice, I thought.
I thought Tesla was one of the most interesting things about this installment. I liked the portrayal of crazy genius, a man of contradictions, who wants to become a vegetarian out of moral considerations (though he isn't quite there yet) but would, to the horror of everyone, sacrifice a living ship to bears so that he could continue his studies. I figured out they were looking for the Tunguska meteorite (though not as quickly as someone who was fascinanted by said meteorite as a child and loves Ponedelnik should have figured it out). I'm not sure I totally buy the explanation that Tesla drank his own Kool-Aid and ignored evidence that the damage was meteoritic and not caused by Goliath, but it was a decent explanation, I guess.
I also liked the moral quandry set up for Alec by Volger, having the choice to kill Tesla and save thousands of Austrian lives, even while what Tesla was planning to do was for the sake of sacrificing thousands to end the war early and save millions -- a neat doomsday weapon scenario, handled, I thought, with respect for both sides of the argument. Having Alec make the final decision based on personal considerations sat better with me than if it had been a moral argument that prompted him to kill Tesla or allow him to deploy Goliath, etiher one.
I didn't find the various adventures along the way -- stopovers in Japan, America and Mexico -- particularly interesting, maybe because it was all political and not with any new genepunk worldbuilding, which is what I like best about this series. I did like Russia's Trans-Siberian Trailways ("room enough for two bears to pass in opposite directions without annoying each other") and the underwater fiber system "which stretched from Britain to Australia to Japan [...] made from mile-long strangds of living nervous tissue", and the North/South division in the US also falling along Darwinist (agricultural south) vs Clanker (industrial north) lines because the US was in the middle of the Civil War when Darwin announced his discoveries, and the inception of Ford Walkers towards the end, and I guessed that the Japanese boffins they meet were the founders of Toyota. Also, heh, "Herculean inundation" on the airship, where they flush all the crap from the gut of the ship to put out a fire or as emergency ballast. Also, the manta airships were cool.
11. Naomi Novik, Crucible of Gold -- already here
12. Lev Grossman, The Magician King -- So, I didn't love it as much as The Magicians. It might've actually been a better book, and I do think Julia is a better protagonist than Quentin -- not just more likeable, but actually better. But I'm such a sucker for magic school narratives, and there was no magic school in this, not really. Spoilers!
I did like Julia, a lot. (And I totally agree with what cancan_cadenza said ages ago, that Julia must be an Amber reference.) I liked her personality at the beginning, when she was the good student, as brilliant as Quentin. I liked the reason she failed the Brakebills test ("The test was the last of her priorities. It was the least interesting thing in the room."), and her reaction to it, her refusal to be bought off. Her descent into depression was really painful to read, but I thought her entire arc was amazing, searching for Brakebills, finally finding her way to backalley magic and FTB ("Her whole life she'd felt like the last living member of a lost Amazonian tribe, speaking her own extinct dialect, but here, finally, was her ethnic group. They were a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-oins, but they seemed human to her. Or maybe not human, but whatever Julia was, they were too.") and Murs. I don't think her ending as a dryad really worked for me, but I'm not sure any kind of ending would have.
Some Julia quotes:
"They'd never been as good a couple as they looked -- he wasn't a real bona fide nerd, just nerd-friendly, nerd-compativle, and you could only explain your Godel, Escher, Bach references so many times before it starts to be a problem."
"Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view."
I was happy to see Josh having made good for himself, although I was kind of hoping he would return to his palace rather than stay in Fillory, because Fillory is basically boring to me. I liked Poppy, but she seemed very, very different to me from the Poppy in the short story "Endgame" that I had previously read, and I'm not really sure how that story fits into canon -- it doesn't seem to? But, anyway, I liked this Poppy, too, the way she was rational and did not want to stay in Fillory because she found plenty to be fascinated by in the real world. I liked what there was of Eliot and Janet, too, and wished there had been more. Oh, and Penny! I was happy when Penny showed up, and to see what had become of him.
Even though I don't much care for Fillory, I did like some of the takes on fantasy tropes in this book as well, especially the whole thing with the tournament to find the best swordsman, and Bingle appearing cursed, but not being the one to die, and finally following Julia into... wherever, fulfilling his prognostication in a rather surprising way. My surprising bit, though, is this: "'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.' Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much." Also, the sloth was pretty funny.
