Book friending meme and reading roundup
The most adorable, as well as most relevant to my interests, friending meme:
the 'what's on your bookshelf?' friending meme
ETA: intro post for new friends with lots of free time on their hands ;P
[My comment, for ease of looking up]
The Basics
name: Anna/hamsterwoman
age: 36
location: San Francisco, USA
Books!
favourite book: Lord of the Rings, but some of my other top favorites are Master and Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Lolita. favourite author: Love the authors of all of the above, of course, and also Terry Pratchett, Oscar Wilde, favourite book series: I couldn't possibly limit myself to a single series! Huge fan of Discworld, as you can gather from above, and also the Vorkosigan Saga, and am currently fairly obsessed with the Vlad Taltos/Dragaera books and the Rivers of London/Peter Grant series.
favourite screen adaptation of a book: Stardust has the distinction of appealing to me more as a movie than as a book, so that might be the one :) I also do love the LotR movies, of course.
preferred genre: Fantasy (epic, urban, it's all good), with occasional sci-fi and mystery, and I also like SFF books that incorporate mystery elements, like Rivers of London or Asimov's Lije and Daneel books.
print or ebook?: I like both! Last year was the point where I read more books on my Kindle than in print, and the instant gratification is a very strong draw for ebooks. So at this point I guess I prefer ebooks for reading, but go with whatever is most easily available at the library, and tend to buy books in print when I'm buying them with the ulterior motive of lending them to friends :)
currently reading: I just finished Benedict Jacka's Hidden (Alex Verus #5) and am in the middle of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead and Hugh Howey's Wool, plus a couple more back-burner books that I need to go back to, like Red Seas Under Red Skies.
rec something: I habitually go around rec'ing the Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London, and Discworld to all and sundry who have not read them yet, but my most recent rec of choice has been Seraphina (by Rachel Hartman) -- a likeable narrator, fun worldbuilding (math dragons!), and a sequel coming out in about a month :) It's YA technically, I think, but adults seem to enjoy it as well, including adults who generally don't care for YA.
Other
fandoms: Rivers of London is probably my most active fandom at the moment (yay, it's growing!), but also the small Vorkosigan Saga fandom, and I've been getting back in touch with Babylon 5 as a friend is watching the show for the first time and that's made me go back to the rewatch I was doing with my kids (rewatch for me, first time through it with them). Other fandoms I like well enough to include them in ridiculous memes are ASOIAF, AtLA/Korra, Avengers (movie-verse only), Buffy, Chronicles of Amber, Curseworkers, Demon's Noun, Discworld, Dragaera/Vlad Taltos, Dresden Files, Firefly, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Kingkiller Chronicles, Kushiel's Legacy, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock BBC, Temeraire, Tortall.
ships: I tend to not be super shippy, but a couple of my book-sourced OTPs are Aral/Cordelia (Vorkosigan Saga), Vlad/Morrolan (Dragaera), Jaime Lannister/Loras Tyrell (ASOIAF). I also happily crackship across universes, my favorite among those being Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam (from Firefly).
interests: reading (obviously), travel, critters (though sadly I don't have any critters living at home)
other social media accounts: I'm on DW but only use it as backup, and on Tumblr but don't use it at all except to track the tags for my tiny fandoms that don't exist elsewhere. And I have a Goodreads somewhere but don't use it either... I tend to be pretty mono-platform :P
something random about yourself: I'm bilingual (but need to read more in Russian :P), and my two kids are trilingual anything else: I somehow ended up doing there Reading Bingo cards as a result of the Snowflake Challenge, if anybody's interested in playing along, or in the long list of recs that awesome people on my flist provided
*
This seems as good a time as any to post my last couple of book write-ups -- I've been feeling very lazy and putting these off...
3. Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones -- I enjoyed this while I was reading it, but was left with vague feelings of disappointment once I was finished. I guess the thing is, the various point elements work pretty well for me, but as a whole the book didn't gel. Spoilers!
