Reading roundup (urban fantasy recs, take 3) + reading bingo and meme
10. Patricia Briggs, Iron Kissed
11. Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed (Mercy Thompson, #3 and #4) -- so I'm going to talk about these together, because it really feels like one book broken in two, given the way Iron Kissed ends. BIG SPOILERS for both books, mixed together
So, I knew, from poking around TV Tropes or maybe reading stuff online, that at some point Mercy gets raped. Pretty much from the first conversation Mercy and Tim had, when she kept thinking of him as a very nice man, I had a feeling he would be the rapist. I don't think the rape was gratuitous -- it made a lot of sense for a man like Tim, who was on all sorts of power trips, and it fit into where Mercy and Tim's interaction had come from. And for the most part I thought it's aftermath was handled... I don't know if it was handled well, but I definitely thought it was handled very thoroughly, with Mercy having to deal with the notoriety of it, and victim blaming, and some creep being turned on by the knowledge of it, and her loved ones worrying about her and asking constantly if she is all right, and trying to pretend she is with varying degrees of success, and progress being two steps forward one step back. Dealing with panic attacks triggered by places and situations and memories, and working through them with support and sheer bloody-minded tenacity which is very Mercy. So, for the most part, I thought it was handled well -- in Bone Crossed. The end of Iron Kissed was very uncomfortable; Mercy's shame and degradation and the fact that Ben has to speak for her -- it's justified in-text by the fact that she's still under the overdose of the fairy drink, but I wish it hadn't been in the book, because the physical rape and the mind-rape that accompanied it were bad enough. It was good that Mercy had killed her rapist on her own rather than being rescued by Adam, but the aftermath was the one thing that felt like too much -- I didn't want to see Mercy in that state, and I didn't think it was a good idea, authorically, to put her in it. And I wonder if the way Iron Kissed ends vs Bone Crossed begins -- where it looks like Mercy and Adam are going to sleep together -- was an intentional fake-out from the start, or if Briggs changed her mind on how that would go after getting criticism from readers. Because the version of the scene as presented in Bone Crossed, where Adam is horrified that Mercy would think he was asking her for sex at that point and Mercy's panic attacks get triggered by much milder sexual situations, is a version I can accept much more readily. OK, that's enough about the rape, moving on.
I find that I like Sam much more now that he is no longer after Mercy romantically -- their sibling-y vibe is actually really nice, and I wish that had been there all along, instead of the stupid attempt at a love triangle. I loved meeting Mercy's mother, with her Barbie gun, and only wish she'd been around for longer. Was very happy to see Stephen again, and that he and Mercy are now reconciled. His conversations with Chad in sign were charming, as were his BtVS references ("Want to explain to the kid that I'm more a Spike than a Buffy?")his devotion to Marsilia even when he thought she'd killed his people and after she had tortured him and cast him out was quite poignant, and I especially liked the scene where Mercy sends him away with Chad, and he agrees to do it, but: "if I do this and yu survive -- you will forgive me for the others." and then, on a much lighter note, "If you ever want to be dinner sometime."
And I continue to like Mercy, who feels like a very coherent character, well defined by her environment and her past. I like the details that she is very careful about safe sex because she's illegitimate born herself (but it's clearly her own hangup, not something the author has an agenda with, because her mother is delightful and I didn't feel her judged at all), and balks at the idea of suicide even under fairy compulsion and wants to make sure Tim's friend is not falsely believed to be a suicide by his brother because she lost her foster-father to suicide herself. Plus her faith, as I've already mentioned, and her love for history. Oh, and I like how Mercy considers doing something ill-advised -- something UF heroes tend to do a whole lot -- and then thinks through all the reasons it's a really dumb idea, and decides to do something more sensible instead -- like when she considers doing something to make Adam angry when she's afraid that being tied to her will put him in danger because Marsilia has found out about Andre, and thinks about running away, and then decides to stay because those other options would just make things worse. And I like that she's the kind of person who thinks, after the crisis has passed, "Vampires weren't going to kill everyone I knew. They weren't even going to kill me." What I didn't like, though, was the "revelation" towards the end of Bone Crossed that the reason Mercy was originally scared of Adam's advances is that she had been ~abandoned too many times in her past~ or whatever. I thought her earlier reasons made a lot of sense, frankly, and did not IMO require retconning... although I can handwave it as Mercy being high on love and wanting to reverse her earlier opinion, so, OK, unreliable narrator.