Then of course there was the actual plot, with the old gods and the golden key, but, honestly, I didn't care (although I did like the vision of the underworld as a rec center nobody ever leaves, and the thing with the passports). I was reading for the prose and for Julia's arc, and for Josh being funny and the other characters popping up.
Other quotes:
"Janet was in charge of relations iwth foreign powers -- Quentin called her Fillory Clinton." (Ow. But also heh.)
"'Jesus Christ' was an expression the younger Fillorians had picked up from their new rulers. It was impossible to explain to them what it actually meant. They were convinced it was something dirty."
"The library was still plagued by outbreaks of flying books -- three weeks ago a whole flock of Far Eastern atlases had taken wing, terrifyingly brod, muscular volumes like albatrosses, and wrecked the circulation area [...]. The books actually found their way out through the front door and roosted in a tree by the welters board, from which they raucously heckled passersby in a babel of languages until they got rained on and dragged themselves sulkily back to the stacks, where they were being aggressively rebound."
"He really couldn't believe the awe in which he used to hold this man. The towering, Gandalfian wizard he once cowered before had been swapped out and replaced with a smug hidebound bureaucrat."
"Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies."
"They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity."
"Quentin had always had reservations about dragons, the real ones anyway, the ones that actually existed. He'd been raised on the tradition of high-flying, gold-hoarding, fire-breathing dragons. Beowulf dragons, Tolkien dragons, Dungeons & Dragons dragons. The news that real dragons lived in rivers and didn't go thrundering around the countryside setting trees on fire had come as a disappointment to him. River dragons sounded colder and slimier and more newtlike than what he'd been hoping for."
"She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship."
"Quentin asked Josh where he thought Cornwall was, then immediately rephrased and said he would give Josh a hundred dollars if he could tell him whether Cornwall was in England, Ireland, or Scotland. Smelling a trick question, Josh went nonlinear and guessed Canada."
"[A]nd finally High C's, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish."
"A three-ring binder: that's what they had by way of a spellbook. And they called it the Spellbinder. That should have tipped Julia off."
"...and even oneiromancy -- dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it."
"Apparently if you're enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted."
13. Ursula Vernon, Revenge of the Horned Bunnies (Dragonbreath #6) -- Danny meets and rescues some jackalopes. It was cute, the way all of these books are cute, but not my favorite in the series. I really liked Christiana the nerdy crested lizard ("The sheep brain wasn't gross. [...] It was fascinating. And the fact that it grossed out most of the other girls was a bonus.") and Spencer the annoying little cousin finally getting a chance to use his powers of boring people for good was cool. I continue to really like Danny's parents in their brief appearances ("Danny's mom had spent most of dinner trying to mediate between her sisters [...] who were Not Speaking to Each Other, Thank You. On the drive home, Danny's father had threatened to really poison the mashed potatoes next time, and Danny's mom had said, "Oh honey, don't tempt me!" and had giggled hysterically for the next forty miles."
14. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
15. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
17. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay -- So, I read them. I read the first two books and half the third in about a week, and then had to put down the series and read something fluffier until I felt like coming back to the world again. I liked them, both the first book as a standalone and the trilogy as a whole. Spoilers for all three books!
I really liked Katniss. I usually don't care much for protagonists, and the first person present tense narration doesn't often work for me either, but I really liked Katniss. Early on, I kept mentally comparing her to Katsa (from Graceling), who is basically supposed to have a special talent for survival. Katsa never felt like a coherent character to me (one of my main problems with the book), but Katniss felt absolutely real. She is focused on survival, and that has good implications and bad. She is really good at the Games, and at taking care of anyone she decides is going to survive with her, but she can also be callous and oblivious about things outside her main goal and is not a particularly nice person. I remember when Mockingjay came our, people were criticizing Katniss for being passive a lot in the third book, and I didn't see it as a problem. It made perfect sense to me that once she was finally in a situation where there was nothing she had to do to survive, where she was safe and her and her family's basic needs were satisfied, the realization that a person she was determined to help survive was being tortured and there was nothing she could do to help him would make her fall apart -- what else was there for her to do? (And I thought that having Finnick, a fellow victor and survivor, older than Katniss and so on, falling apart even worse, was ample proof that Katniss wasn't just being weak.) I liked Katniss's difficult relationship with her mother (and the way the book showed that Katniss had been wrong to deride her mother for her depression without there being instantaneous healing between them), and I liked her relationship with Prim, too, in the first book, but I never felt like Prim became a full-fledged character and had a hard time mourning her for her own sake.