For example, I like some aspects of the worldbuilding: I like that offworlder Trey is always cold, and that people from different planets are distinguished by their build and strength because they grow up in different gravity. I like that Patroclans have evolved to function in dyads because of how common symbiotic organisms are on their planet and that everybody else thinks they're weird. I like the homey, anchored feel of the Orestian setting, with stove-beds and elaborate meals that sound like bento boxes and families working on home-made crafts and things made out of hoobey wool and the various particulars of the hoobey races. But the central, pivotal aspect of worldbuilding -- the severity of the code, the "ghosts" (people who have transgressed and are declared legally dead, whom the living cannot interact with without the aid of a "medium") and para'an (those who have forsaken their families and are made kinless and therefore fair game for pretty much anything), and how stringently people adhere to all these limitiations, the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and yet the way the code is poised to crumble by the end -- I had a hard time buying that.
I liked certain secondary characters and also the way aspects of the more primary character backstory are integrated throughut the narrative: I like the way Trey still thinks like an actor a lot of the time, and feels kinship with Rehur because of the shared profession; I liked Leith's crew of disabled Peacekeeper veterans (and especially the one-eyed pilot who kept flirting with Guil but turned out to be a good guy). I liked Ume-Kai the minne in the Necropolis and Alkres the ult'eir-turned-Patriarch, who is very believably a kid trying to fill an adult role, with his strat-game and occasional breakdowns and doing his best and putting some of the adults to shame, and Ixora the stubborn and impetuous Halex cousin.
But the POV switches are weird, and made it hard for me to really bond with the characters. Trey gets first-person POV and the bulk of the book's narration, and I appreciated Trey being a non-action-hero protagonist, someone who is very much out of his depth in many of the situations he encounters in the second half of the book, but someone willing to risk himself to do the necessary thing even though he'd really rather not. But Rehur never developed into an interesting character for me, and Guill's POV was just odd -- I know it's actually the point that her feral destructiveness, the revenge against the Brandr sort of comes out of nowhere, but it didn't work for me -- I feel like I either needed to see that seeded better from the start or I didn't need her POV at all; as it is, I didn't get anything from it. Maybe what I needed to properly care about both Rehur and Guil was seeing more of what their live as ghost and para' were like, the transition to family to outcast would've been the interesting part, and we got none of that. I would have also liked to see more of Leith, given that her POV opens the book. As it is, the narratives feel like bits cobbled together with large gaps rather than a composite whole (and I also feel a bit weird about books that mix first and third POV without a really good reason for the narrations to be different, like one being a diary and the other not, or the first-person narrator being the framing narrator for the others' stories or whatever.)
I liked a lot of the individual scenes, but the pacing was really weird. There are a lot of scenes that unfold really slowly and feel like they are building to something big -- and then you get nothing, or a minor "plink" that does not justify the build up. And conversely some big things happen too quickly and are merely summarized, or get smudged between POV changes -- I felt like the narrative was randomly running in slo-mo or skipping forward in a way that mostly did not work for me on the macro level, though on the local level many of the scenes were good. The only section where the pacing felt spot-on to me were the hoobey races, with the dangerous but successful trial run, the build-up of excitement to the accident with Ixora's sled and everything that spirals from there. I don't think I usually notice problems of pacing, so I'm not sure what the deal here was -- if Scott were intentionally trying something unusual with pacing that didn't work for me, or if I was just made more sensitive to it by some other quirk of the writing...
Also, this is a total nitpick, but while I like the title and how it plays into the themes of revenge and feud, and also into the names of the planets involved, I feel like the book should've really tied the title into the narrative somehow -- it felt slapped onto the book by some third party as an afterthought...
Quotes:
"[Gazel] had a maddening habit of wrapping every word in meaningless irony."
Trey restraining Ixora after the crash: "I caught her then, no longer daring to be gentle, and pinned her arms with my off-world strength."
Alkres to the Orillon patriarch: "It's been so long since people have behaved properly, I hardly know what I'm supposed to do. Thank you, sor."