Worldbuilding-wise, these books were OK. This universe's fairies are neat but not super-special, although I did like the seashore-dwelling Grey Lord, and the walking stick which has adopted Mercy. Oh, and we got to meet Baba Yaga, who didn't feel much like Baba Yaga but was not actively terrible, either, so, OK, whatever. I did enjoy seeing more of the vampire seethe politics, especially Stephen's devotion to Marsillia and Bernard's altruistic motivations. And Blackwood's powers-via-consumption are a pretty neat trick that I don't think I've seen done elsewhere. The ghosts I find not very interesting at all, and it does seem like Mercy's powers there and kind of tacked on in the second book and expanding, although the expansion, at least, is kind of justified. Oh, and I guess we also got Mercy's induction into the Pack, but I actually don't find that interesting at all, and I think I preferred her as an outsider...
Actually, I have to say, some of the worldbuilding I'm enjoying most is just the sense of mundane community. Assorted magical creatures are a dime a dozen in urban fantasy, but what I've found more rare is the sense of the protagonist inhabiting a real world and interacting with regular people. Mercy has a job, an employee and customers; Mercy has a church she goes to and the community there; Mercy has her dojo, and goes to restaurants and knows people there; Mercy has people she went to college with -- it's all little things, unimportant things for the most part, but it gives this series a much more grounded feel than most UF, which I like a lot.
I feel like the books are getting... less tight. Like, I thought the first one had all plot threads wrapped up very tightly, at least to an intermediate conclusion. The second one had some more dangly bits -- some of them intentional set-ups for later books (Marsilia being bound to find out about Mercy killing Andre) and some just kind of out there (Kara the werewolf girl). In Iron Kissed/Bone Crossed, there's just a whole bunch of stuff that's brought up and never really resolved -- I kept waiting for some kind of wrap-up/arc involving the lawyer woman, for instance, but nada. And I wanted to learn more about what was going to happen to Corban and Chad after Blackwood's destruction, but that's left dangling, too. And I thought there should've been some kind of emotional closure between Mercy and Ben, after the end of Iron Kissed, but no...
Still, even though I do think the first book was best, I'm really enjoying the series, and the only reason I took a break is that the next eBook is all checked out and I'm waiting for my hold to come in (I've got the next one after that, and a hold on the one after).
12. Kate Griffin, Midnight Mayor (Matthew Swift #2) -- pretty similar to the first one in terms of what worked for me and what didn't, with maybe a slightly higher ratio of cranberry to bran, with most of the cranberries being furnished by Oda. Or possibly I was just more ready, better braced, for the parts that didn't work for me. Spoilers!
I still find the writing pointlessly pretentious when it goes all sentence-fragment-y and stream-of-consciousness -- that just doesn't work for me, and the long scene from the fox's POV was a good example of that -- it just felt gratuitous. The writing in general is still way overdescriptive, but I think there are fewer passages like that, which caused me to skim, and then there are some passages where to overdone style actually works -- Matthew's walkabout was one, and him inhabiting the shoes was another, and everything recounting the past appearances of the death of cities was really well-suited to it, too. The drawn-out action scenes still lack something and make my eyes glaze over, though, and the dialogue is still a lot of fun.
There was less worldbuilding I was intrigued by, excluding the death of cities himself and his summoning. The whole stuff with the spectres wasn't very interesting to me, and some of the other stuff was more grotesque than interesting -- Boom-Boom and the quack's modern Igor. But the saturate was both gross and pretty cool; I liked that. The Aldermen were not all that interesting to me as a concept -- they felt a bit like refugees from a Terry Pratchett novel, like a human incarnation of the Auditors, maybe. But I did like the mix of of mundane corporatespeak and hardcore mysticality. I liked the Black Cab interlude a lot, for the same reasons I liked the Capitalized Personages in the first book (and missed seeing the Beggar King and the Bag Lady here), and also the Mother, Maiden, and Crone ("It would have been nice to call her the Maid. I doubted I could. [...] It would have been appropriate to call her the Mother, but I wasn't sure how she'd take it. [...] We wanted to call her the Hag, and were smart enough to steer clear of the idea."). This is really the part of the worldbuilding that feels most interesting to me, and I wish Griffin would do more of it.