I liked a lot of the other characters, too. I'm prettu sick of love triangles, but I thought the one involving Gale and Peeta was actually pretty good, in that they were above petty rivalry with each other, and especially in the way Katniss saw the love triangle. I also thought it was interesting that while Gale was accusing Katniss of choosing, callously, whichever one of them she couldn't survive without or whichever one needed her most, it was Gale himself who kept a sort of calculation going on how far ahead or behind Peeta he was in her affections. I thought his trap being used (probably) to kill Prim was a bit of an easy way out for the love triangle resolution, but I also thought it worked. As for Peeta... well. I quite liked Peeta, but I also think he was too saintly, in a series populated mostly by shade-of-grey characters. The Capitol had to brainwash him to cause any serious drama from him, before he would do anything not entirely pro-Katniss, which I found a tad unbelievable. But we do see everyone through Katniss's eyes, so Peeta being wholly pure makes sense from that perspective even if I don't find him really believable.
I liked a lot of the other tributes, and actually wish we had gotten to see more of them. I liked little Rue (and the entire arc with her, including the gift of District 11 bread and the subsequent gesture of respect in District 11 in Catching Fire), and was really intrigued by Foxface (too bad we never even found out her name...). In the Quarter Quell, I really liked Finnick, and it's his death that upsets me the most. I think he might've actually been my favorite character -- the combination of badassness, humour, confidence, and revealed trauma and loneliness. I also liked Johanna, especially the relationship that grows between her and Katniss when they're training together in District 13, and the way Johanna was reacting to rain/water (which I'd guessed was due to torture in the Capitol's hands). I also really liked Cinna; for much of the first book and even some of the second I'd been hoping that he would show up alive, but it's just not that kind of series, alas. (If people ship Katniss/Cinna, I can totally see why, though I'm personally not shipping anyone in this series.) I also grew to like Katniss's prep team, and the scene where they're readying her for the Quarter Quell games and she has to console them / they can barely work without breaking down was one of the most poignant scenes in the series for me. It took awhile for Haymitch to grow on me, but starting with the Quarter Quell preparations, he did and very much so. I ended up really liking his relationship with Katniss, their tacit understanding of each other and ability to get under each other's skin.
The main weakness of the books, to me, were the characters of Snow and Coin. Snow, as the evil-so-evil dictator of the Capitol, with his scent of blood and open sores and prostituting victors and poisoning enemies and only barely avoiding munching live kittens onscreen was bad enough. He made some half-hearted speeches about how it was all for the good of the districts and humanity as a whole, but it was clear he didn't believe that himself, and evil that knows it's being evil and is evil just for the fun of it is really boring. Coin, I thought, was even worse. I wasn't expecting the leader of District 13 to be altruistic and noble, but her being basically the exact same sort of evil as Snow was just lazy and lame and even harder for me to swallow. (Another thing I remember from when the third book came out was people arguing about whether or not Katniss (and Haymitch) really meant their vote in favor of the last Hunger Games using children of Capitol leaders. It seems utterly clear to me that both of them were not really in favor of the games. I guess Katniss felt she needed to vote in favor to make Coin feel that she could be trusted, so that she could pull off the switch with the target? That didn't seem like the most logical plan to me, but I suppose I can buy Katniss feeling she had to vote that way.)
The other thing I remember lots of people arguing about was the ending, whether or not it was realistic that Katniss would have children in the epilogue, after insisting throughout the series that she could never bring children into a world where they could been reaped. To me it made perfect (bittersweet) sense that Katniss would have enough cautious trust in the world to have children even though she was not wholly healed from her time in the Games and everything that followed, and I got the sense that it definitely was worth it for her, even while simultaneously being terrifying (and being a parent in general, even without the horrible things Katniss went through, is not a little bit like that, so the ending worked for me).
In general, the worldbuilding was not bad, if fairly sparse. The basic premise of the games puzzled me for a long time before I read the books, but understanding that they were meant as a punishment, to keep the districts cowed, made them make some sense (and I thought the reasoning behind the various "extra" punishments of the Quarter Quells was pretty neat). I kept wondering about the Romanesque names of the Capitol and District 2, and in general the naming conventions. I liked the story of the mockigjays origin.