"Gazel snorted. "I'm as good a ghost as you are. Who was there to give parachor, with the medium gone? I doubt I could find three kinsmen for it, anyway."
Reading Bingo squares: author I've never read before, queer author, queer protagonist. I don't think Leith counts as a protagonist, but she is a prominent secondary character with a physical disability.
4. Mellissa Scott, Point of Knives -- Astreiant novella, second-world fantasy police procedural with gay protagonists. I enjoyed this a lot. It feels a lot less ambitious, world-building-wise, than the book above, but the world feels neat and coherent, with interesting and unusual touches (the importance of horoscopes, the whole thing with coin being tied to the realm by magic). Some touches I enjoyed were the sense of university structure (you get magical universities pretty often, but even from glimpses it feels like a full-fledged large bureacracy here, which is nice), the way the technology level is not Random Medieval Times (there are pistols, although they don't appear to be at all common, at least in this city), the sense that the world is not monolithic -- there are different cultural mores at play with the characters who are from the city, like Rathe, and outsiders like Eslingen. I also like the way Astreiant police operates quite differently from a modern police force -- for example, "feeing" -- i.e. bribery -- being accepted and even expected, and the fact that Rathe refuses to participate being an oddity. Also liked random bits of slang and metaphor: "summer-sailors" as a term meaning pirates, "lunar dozen" meaning fifteen, "skeleton at the feast", etc.
More importantly, I liked the characters more than in The Kindly Ones, especially Eslingen the soldier among the principals, and Mirremay the half-criminal chief point/head point. But secondaries have a vivid sense, too, the victims' son/grandson, the madam, the disabled university scholar -- it just makes the novella feel lived in (and I think it's especially easy to lose this in a novella set in a larger series by assuming that people are familiar with the characters already). And as for the couple, though Rathe as a character hasn't really grabbed me, I do like their interaction, their chemistry a lot -- the banter, the flirting, the sense that they have lives and priorities and responsibilities outside of the relationship and need to balance those with falling in love -- it was refreshing to see real barriers that they handled maturely and did not build up into impassable roadblocks while also not deluding themselves that those things did not matter. And on a minor note, I was also pleased to see that they kept the relationship and working together solidly separated -- no fooling around on stakeouts and such.
The plot was OK, but I don't expect much from a novella, and I do like the way the setting lends itself to the sort of "forensic magic" + fantasy police procedural subgenre I really enjoy, so I will be definitely reading more in the series (just need to find the novels in a format that will work for me.
Quotes:
"'Any luck with your soldier? No, wait, let me repharse that. Has he been of any help?' Rathe's cheeks were hot."
"I've served with sixteen-quarter nobles who wouldn't sit down at table with common folk under the rank of colonel, and that when the 'table' was the tail of a wagon balanced on a pair of powder kegs."
Reading Bingo squares: queer author, queer protagonist.
5. Benedict Jacka, Hidden (Alex Verus #5) -- fifth verse same as the fourth, but it was a fast, exciting read, which apparently I needed the day of my trip to Oregon, after having to get up at 4 a.m. and fret through a stalled train when I was trying to catch a plane, rather than Max Gladstone or Wool, which I was reading concurrently. I skimmed here and there, because the prose is not, you know, scintillating, but it was fun. MAJOR SPOLERS!
I confess, this outing felt a bit too fluffy after the carnage at the end of the last one. I seriously thought Anne would end up getting herself killed by refusing to fight, or possibly by sacrificing herself to save Alex, and am, honestly, a bit disappointed that ISN'T what happened -- it's not that I hate Anne, though I do find her fairly boring, even with the latest revelations, but it would've felt more fitting to me than everybody managing to escape. I did like not-Anne, though, and wish she would come out and play more often.