I still don't care about Matthew, and, since the book was less about the angels discovering life, didn't feel like my greater fondness for the angels helped out here as much. But the angels and the split personality thing is still very amusing, and can be interesting at times. Many of my favorite bits of text deal with those things: "static interference with knobs on made flesh", and "We are curious and, like I said, I didn't have much better to do" and '"What's he saying?" snapped Earle, to Oda [...] "Not him," she replied, "Them." "No," I snapped. "Me."' and "Meekly, to our infuriation, I said, 'Yes.'" and "We scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish" and, of course, "We are Swift, and I am the angels." Oh, and Matthew/the angels liking the opera but regretting they understood so much of it cracked me up.
I'd been warned by mauvais_pli that Griffin is very hard on her cast, and, yeah. I'm bummed to have lost Vera, who was a lot of fun. But it was nice to have a cameo by Dr Seah again -- she has the best lines! -- and to see Sinclaire again, even if briefly. Of the newly introduced characters, I liked Loren, and wish we'd gotten to see more of her, especially as I'm guessing she will not be returning -- and one of the things I found interesting is that she actually asks to be "Obliviated" (something Matthew can't provide), because she can't afford counseling -- you often see the muggles mind-wiped for their own good, but this is an interesting subversion. I also found Mr Earle intriguing -- so of course he's dead, too. And I quite like what we've seen so far of Penny. And, in addition to liking Penny herself, I like that her reaction to finding out she's a sorceress is so different from Dana Mikeda's -- Dana wanted to turn it off, Penny is insistent on learning from Matthew -- "my intended plan of being one kick-arse sorceress who can totally go out there and get her shit done" -- and won't take no for an answer. Of course, their initial experiences with sorcery are very different -- in Dana's case it manifested as a sort of illness, which of course you'd want to cure, and in Penny's case it was a weapon she didn't realize she was holding, which it makes sense to learn how to use. But I thought that was neat. And speaking of Dana, even though her appearance, even in apparition, was brief, I enjoyed it, especially her reaction to Matthew's sorry: "Nice of you to say, bit late."
But the one character I actually feel any sort of investment in is Oda, who is marvelous with her non-sense of humour and her charming greetings and denouncing things for fun and her one-of-a-kind peptalks ("Ngwenya dead with a bullet in her brain!") and her "he's got a gun" approach to getting into places unchallenged and her knowledge of what the spleen does. I like her relationship with Matthew, too, everything that's unsaid between them, and I hope despite her one-word exit they work things out between them.
Oh, yeah, plot. I appreciated the themes of strangers and family, but the plot is pretty thin, and pretty much as predictable as in the first book. But "Give me back my hat" is a great dramatic cry, possibly second only to "Where is my cow" in terms of cognitive dissonance.
Quotes and fragments:
Matthew's conversation with Vera:
"Who 'they'?"
"I don't know."
"Why you?"
"I don't know."
"Which you?"
re: Kemsley: "a set of teeth you could have carved a piano with. If I hated Aldermen on basic principle, I hated him on direct observation."
"a gym if you felt in a guilty mood and hadn't found religion"
"What kind of total tit goes around making us Midnight Mayor? I don't even believe in the Midnight fucking Mayor!"
re: the saturate: "fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street"
"All hood and attitude, proud to be against the law, proud just to be against."
"The problem about that [blinding yourself while scrying by footwear] is that a pair of shoes, while it may remember where it wants to go, is less likely than a brain to stop at a red light."
"Still not dead. That's me. It's my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time."
"The vacuum cleaner in my stomach turned from suck to pump"
"Cafes offered travellers from Paris croissants and thick dark coffee, to cushion them against the baked-beans-based culture shock they were about to receive"
"bands with names like "Thunderchazz!", "DJ Crindhop", "The Bassline Slutz" and other excitingly ungrammatical things."
"feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane"
"Never too late to repent. Just too late to avoid your fate."
"papers full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money"
"We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot."
Penny: "So either you help me, or get out of my way, and the only way you're getting out of my way, Mr Mayor, is by helping me. It's your choice."
Matthew: "It's not really a choice."
Penny: "Then it should be very easy to make."
and the running theme of machines that go "ping" :)
I still/even more want all the Rivers of London crossovers. At first I was thinking just general Met activity with the mayhem that follows Matthew early on, or Nightingale's Arrangement with the Aldermen/Midnight Mayor, but really Penny is what I want the crossover around, it turns out. Penny standing at the Thames and encountering some of Mama Thames' girls, or Peter bumping into her at Charing Cross and noticing weird vestigia around her and striking up a conversation (he'd not overlook a cleaner, his mother being one), or Peter and Nightingale responding to Penny's 999 call from the bridge. I just think Peter and Penny interacting would be quite wonderful -- she seems exactly the right sort of bossy lady to take him in hand. And I have a feeling she and Abigail get along well, and gleefully gang up on Peter (not that either of them would need any help, but, you know, it's more fun as a team sport). I think I can even sort of handwave the two universes coexisting, if I posit that Matthew's sort of magic doesn't leave vestigia -- or not the same sort, anyway -- so the Folly-trained magician(s) aren't sensitive to it until they find out about it. And, in fact, that's why magic seemed to be diminishing in the years after WWII -- it was mutating into this new form of sorcery, and there weren't enough people paying attention to notice.
Currently reading: Still on a break from Thursday Next and Inda, and am trying to finish up Cast in Ruin, which I'd started back in January.
Also, I've apparently succumbed to keeping track of what I read in Excel, because the end-of-year book meme was getting too laborious tallying by hand. Twelve books in, every single one has come from the library, 83% have been in eBook form, 83% have been adult (vs YA/kidlit), 83% have a female author (but only 50% a female protagonist), and 67% have been urban fantasy (100% have been fantasy of one sort or another).
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There have been a couple reading-related loose ends I've wanted to post but keep forgetting:
There was reading bingo going around a little while ago (just two cards, this one and a YA one, which you can grab here), and here's where I am so far: (not at a bingo yet)
Done:
A book with more than 500 pages: Inda
A book with non-human characters: Seraphina (dragons)
A book by a female author: Let's go with Moon Called, 'cos I have plenty of Patricia Briggs to go around.
A book with a mystery: Let's go with The Devil You Know
A book with a one-word title: Blameless
A book I heard about online: Most of them, LOL, but let's go with A Madness of Angels
The second book in a series: Blood Bound
Free Square: Iron Kissed (why not)
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And a short little book meme:
All other things (writing quality, story, etc), which would you rather read?
1. Something written by a man or a woman?
All other things truly being equal, it wouldn't matter. Statistically speaking, I've been reading a lot more books by women than by men, but that's not what the question is asking. And my "try anything by" lists are probably fairly gender-balanced at this point. But for a totally unknown-to-me writer, I think I would feel less apprehensive picking up a book by a female author. Which is not to say that I have not come across plenty of books authored by females which really irritated me, but most of the ones I've put down in utter disgust have been by male authors (quite likely because more best-selling authors are men?)
2. Something with a male or female protagonist?
From an author I trust, it probably wouldn't matter (e.g. I'd just as happily read another Cordelia book as another Miles one), but male protagonist for an unknown. More likely to be a trope I like, more likely to have the sort of interaction with other characters I find particularly interesting, and less likely to get bogged down in a stupid love triangle.
3. Something funny or something tragic?
Definitely something funny!
4. Something short or something long with many parts?
A nice, long series. I get really attached to characters and settings (if they're done well / appeal to me) and always want to spend more time with them. And since I don't reread, and many of my fandoms don't have fics, series is the way to get it.
5. Something simple or something layered?
Layered, but not, like, pretentiously so. I guess what I mean is, layered, but the kind of layered that can be enjoyed on the "simple" level, as just a good story, which just becomes better if/when you notice the additional layers.