I know there's a huge fandom for these books and movie, and I've seen some really pretty fanart and even read a couple of fics, but I don't feel any drive to be fannish about this series, probably because the world is so grim, I don't actually want to spend any more time there.
16. Kate Elliott, Cold Magic -- I'm not entirely sure what I think of this book. I enjoyed it, but it's almost too much stuff. The author herself describes it as an "Afro-Celtic post-Roman steampunk Regency novel with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendents of troodons" (which is actually leaving out quite a lot of stuff!). Spoilers!
The worldbuilding is actually really neat, but I almost wish she'd chosen to focus on individual pieces of it rather than dumping the whole things on the readers. See, this is a world where Carthage fought Rome to a standstill and was not destroyed, but there was a Carthaginian exodus anyway, and so there are lots of Phoenician ladies all over the place now, including the Hassi Barahal ladies who are our protagonists. And Rome is still a center of power, too. And then there was a salt plague in Africa at the height of the Mali empire, which led to the African diaspora, which mainly seems to have led to the North being populated by tribes of mixed African/Celtic bloodlines. (I'm actually surprised that this book/series has not garnered more attention for the "pretty much everyone is non-white" aspect, because I thought that was pretty cool.) And there's also an ice age. And there was a revolutionary war of some kind, quite recently. And over in North America, there are trolls, which are apparently sentient dinosaurs, who seem to be the primary source of technology/steampunk in this world. And that's before we even get to any magic, of which there is also some. There are cold mages, whose magic is pretty cool (pun not intended), and bards/djeliw with mystical powers, and spirits. And a were-cat. And people who dream true dreams. There's a lot of stuff going on, basically, and some of it is data-dumped (fairly gracefully) and some of it you just grow to infer from what's going on. But, a lot of stuff. And then there are the politics, magic vs technology, the rule of cold mages vs mundane lords vs revolutionaries, and everybody has some points and nobody is exactly an angel.
Anyway, besides the kitchen sink worldbuilding, there are other interesting things. I liked Bee the cousin more than I liked Cat the protagonist, I have to admit, but mostly I liked how close the two girls were. Even when Cat finds out she is not a Hassi Barahal at all, and her aunt and uncle aren't blood family, she never for a moment wibbles over Bee not really being her cousin -- it just doesn't ever cross her mind. I quite liked when it looked like Bee was the really important one on the two, because it's refreshing not to hav the protagonist be the Chosen One, but of course that's sort of reversed in the final reveal. Still, I'm glad that Bee's dream powers seem to be important as well. I really liked Cat's half-brother Rory, the were-cat, and especially the easy relationship he instantly develops with Bee: "Be spectacular, Cousin."
I was unsold on Andevai (Cat's arranged-marriage husband) for a long time, because having a rough life is not an excuse for being a jerk, but once he seemed to change his mind about killing Cat and wandered into the spirit world and was sat on by cats, I started liking him more. I also really like the fact that, while she is clearly attracted to him and he apparently fell for her on first sight, this is not considered a valid basis for an actual relationship, because attraction and one hot kiss don't actually trump everything else between them. I do find Andevai's obsession with his wardrobe hilarious, and that Cat is both amused by this and also really likes looking at him in his finery. Also, I am totally rooting for Bee and Barry Amadou.
Randomly: "cold steel in the hand of a cold mage" = Morganti weapon, apparently, more or less.
Anyway, I do intend to read on the series, especially now that I've mostly figured out what's going on.
18. Holly Black, Black Heart -- So, I didn't love this one as much as Red Glove. Still enjoyed it, but the second book definitely stands as my favorite. I thought this one had some of the same features that didn't work very well for me in White Cat, despite the wonderful premise of the world. Spoilers! Cassel is on his own too much, brooding (Barron doesn't really count, although I did enjoy their interaction and almost-reconciliation, sorta, in this one).
Sam and Daneca are characters I care about more than Cassel himself, and there weren't enough of them in this book for me, although I did like the way their fight was handled, especially Sam's "Just tell me why he's better than me" when he finds out that Daneca's been seeing someone else. I did like Daneca falling for Barron, and Barron apparently falling for her, and Cassel tossing the photo from Barron's wallet for complex reasons and being disconcerted by how much happier Daneca looked in that photo than he'd ever seen her with Sam.