Other than that, Richard is back and is creepy, Sagash is creepy. Crystal is just plain annoying. I kind of liked the bored Korean girl dark apprentice and wouldn't mind seeing more of her in the future, and was happy to see Caldera again -- I'd liked her in book 4. Not really a fan of the way Sonder seems to be positioned as a Light antagonist now; I thought in the previous book he was well within bounds to want a break from Alex after what Alex did with the Nightstalkers and also the revelations of his dark apprentice past (I mean, I also think it's OK that Luna and Variam are not fazed by it, but it's OK to have a problem with someone who led kidnappers to a victim and stood by for a long time while said victim was tortured and abused, even if they later tried to help her and suffered a lot as a result), but in this book he is overstepping and being unpleasant and not very competent, which I think cheapens that legitimate reaction. But anyway. I do like the way Alex's relationship with Luna has gotten more and more equal over the books; I like it much better now than we first started. Oh, and the blink is cute, especially in trolling Alex with the "one for yes, two for no" stuff, though I didn't think he really needed a pet. Oh, and the scene with Alex's father was just incredibly random; I suppose it's good to get a bit more background on his mundane life, but the revelation about his relationship with his parents just didn't feel organic to me at all, but fairly tacked on.
I do continue to like that Alex is, you know, not a nice person. The way he gets the best of Darren (begging for his life, then punching him in the balls), his "pep talk" to Anne before the duel (though that was, obviously, for a good cause) -- Alex and Anne had some good interactions in this book: "I think you're setting much-too-high standards for yourself." "Not murdering anyone isn't a high standard." and "[Y]ou're trying to commit a really twisted version of suicide-by-cop? That doesn't make you a good person, it makes you mentally ill." I also liked it that Alex's first approach after Anne is kidnapped is to trade for or buy her back ("I know it's not very heroic, but it's practical"), rathe rthan go charging heroically in -- it's in character, and also pretty refreshing.
I also liked the way he was basically completely frozen with terror and unable to think straight when Richard appeared -- Alex tends to be pretty logical and often even smug, so it's interesting to see him completely undone like that, yet very believable, given his past. I don't find Richard himself very interesting, though he's a well done Affable Evil / Chessmaster villain, but I do like the way Alex interacts with him, and the things we find out about Alex's past through that, like: "Richard gave me a single nod, the same gesture he'd always used when one of us had gotten something right. I felt a moment's satisfaction, followed by a chill. Was I trying to show off for Richard?", and the revelation that Richard bears him no grudge (because why should he? he'd gotten everything he wanted anyway, and had been merely trying to keep Alex from interfering), and also the fact that Alex had not thought he was risking much when he set out to rescue Catherine: "It never occurred to me that I could fail. I knew the mansion inside out, I knew the security systems, and I could predict where everyone was going to be.")
But overall, book 4 is still the highlight of the series for me; this one didn't live up to it.
Quotes:
"For the record, no, at no point did I consider just killing him [Darren], and I suppose some of you are wondering why. Point one: killing the apprentice of a recognized mage would violate the Condord and would give Sagash full grounds to demand that the Keepers arrest me. Point two: it would escalate things and cut off any possibility of negotiation with Sagash, which was still a viable way of resolving this even if it was getting less likely by the minute. Point three: What the hell is wrong with you? You seriously think I want to be responsible for more dead kids? Jesus."
"Assuming Sagash didn't have more than one armed Korean girl hanging aorund his shadow realm (which didn't seem too likely unless he had a very specific fetish)"
Oh, but my favorite moment might've been Luna and Vari channeling House, M.D.:
Sonder was in front of the desk balancing a whiteboard on a stand. He'd brought a set of markers and was testing them on the board to see if they worked.
"What's with the board?" Variam said. [...]
"Maybe it's Lupus," Luna suggested with a grin.
"Nah," Variam said. "It's never Lupus."
Reading Bingo squares: red cover!
I'm also about 70% done with Three Parts Dead and 80% done with Wool.