So... female author, male protagnoist, funny, series, layered... methinks I just described the Vorkosigan Saga :P
11. Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed (Mercy Thompson, #3 and #4) -- so I'm going to talk about these together, because it really feels like one book broken in two, given the way Iron Kissed ends. BIG SPOILERS for both books, mixed together
So, I knew, from poking around TV Tropes or maybe reading stuff online, that at some point Mercy gets raped. Pretty much from the first conversation Mercy and Tim had, when she kept thinking of him as a very nice man, I had a feeling he would be the rapist. I don't think the rape was gratuitous -- it made a lot of sense for a man like Tim, who was on all sorts of power trips, and it fit into where Mercy and Tim's interaction had come from. And for the most part I thought it's aftermath was handled... I don't know if it was handled well, but I definitely thought it was handled very thoroughly, with Mercy having to deal with the notoriety of it, and victim blaming, and some creep being turned on by the knowledge of it, and her loved ones worrying about her and asking constantly if she is all right, and trying to pretend she is with varying degrees of success, and progress being two steps forward one step back. Dealing with panic attacks triggered by places and situations and memories, and working through them with support and sheer bloody-minded tenacity which is very Mercy. So, for the most part, I thought it was handled well -- in Bone Crossed. The end of Iron Kissed was very uncomfortable; Mercy's shame and degradation and the fact that Ben has to speak for her -- it's justified in-text by the fact that she's still under the overdose of the fairy drink, but I wish it hadn't been in the book, because the physical rape and the mind-rape that accompanied it were bad enough. It was good that Mercy had killed her rapist on her own rather than being rescued by Adam, but the aftermath was the one thing that felt like too much -- I didn't want to see Mercy in that state, and I didn't think it was a good idea, authorically, to put her in it. And I wonder if the way Iron Kissed ends vs Bone Crossed begins -- where it looks like Mercy and Adam are going to sleep together -- was an intentional fake-out from the start, or if Briggs changed her mind on how that would go after getting criticism from readers. Because the version of the scene as presented in Bone Crossed, where Adam is horrified that Mercy would think he was asking her for sex at that point and Mercy's panic attacks get triggered by much milder sexual situations, is a version I can accept much more readily. OK, that's enough about the rape, moving on.
I find that I like Sam much more now that he is no longer after Mercy romantically -- their sibling-y vibe is actually really nice, and I wish that had been there all along, instead of the stupid attempt at a love triangle. I loved meeting Mercy's mother, with her Barbie gun, and only wish she'd been around for longer. Was very happy to see Stephen again, and that he and Mercy are now reconciled. His conversations with Chad in sign were charming, as were his BtVS references ("Want to explain to the kid that I'm more a Spike than a Buffy?")his devotion to Marsilia even when he thought she'd killed his people and after she had tortured him and cast him out was quite poignant, and I especially liked the scene where Mercy sends him away with Chad, and he agrees to do it, but: "if I do this and yu survive -- you will forgive me for the others." and then, on a much lighter note, "If you ever want to be dinner sometime."
And I continue to like Mercy, who feels like a very coherent character, well defined by her environment and her past. I like the details that she is very careful about safe sex because she's illegitimate born herself (but it's clearly her own hangup, not something the author has an agenda with, because her mother is delightful and I didn't feel her judged at all), and balks at the idea of suicide even under fairy compulsion and wants to make sure Tim's friend is not falsely believed to be a suicide by his brother because she lost her foster-father to suicide herself. Plus her faith, as I've already mentioned, and her love for history. Oh, and I like how Mercy considers doing something ill-advised -- something UF heroes tend to do a whole lot -- and then thinks through all the reasons it's a really dumb idea, and decides to do something more sensible instead -- like when she considers doing something to make Adam angry when she's afraid that being tied to her will put him in danger because Marsilia has found out about Andre, and thinks about running away, and then decides to stay because those other options would just make things worse. And I like that she's the kind of person who thinks, after the crisis has passed, "Vampires weren't going to kill everyone I knew. They weren't even going to kill me." What I didn't like, though, was the "revelation" towards the end of Bone Crossed that the reason Mercy was originally scared of Adam's advances is that she had been ~abandoned too many times in her past~ or whatever. I thought her earlier reasons made a lot of sense, frankly, and did not IMO require retconning... although I can handwave it as Mercy being high on love and wanting to reverse her earlier opinion, so, OK, unreliable narrator.