I also very much enjoyed the time Cassel and Sam spent drinking with Cassel's grandfather, who is another favorite character of mine. In fact, Desi was one of my favorite things about this book ("You take anything in your coffee, government leech?", and showing Sam his collecting of naughty pictures of women not wearing gloves, featuring Cassel's grandmother, and generally being awesome in a low-key way.)
All the stuff with the federal agents and Cassel transforming himself into Patton was rather difficult to swallow, even though of course I saw the transformation coming. I did like that Lila knew it was him the whole time but was justifiably worried that he was going to end up being shot by someone else. And her response: "You can't go around making plans that have you getting killed as a by-product. Eventually oneof them is going to work." (And I knew, when he signed the papers, that it was the invisible ink pen coming up again, but that was pretty well planted/foreshadowed.)
Speaking of Lila, I thought this was one of the better ways of handling a long-running "they love each other but think it's unrequited" thing, which I'm deathly sick of otherwise. I did think it was quite believable that Cassel would believe that, whatever Lila might have felt for him when they were kids, him being the reason she spent years in a cage would mean she couldn't love him, and his mother's interference with emotional working making things even worse, and Lila was reading the signs correctly, just not the emotion behind them. And I really like Cassel's line, "You're not sentenced to me." (I also liked the way it is acknowledged that being a cat for several years would make it difficult for Lila to catch up in school, however smart she is.)
On the Lila and Cassel note, I liked the way both their first time and Desi's porn collection underscore the worldbuilding, where constantly having to wear gloves eroticizes bare hands.
Didn't much care for the B plot (the pseudo-blackmailing and the Dean and all that, though it did unfold excitingly enough). And I quite liked Gage, especially the way he apparently hung out with Lila in their early teens, trying on Lila's mother's clothes and stuff. I hope he gets his heriloom gun back from Mina Lange. I also liked the revelation of the thing between Zacharov and Cassel's mother (and Zacharov's sort of admiration for her: "There's something about her-- Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling -- terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits -- or if she has any, she hasn't found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything."), and that Cassel's father knew. And her working Patton at Zacharov's orders, rather than out of some sudden political interest, made a lot more sense.
Things end with a hook open for a sequel -- the diamond still at large, and all the stuff about Cassel's father's family. I know Holly Black has said she wouldn't be averse to returning to the same world and characters to tell more stories, and I'd be very happy if she does.
Oh, and I enjoyed the shoutout to both Mortal Instruments, via a walk-on named Jace, and Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, via the TV show he was watching.
19. Steampunk!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant -- so, I actually don't even like steampunk. But I was in the mood for more after Cold Magic, and this collection had a lot of names I recognized, so I went for it, and quite enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the editors' decision to allow stories set anywhere and any-when except actual Victorian London -- that was refreshing, even though Victorian steampunk London is what I went in expecting. Spoilers for individual stories
"Some Fortunate Future Day", by Cassandra Clare -- a Gothic-feeling piece with a girl alone in a house with creepy dolls and a time machine, determined to make her happy ending with a rescued soldier. Suitably creepy.
"The Last Ride of the Glory Girls", by Libba Bray -- I'm used to Bray's short stories being really powerful, and I didn't think this one was as good as some of the others I read. It took me a while to get used to the "Wild West" narration (the setting is on a different planet, though), but I ended up liking the mechanical genius narrator Addie, and the worldbuilding with the Believers. The Glory Girls were an interestingly diverse cast without the diversity feeling anvilicious. I didn't really care about the plot, and the ending was too open-ended for my taste, but it was an enjoyable story.
"Clockwork Fagin", by Cory Doctrow -- actually the first thing by Doctrow I've ever read, not counting blog posts. Dark humour, but the story worked for me, and I was even engrossed in the plot. I did think the ending was a bit too happy considering the setting, but after the darkness of the story's beginning that was OK. It doesn't make me want to run out and read more Doctrow, but it didn't turn me off him, either.
"Hand in Glove", by Ysabeau Wilce -- set in Califa, although during a different era than the Flora stories. It had some of the same flavor as the Flora books but less charm, though I still liked the story. There's a crime, an animated hand is the murderer, and a plucky policewoman is trying to revolutionize the police force to look at evidence rather than just beat up suspects. I liked that the golden boy detective, while a bit of a cad, certainly, did not turn out to be truly a bad guy. And I liked the chimp scientist, and Etreyo setting a trap for the hand using her former rat catcher skills. I'd been hoping for more from a Califa story, but it was fun.