Here's how I'm doing on CSRB so far:
Serious:
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Random:
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Mix'n'Match:
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
And as a quick reminder, for people who are playing along with the Reading Bingo or would like to:
Cards and recs
Sharing and bragging post
tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb
the 'what's on your bookshelf?' friending meme
ETA: intro post for new friends with lots of free time on their hands ;P
[My comment, for ease of looking up]
The Basics
name: Anna/hamsterwoman
age: 36
location: San Francisco, USA
Books!
favourite book: Lord of the Rings, but some of my other top favorites are Master and Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Lolita. favourite author: Love the authors of all of the above, of course, and also Terry Pratchett, Oscar Wilde, favourite book series: I couldn't possibly limit myself to a single series! Huge fan of Discworld, as you can gather from above, and also the Vorkosigan Saga, and am currently fairly obsessed with the Vlad Taltos/Dragaera books and the Rivers of London/Peter Grant series.
favourite screen adaptation of a book: Stardust has the distinction of appealing to me more as a movie than as a book, so that might be the one :) I also do love the LotR movies, of course.
preferred genre: Fantasy (epic, urban, it's all good), with occasional sci-fi and mystery, and I also like SFF books that incorporate mystery elements, like Rivers of London or Asimov's Lije and Daneel books.
print or ebook?: I like both! Last year was the point where I read more books on my Kindle than in print, and the instant gratification is a very strong draw for ebooks. So at this point I guess I prefer ebooks for reading, but go with whatever is most easily available at the library, and tend to buy books in print when I'm buying them with the ulterior motive of lending them to friends :)
currently reading: I just finished Benedict Jacka's Hidden (Alex Verus #5) and am in the middle of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead and Hugh Howey's Wool, plus a couple more back-burner books that I need to go back to, like Red Seas Under Red Skies.
rec something: I habitually go around rec'ing the Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London, and Discworld to all and sundry who have not read them yet, but my most recent rec of choice has been Seraphina (by Rachel Hartman) -- a likeable narrator, fun worldbuilding (math dragons!), and a sequel coming out in about a month :) It's YA technically, I think, but adults seem to enjoy it as well, including adults who generally don't care for YA.
Other
fandoms: Rivers of London is probably my most active fandom at the moment (yay, it's growing!), but also the small Vorkosigan Saga fandom, and I've been getting back in touch with Babylon 5 as a friend is watching the show for the first time and that's made me go back to the rewatch I was doing with my kids (rewatch for me, first time through it with them). Other fandoms I like well enough to include them in ridiculous memes are ASOIAF, AtLA/Korra, Avengers (movie-verse only), Buffy, Chronicles of Amber, Curseworkers, Demon's Noun, Discworld, Dragaera/Vlad Taltos, Dresden Files, Firefly, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Kingkiller Chronicles, Kushiel's Legacy, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock BBC, Temeraire, Tortall.
ships: I tend to not be super shippy, but a couple of my book-sourced OTPs are Aral/Cordelia (Vorkosigan Saga), Vlad/Morrolan (Dragaera), Jaime Lannister/Loras Tyrell (ASOIAF). I also happily crackship across universes, my favorite among those being Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam (from Firefly).
interests: reading (obviously), travel, critters (though sadly I don't have any critters living at home)
other social media accounts: I'm on DW but only use it as backup, and on Tumblr but don't use it at all except to track the tags for my tiny fandoms that don't exist elsewhere. And I have a Goodreads somewhere but don't use it either... I tend to be pretty mono-platform :P
something random about yourself: I'm bilingual (but need to read more in Russian :P), and my two kids are trilingual anything else: I somehow ended up doing there Reading Bingo cards as a result of the Snowflake Challenge, if anybody's interested in playing along, or in the long list of recs that awesome people on my flist provided
*
This seems as good a time as any to post my last couple of book write-ups -- I've been feeling very lazy and putting these off...
3. Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones -- I enjoyed this while I was reading it, but was left with vague feelings of disappointment once I was finished. I guess the thing is, the various point elements work pretty well for me, but as a whole the book didn't gel. Spoilers!