Worldbuilding-wise, these books were OK. This universe's fairies are neat but not super-special, although I did like the seashore-dwelling Grey Lord, and the walking stick which has adopted Mercy. Oh, and we got to meet Baba Yaga, who didn't feel much like Baba Yaga but was not actively terrible, either, so, OK, whatever. I did enjoy seeing more of the vampire seethe politics, especially Stephen's devotion to Marsillia and Bernard's altruistic motivations. And Blackwood's powers-via-consumption are a pretty neat trick that I don't think I've seen done elsewhere. The ghosts I find not very interesting at all, and it does seem like Mercy's powers there and kind of tacked on in the second book and expanding, although the expansion, at least, is kind of justified. Oh, and I guess we also got Mercy's induction into the Pack, but I actually don't find that interesting at all, and I think I preferred her as an outsider...
Actually, I have to say, some of the worldbuilding I'm enjoying most is just the sense of mundane community. Assorted magical creatures are a dime a dozen in urban fantasy, but what I've found more rare is the sense of the protagonist inhabiting a real world and interacting with regular people. Mercy has a job, an employee and customers; Mercy has a church she goes to and the community there; Mercy has her dojo, and goes to restaurants and knows people there; Mercy has people she went to college with -- it's all little things, unimportant things for the most part, but it gives this series a much more grounded feel than most UF, which I like a lot.
I feel like the books are getting... less tight. Like, I thought the first one had all plot threads wrapped up very tightly, at least to an intermediate conclusion. The second one had some more dangly bits -- some of them intentional set-ups for later books (Marsilia being bound to find out about Mercy killing Andre) and some just kind of out there (Kara the werewolf girl). In Iron Kissed/Bone Crossed, there's just a whole bunch of stuff that's brought up and never really resolved -- I kept waiting for some kind of wrap-up/arc involving the lawyer woman, for instance, but nada. And I wanted to learn more about what was going to happen to Corban and Chad after Blackwood's destruction, but that's left dangling, too. And I thought there should've been some kind of emotional closure between Mercy and Ben, after the end of Iron Kissed, but no...
Still, even though I do think the first book was best, I'm really enjoying the series, and the only reason I took a break is that the next eBook is all checked out and I'm waiting for my hold to come in (I've got the next one after that, and a hold on the one after).
12. Kate Griffin, Midnight Mayor (Matthew Swift #2) -- pretty similar to the first one in terms of what worked for me and what didn't, with maybe a slightly higher ratio of cranberry to bran, with most of the cranberries being furnished by Oda. Or possibly I was just more ready, better braced, for the parts that didn't work for me. Spoilers!
I still find the writing pointlessly pretentious when it goes all sentence-fragment-y and stream-of-consciousness -- that just doesn't work for me, and the long scene from the fox's POV was a good example of that -- it just felt gratuitous. The writing in general is still way overdescriptive, but I think there are fewer passages like that, which caused me to skim, and then there are some passages where to overdone style actually works -- Matthew's walkabout was one, and him inhabiting the shoes was another, and everything recounting the past appearances of the death of cities was really well-suited to it, too. The drawn-out action scenes still lack something and make my eyes glaze over, though, and the dialogue is still a lot of fun.
There was less worldbuilding I was intrigued by, excluding the death of cities himself and his summoning. The whole stuff with the spectres wasn't very interesting to me, and some of the other stuff was more grotesque than interesting -- Boom-Boom and the quack's modern Igor. But the saturate was both gross and pretty cool; I liked that. The Aldermen were not all that interesting to me as a concept -- they felt a bit like refugees from a Terry Pratchett novel, like a human incarnation of the Auditors, maybe. But I did like the mix of of mundane corporatespeak and hardcore mysticality. I liked the Black Cab interlude a lot, for the same reasons I liked the Capitalized Personages in the first book (and missed seeing the Beggar King and the Bag Lady here), and also the Mother, Maiden, and Crone ("It would have been nice to call her the Maid. I doubted I could. [...] It would have been appropriate to call her the Mother, but I wasn't sure how she'd take it. [...] We wanted to call her the Hag, and were smart enough to steer clear of the idea."). This is really the part of the worldbuilding that feels most interesting to me, and I wish Griffin would do more of it.