"The Ghost in Cwmlech Manor", by Delia Sherman -- one of the stories I really liked, largely for the narration. I liked both the spunky narrator, Tacy, (who wants to be an engineer), and her sensible mam, and Mistress Angharad the ghost, and the abstracted Sir Arthur, the new baron, who doesn't believe in ghosts. I liked the way Tacy's musical ear was actually a disadvantage in trying to control the automatons with a pipe that had been designed by a tone-deaf inventor, and I liked the plot and the resolution, and just about everything about this story. I keep being surprised when I read a Delia Sherman story and enjoy it, because I really didn't care much for "The Fall of the Kings" (which she co-authored with an author I do enjoy), but I guess I should stop holding that against her...
"Gethsemane", by Elizabeth Knox -- I'm not sure that I would really classify this as steampunk, or even SFF, but it was an interesting story. The writing was lovely, and I liked the way things were foreshadowed and revealed, like, "You ask how we know what the doctor thought. Well -- he survived." I liked McMahon and was glad that he survived, and the ending is not happy, but fitting.
"The Summer People", by Kelly Link -- I always like Link's short stories, and I like short stories with ~faeries in them, and I liked this one. I did like Ophelia much better than the protagonist Fran. The story, too, is only very nominally steampunk, although the description of the miniature steampunk setups in the Summer People's house was really neat. Anyway, I liked it a lot, though I don't have much to say about it.
"Peace in Our Time", by Garth Nix -- nope, I don't think I'll ever find a Garth Nix short story I'll really like. This one was fine enough, but I forgot about it as soon as I finished reading. I did like the anti-steampunk, bio-based returned-from-the-stars post-human visitor with her blue blob of agony and gills and "She went outside and took a message swift from her pocket, licking the bird to wake it before she sent it aloft". I guess what it comes down to is that this is a much simpler story than most of the other stories in this book -- one gimmick and one joke and that's it.
"Nowhere Fast", by Christopher Rowe -- post-apocalyptic US where personal vehicles are forbidden and everybody rides bicycles and (apparently) has mandatory community service. It wasn't bad, but it didn't grip me, though I did like the fact that the post-apocalyptic ultra-environmentalists weren't unequivocally the good guys.
"Steam Girl", by Dylan Horrocks -- not necessarily SFF either -- depending on whether the Steam Girl stories are completely made up or actually the truth, but I liked it a lot. The high school setting, the narration, the tension between the fantastic self-insert worlds and the characters in real life, everything was both interesting and well done. And the story within a story was fun, too.
"Everything Amiable and Obliging", by Holly Black -- this is very much like an Asimov robot story set in Victorian times. A girl falls in love with her robotic dancing instructor, and there's rumination on whether or not he can really love her, and the conflict between obedience and ensuring she doesn't come to harm, which is basically Three Laws stuff. The setting does give it an interesting twist, because it leads to things like this: "'Tell me one thing, cousin,' Sophie said. 'Nicholas serves you. He cannot help putting your desires before his own. Does that not bother you?' 'Does it bother Father that Mother cares for his house, gives parties to his friends, and heaps the table with victuals that are to his tastes rather than her own?'"
"The Oracle Engine", by M.T.Anderson -- another writer I hadn't read before. The story is narrated as a Roman history, featuring, basically, the first supercomputer, and there's self-fulfilling prophecies and dramatic irony and all kinds of cool things like that. I also liked the worldbuilding a lot, the mating of steampunk with classical mythology, where Prometheus is viewed as the first Mechanist, and Odysseus is credited with making the giant horse automaton that destroyed Troy, and Deadalus fashioned his wings to run on solar power and fell because he flew into a cloud, while Icarus "flying higher, receiving all the beams of Phoebus, stayed buoyant, reached the land, and so became the first to give the gift of flight to human men." Also, it features the line: "I believe [...] that an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this." (whatever I never claimed my sense of humour was highbrow. :P)
There were also two graphic short stories, "Seven Days Beset by Demons" (by Shawn Cheng) -- an illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins in a steampunk setting which didn't do anything for me, and "Finishing School" (by Kathleen Jennings) which seemed interesting but which I found really difficult to follow, and I think would've enjoyed more as a regular short story, not a comic.