For example, I like some aspects of the worldbuilding: I like that offworlder Trey is always cold, and that people from different planets are distinguished by their build and strength because they grow up in different gravity. I like that Patroclans have evolved to function in dyads because of how common symbiotic organisms are on their planet and that everybody else thinks they're weird. I like the homey, anchored feel of the Orestian setting, with stove-beds and elaborate meals that sound like bento boxes and families working on home-made crafts and things made out of hoobey wool and the various particulars of the hoobey races. But the central, pivotal aspect of worldbuilding -- the severity of the code, the "ghosts" (people who have transgressed and are declared legally dead, whom the living cannot interact with without the aid of a "medium") and para'an (those who have forsaken their families and are made kinless and therefore fair game for pretty much anything), and how stringently people adhere to all these limitiations, the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and yet the way the code is poised to crumble by the end -- I had a hard time buying that.
I liked certain secondary characters and also the way aspects of the more primary character backstory are integrated throughut the narrative: I like the way Trey still thinks like an actor a lot of the time, and feels kinship with Rehur because of the shared profession; I liked Leith's crew of disabled Peacekeeper veterans (and especially the one-eyed pilot who kept flirting with Guil but turned out to be a good guy). I liked Ume-Kai the minne in the Necropolis and Alkres the ult'eir-turned-Patriarch, who is very believably a kid trying to fill an adult role, with his strat-game and occasional breakdowns and doing his best and putting some of the adults to shame, and Ixora the stubborn and impetuous Halex cousin.
But the POV switches are weird, and made it hard for me to really bond with the characters. Trey gets first-person POV and the bulk of the book's narration, and I appreciated Trey being a non-action-hero protagonist, someone who is very much out of his depth in many of the situations he encounters in the second half of the book, but someone willing to risk himself to do the necessary thing even though he'd really rather not. But Rehur never developed into an interesting character for me, and Guill's POV was just odd -- I know it's actually the point that her feral destructiveness, the revenge against the Brandr sort of comes out of nowhere, but it didn't work for me -- I feel like I either needed to see that seeded better from the start or I didn't need her POV at all; as it is, I didn't get anything from it. Maybe what I needed to properly care about both Rehur and Guil was seeing more of what their live as ghost and para' were like, the transition to family to outcast would've been the interesting part, and we got none of that. I would have also liked to see more of Leith, given that her POV opens the book. As it is, the narratives feel like bits cobbled together with large gaps rather than a composite whole (and I also feel a bit weird about books that mix first and third POV without a really good reason for the narrations to be different, like one being a diary and the other not, or the first-person narrator being the framing narrator for the others' stories or whatever.)
I liked a lot of the individual scenes, but the pacing was really weird. There are a lot of scenes that unfold really slowly and feel like they are building to something big -- and then you get nothing, or a minor "plink" that does not justify the build up. And conversely some big things happen too quickly and are merely summarized, or get smudged between POV changes -- I felt like the narrative was randomly running in slo-mo or skipping forward in a way that mostly did not work for me on the macro level, though on the local level many of the scenes were good. The only section where the pacing felt spot-on to me were the hoobey races, with the dangerous but successful trial run, the build-up of excitement to the accident with Ixora's sled and everything that spirals from there. I don't think I usually notice problems of pacing, so I'm not sure what the deal here was -- if Scott were intentionally trying something unusual with pacing that didn't work for me, or if I was just made more sensitive to it by some other quirk of the writing...
Also, this is a total nitpick, but while I like the title and how it plays into the themes of revenge and feud, and also into the names of the planets involved, I feel like the book should've really tied the title into the narrative somehow -- it felt slapped onto the book by some third party as an afterthought...
Quotes:
"[Gazel] had a maddening habit of wrapping every word in meaningless irony."
Trey restraining Ixora after the crash: "I caught her then, no longer daring to be gentle, and pinned her arms with my off-world strength."
Alkres to the Orillon patriarch: "It's been so long since people have behaved properly, I hardly know what I'm supposed to do. Thank you, sor."