I still don't care about Matthew, and, since the book was less about the angels discovering life, didn't feel like my greater fondness for the angels helped out here as much. But the angels and the split personality thing is still very amusing, and can be interesting at times. Many of my favorite bits of text deal with those things: "static interference with knobs on made flesh", and "We are curious and, like I said, I didn't have much better to do" and '"What's he saying?" snapped Earle, to Oda [...] "Not him," she replied, "Them." "No," I snapped. "Me."' and "Meekly, to our infuriation, I said, 'Yes.'" and "We scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish" and, of course, "We are Swift, and I am the angels." Oh, and Matthew/the angels liking the opera but regretting they understood so much of it cracked me up.
I'd been warned by mauvais_pli that Griffin is very hard on her cast, and, yeah. I'm bummed to have lost Vera, who was a lot of fun. But it was nice to have a cameo by Dr Seah again -- she has the best lines! -- and to see Sinclaire again, even if briefly. Of the newly introduced characters, I liked Loren, and wish we'd gotten to see more of her, especially as I'm guessing she will not be returning -- and one of the things I found interesting is that she actually asks to be "Obliviated" (something Matthew can't provide), because she can't afford counseling -- you often see the muggles mind-wiped for their own good, but this is an interesting subversion. I also found Mr Earle intriguing -- so of course he's dead, too. And I quite like what we've seen so far of Penny. And, in addition to liking Penny herself, I like that her reaction to finding out she's a sorceress is so different from Dana Mikeda's -- Dana wanted to turn it off, Penny is insistent on learning from Matthew -- "my intended plan of being one kick-arse sorceress who can totally go out there and get her shit done" -- and won't take no for an answer. Of course, their initial experiences with sorcery are very different -- in Dana's case it manifested as a sort of illness, which of course you'd want to cure, and in Penny's case it was a weapon she didn't realize she was holding, which it makes sense to learn how to use. But I thought that was neat. And speaking of Dana, even though her appearance, even in apparition, was brief, I enjoyed it, especially her reaction to Matthew's sorry: "Nice of you to say, bit late."
But the one character I actually feel any sort of investment in is Oda, who is marvelous with her non-sense of humour and her charming greetings and denouncing things for fun and her one-of-a-kind peptalks ("Ngwenya dead with a bullet in her brain!") and her "he's got a gun" approach to getting into places unchallenged and her knowledge of what the spleen does. I like her relationship with Matthew, too, everything that's unsaid between them, and I hope despite her one-word exit they work things out between them.
Oh, yeah, plot. I appreciated the themes of strangers and family, but the plot is pretty thin, and pretty much as predictable as in the first book. But "Give me back my hat" is a great dramatic cry, possibly second only to "Where is my cow" in terms of cognitive dissonance.
Quotes and fragments:
Matthew's conversation with Vera:
"Who 'they'?"
"I don't know."
"Why you?"
"I don't know."
"Which you?"
re: Kemsley: "a set of teeth you could have carved a piano with. If I hated Aldermen on basic principle, I hated him on direct observation."
"a gym if you felt in a guilty mood and hadn't found religion"
"What kind of total tit goes around making us Midnight Mayor? I don't even believe in the Midnight fucking Mayor!"
re: the saturate: "fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street"
"All hood and attitude, proud to be against the law, proud just to be against."
"The problem about that [blinding yourself while scrying by footwear] is that a pair of shoes, while it may remember where it wants to go, is less likely than a brain to stop at a red light."
"Still not dead. That's me. It's my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time."
"The vacuum cleaner in my stomach turned from suck to pump"
"Cafes offered travellers from Paris croissants and thick dark coffee, to cushion them against the baked-beans-based culture shock they were about to receive"
"bands with names like "Thunderchazz!", "DJ Crindhop", "The Bassline Slutz" and other excitingly ungrammatical things."
"feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane"
"Never too late to repent. Just too late to avoid your fate."
"papers full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money"
"We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot."
Penny: "So either you help me, or get out of my way, and the only way you're getting out of my way, Mr Mayor, is by helping me. It's your choice."
Matthew: "It's not really a choice."
Penny: "Then it should be very easy to make."
and the running theme of machines that go "ping" :)
I still/even more want all the Rivers of London crossovers. At first I was thinking just general Met activity with the mayhem that follows Matthew early on, or Nightingale's Arrangement with the Aldermen/Midnight Mayor, but really Penny is what I want the crossover around, it turns out. Penny standing at the Thames and encountering some of Mama Thames' girls, or Peter bumping into her at Charing Cross and noticing weird vestigia around her and striking up a conversation (he'd not overlook a cleaner, his mother being one), or Peter and Nightingale responding to Penny's 999 call from the bridge. I just think Peter and Penny interacting would be quite wonderful -- she seems exactly the right sort of bossy lady to take him in hand. And I have a feeling she and Abigail get along well, and gleefully gang up on Peter (not that either of them would need any help, but, you know, it's more fun as a team sport). I think I can even sort of handwave the two universes coexisting, if I posit that Matthew's sort of magic doesn't leave vestigia -- or not the same sort, anyway -- so the Folly-trained magician(s) aren't sensitive to it until they find out about it. And, in fact, that's why magic seemed to be diminishing in the years after WWII -- it was mutating into this new form of sorcery, and there weren't enough people paying attention to notice.
Currently reading: Still on a break from Thursday Next and Inda, and am trying to finish up Cast in Ruin, which I'd started back in January.
Also, I've apparently succumbed to keeping track of what I read in Excel, because the end-of-year book meme was getting too laborious tallying by hand. Twelve books in, every single one has come from the library, 83% have been in eBook form, 83% have been adult (vs YA/kidlit), 83% have a female author (but only 50% a female protagonist), and 67% have been urban fantasy (100% have been fantasy of one sort or another).
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There have been a couple reading-related loose ends I've wanted to post but keep forgetting:
There was reading bingo going around a little while ago (just two cards, this one and a YA one, which you can grab here), and here's where I am so far: (not at a bingo yet)
Done:
A book with more than 500 pages: Inda
A book with non-human characters: Seraphina (dragons)
A book by a female author: Let's go with Moon Called, 'cos I have plenty of Patricia Briggs to go around.
A book with a mystery: Let's go with The Devil You Know
A book with a one-word title: Blameless
A book I heard about online: Most of them, LOL, but let's go with A Madness of Angels
The second book in a series: Blood Bound
Free Square: Iron Kissed (why not)
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And a short little book meme:
All other things (writing quality, story, etc), which would you rather read?
1. Something written by a man or a woman?
All other things truly being equal, it wouldn't matter. Statistically speaking, I've been reading a lot more books by women than by men, but that's not what the question is asking. And my "try anything by" lists are probably fairly gender-balanced at this point. But for a totally unknown-to-me writer, I think I would feel less apprehensive picking up a book by a female author. Which is not to say that I have not come across plenty of books authored by females which really irritated me, but most of the ones I've put down in utter disgust have been by male authors (quite likely because more best-selling authors are men?)
2. Something with a male or female protagonist?
From an author I trust, it probably wouldn't matter (e.g. I'd just as happily read another Cordelia book as another Miles one), but male protagonist for an unknown. More likely to be a trope I like, more likely to have the sort of interaction with other characters I find particularly interesting, and less likely to get bogged down in a stupid love triangle.
3. Something funny or something tragic?
Definitely something funny!
4. Something short or something long with many parts?
A nice, long series. I get really attached to characters and settings (if they're done well / appeal to me) and always want to spend more time with them. And since I don't reread, and many of my fandoms don't have fics, series is the way to get it.
5. Something simple or something layered?
Layered, but not, like, pretentiously so. I guess what I mean is, layered, but the kind of layered that can be enjoyed on the "simple" level, as just a good story, which just becomes better if/when you notice the additional layers.
So... female author, male protagnoist, funny, series, layered... methinks I just described the Vorkosigan Saga :P