"Gazel snorted. "I'm as good a ghost as you are. Who was there to give parachor, with the medium gone? I doubt I could find three kinsmen for it, anyway."
Reading Bingo squares: author I've never read before, queer author, queer protagonist. I don't think Leith counts as a protagonist, but she is a prominent secondary character with a physical disability.
4. Mellissa Scott, Point of Knives -- Astreiant novella, second-world fantasy police procedural with gay protagonists. I enjoyed this a lot. It feels a lot less ambitious, world-building-wise, than the book above, but the world feels neat and coherent, with interesting and unusual touches (the importance of horoscopes, the whole thing with coin being tied to the realm by magic). Some touches I enjoyed were the sense of university structure (you get magical universities pretty often, but even from glimpses it feels like a full-fledged large bureacracy here, which is nice), the way the technology level is not Random Medieval Times (there are pistols, although they don't appear to be at all common, at least in this city), the sense that the world is not monolithic -- there are different cultural mores at play with the characters who are from the city, like Rathe, and outsiders like Eslingen. I also like the way Astreiant police operates quite differently from a modern police force -- for example, "feeing" -- i.e. bribery -- being accepted and even expected, and the fact that Rathe refuses to participate being an oddity. Also liked random bits of slang and metaphor: "summer-sailors" as a term meaning pirates, "lunar dozen" meaning fifteen, "skeleton at the feast", etc.
More importantly, I liked the characters more than in The Kindly Ones, especially Eslingen the soldier among the principals, and Mirremay the half-criminal chief point/head point. But secondaries have a vivid sense, too, the victims' son/grandson, the madam, the disabled university scholar -- it just makes the novella feel lived in (and I think it's especially easy to lose this in a novella set in a larger series by assuming that people are familiar with the characters already). And as for the couple, though Rathe as a character hasn't really grabbed me, I do like their interaction, their chemistry a lot -- the banter, the flirting, the sense that they have lives and priorities and responsibilities outside of the relationship and need to balance those with falling in love -- it was refreshing to see real barriers that they handled maturely and did not build up into impassable roadblocks while also not deluding themselves that those things did not matter. And on a minor note, I was also pleased to see that they kept the relationship and working together solidly separated -- no fooling around on stakeouts and such.
The plot was OK, but I don't expect much from a novella, and I do like the way the setting lends itself to the sort of "forensic magic" + fantasy police procedural subgenre I really enjoy, so I will be definitely reading more in the series (just need to find the novels in a format that will work for me.
Quotes:
"'Any luck with your soldier? No, wait, let me repharse that. Has he been of any help?' Rathe's cheeks were hot."
"I've served with sixteen-quarter nobles who wouldn't sit down at table with common folk under the rank of colonel, and that when the 'table' was the tail of a wagon balanced on a pair of powder kegs."
Reading Bingo squares: queer author, queer protagonist.
5. Benedict Jacka, Hidden (Alex Verus #5) -- fifth verse same as the fourth, but it was a fast, exciting read, which apparently I needed the day of my trip to Oregon, after having to get up at 4 a.m. and fret through a stalled train when I was trying to catch a plane, rather than Max Gladstone or Wool, which I was reading concurrently. I skimmed here and there, because the prose is not, you know, scintillating, but it was fun. MAJOR SPOLERS!
I confess, this outing felt a bit too fluffy after the carnage at the end of the last one. I seriously thought Anne would end up getting herself killed by refusing to fight, or possibly by sacrificing herself to save Alex, and am, honestly, a bit disappointed that ISN'T what happened -- it's not that I hate Anne, though I do find her fairly boring, even with the latest revelations, but it would've felt more fitting to me than everybody managing to escape. I did like not-Anne, though, and wish she would come out and play more often.
Other than that, Richard is back and is creepy, Sagash is creepy. Crystal is just plain annoying. I kind of liked the bored Korean girl dark apprentice and wouldn't mind seeing more of her in the future, and was happy to see Caldera again -- I'd liked her in book 4. Not really a fan of the way Sonder seems to be positioned as a Light antagonist now; I thought in the previous book he was well within bounds to want a break from Alex after what Alex did with the Nightstalkers and also the revelations of his dark apprentice past (I mean, I also think it's OK that Luna and Variam are not fazed by it, but it's OK to have a problem with someone who led kidnappers to a victim and stood by for a long time while said victim was tortured and abused, even if they later tried to help her and suffered a lot as a result), but in this book he is overstepping and being unpleasant and not very competent, which I think cheapens that legitimate reaction. But anyway. I do like the way Alex's relationship with Luna has gotten more and more equal over the books; I like it much better now than we first started. Oh, and the blink is cute, especially in trolling Alex with the "one for yes, two for no" stuff, though I didn't think he really needed a pet. Oh, and the scene with Alex's father was just incredibly random; I suppose it's good to get a bit more background on his mundane life, but the revelation about his relationship with his parents just didn't feel organic to me at all, but fairly tacked on.
I do continue to like that Alex is, you know, not a nice person. The way he gets the best of Darren (begging for his life, then punching him in the balls), his "pep talk" to Anne before the duel (though that was, obviously, for a good cause) -- Alex and Anne had some good interactions in this book: "I think you're setting much-too-high standards for yourself." "Not murdering anyone isn't a high standard." and "[Y]ou're trying to commit a really twisted version of suicide-by-cop? That doesn't make you a good person, it makes you mentally ill." I also liked it that Alex's first approach after Anne is kidnapped is to trade for or buy her back ("I know it's not very heroic, but it's practical"), rathe rthan go charging heroically in -- it's in character, and also pretty refreshing.
I also liked the way he was basically completely frozen with terror and unable to think straight when Richard appeared -- Alex tends to be pretty logical and often even smug, so it's interesting to see him completely undone like that, yet very believable, given his past. I don't find Richard himself very interesting, though he's a well done Affable Evil / Chessmaster villain, but I do like the way Alex interacts with him, and the things we find out about Alex's past through that, like: "Richard gave me a single nod, the same gesture he'd always used when one of us had gotten something right. I felt a moment's satisfaction, followed by a chill. Was I trying to show off for Richard?", and the revelation that Richard bears him no grudge (because why should he? he'd gotten everything he wanted anyway, and had been merely trying to keep Alex from interfering), and also the fact that Alex had not thought he was risking much when he set out to rescue Catherine: "It never occurred to me that I could fail. I knew the mansion inside out, I knew the security systems, and I could predict where everyone was going to be.")
But overall, book 4 is still the highlight of the series for me; this one didn't live up to it.
Quotes:
"For the record, no, at no point did I consider just killing him [Darren], and I suppose some of you are wondering why. Point one: killing the apprentice of a recognized mage would violate the Condord and would give Sagash full grounds to demand that the Keepers arrest me. Point two: it would escalate things and cut off any possibility of negotiation with Sagash, which was still a viable way of resolving this even if it was getting less likely by the minute. Point three: What the hell is wrong with you? You seriously think I want to be responsible for more dead kids? Jesus."
"Assuming Sagash didn't have more than one armed Korean girl hanging aorund his shadow realm (which didn't seem too likely unless he had a very specific fetish)"
Oh, but my favorite moment might've been Luna and Vari channeling House, M.D.:
Sonder was in front of the desk balancing a whiteboard on a stand. He'd brought a set of markers and was testing them on the board to see if they worked.
"What's with the board?" Variam said. [...]
"Maybe it's Lupus," Luna suggested with a grin.
"Nah," Variam said. "It's never Lupus."
Reading Bingo squares: red cover!
I'm also about 70% done with Three Parts Dead and 80% done with Wool.
Here's how I'm doing on CSRB so far:
Serious:
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Random:
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Mix'n'Match:
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
And as a quick reminder, for people who are playing along with the Reading Bingo or would like to:
Cards and recs
Sharing and bragging post
tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb