Reading roundup (Craft, Locke, Wool), and finishing season 3 of B5
6. Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead -- I'd been meaning to read Max Gladstone's books for ages and then forgetting to look them up at the library, until egelantier hooked me up. I figured the necromantic lawyers would work with my "magic as craft" worldbuilding kink, and they totally do. I enjoyed the worldbuilding greatly, both the the Crafts(wo)men and the Applied Theology, which I hadn't known about. Spoilers from here!
The characters are secondary for me in this one, but I still liked some of them. I like Tara, who is ambitious and proud and does some pretty questionable things but also, as the climax and the end show, has her priorities straight; I feel like you don't get a lot of protagonists (in general, but especially female protagonists) who are that ambitious and non-humble where it's not a flaw for them to get over, so that was nice and refreshing. But my favorite character is probably Raz Pelham, the vampire captain; I couldn't even tell you why, although his conversation with Cat about bloodsucking consent was pretty great ("Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven't you ever heard of consent?"); he just seems like a good guy and he was the one I was hoping would survive intact, and was happy he did. Abelard is not bad, either; I especially liked that, after carrying Kos within him all this time, the only thing he asks for/arranges for himself is a less sucky prayer shift. And I like the somewhat mutually baffled respect that grows between him and Tara as they talk about the things they are each competent in, completely outside the other's milieu. Alexander Denovo was a pretty good villain, and Cardinal Gustave was someone I was sorry to see be the murderer of Judge Cabot because I had liked him, but I also bought his motivation; I liked Elayne and found her admirable/terrifying in proper measure; basically, everyone except Cat worked as intended for me, I think.
But more than characters, I think I liked the writing. I found especially fun the schtick where the high-flown epic style is mixed with the everyday, or with technical jargon, or the everyday with horror. Some of my favorite bits:
"deific couplings might uncouple or misalign, grace exchangers overheat, prayer wheels spin free of their prayer axles"
"Just as the sentence [of legalese] was about to mean something, a particularly vicious gust tore the page from her fingers"
Tara: "Why are we over the ocean?"
Ms K: "Why do you think?"
Tara: "This is a test."
Ms K: "Of course it's a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions."
"the awe at how well divine hands had made a thing, and the insatiable need to improve on that design."
"The second, and far more insidious, obstacle to surviving such a fall is the pleasant inevitability of death."
"Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face."
"She excused herself from the conversation with a nod. The assassination attempt she thwarted according to club regulations, which politely but firmly requested memebers not damage the premises in their business dealings. [...] And she accepted the bridge date form the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next weveral weeks."
"You kep the rituals, worshiped her, sacrificed to her, to keep her alive. Even though she could do nothing for you, whatsover, other than love and be loved by you? [...] It makes you the most stupid, singleminded collection of religious fanatics I've ever come across. I mean [...] I could not imagine ever doing something like that, but it's terribly sweet."
Gladstone writes some very fun similes/metaphors and general descriptions, too: "a tremor in her soul like a caress from everyone who had ever wronged her", "His angular mouth had trapped an approving smile and did not relinquish it no matter how it struggled", "a heavy diffuse collapse behind him, like a hundred pounds of dead insects falling from the ceiling", "a pair of leather breeches more breach than leather".
Definitely planning on continuing on with the series.
bingo: author I've never read before, protagonist of color, female protagonist, book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love; maybe more than two protagonists? IDK if Cat counts as a full-fledged one, though she gets multiple POV bits
7. Hugh Howey, Wool -- My friend R gave me this book several birthdays ago, after telling me how she had been blown away by it. It started out as a self-published short story (which became part 1 of the novel), followed by four novellas, also self-published, with reader feedback it sounds like (so, something like copperbadge does with Extribulum, I guess), which was eventually picked up by a major publisher and became a NYT best seller. The original short story is really good! The writing was a bit clunky, for my taste, but the twist ending worked for me really well, and after finishing the short story I definitely wanted to read more.
The rest of the book... Not bad, but I was less impressed. Spoilers, including for some major twists! The novellas are linked by setting, characters, and plot, but they didn't feel to me like a single coherent book -- there are different conventions they use (like, epigraphs from Shakespeare for part 4, alternating sections with location headings in part 5) which bugged me in their non-symmetry. The twists continue to be interesting (though I think the original one, in the first part, is still my favorite), and the worldbuilding is neat -- at the macro level the postapocalyptic underground-dwelling setting is creepy, and the details are nicely solid -- lots of sensory detail from the farms, the machinery, the metal staircase that runs the entire length of the silo.
The writing was definitely the weakest point for me, though. He has these little authorial tics like "her young head" and "his old voice", as well as a tendency to misapply adjectives (e.g. "her withered gaze") that were driving me nuts by the end of the book, even though it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. And it felt like somebody had told him characters needed to show emotion, so everybody is always crying in this book. Granted, lots of terrible and tragic things happen, but people have more than one way of showing emotion, and all the crying stretched my credulity.
And because of the mediocre writing, none of the characters came alive for me. I'd liked old deputy Marnes, but he wasn't around much, and neither was mayor Jahns, who had the potential to be an interesting character, too. Walker, the old electrician, was kind of neat, also -- I guess I just like the way Howey writes old people. I liked Juliette well enough, best of the POVs we get -- I like her mechanic's approach to both people and problem-solving -- but she was not anyone I was emotionally invested in or really wanted to know more about. And Lukas I just kind of found embarrassing. I'm not even going to talk about his falling in love with Juliette and vice versa, because that's embarrassing squared. Oh, and Bernard actually had some moments of being interesting -- I thought it was pretty neat that he realizes how fucked up the system he is helping to maintain and proliferate is, but feels himself a victim of the people who set it up, long ago, powerless to change anything. Too bad the rest of his characterization did not support this and was just plain melodramatic villain.
I found some sections dragged on for me, Juliette jury-rigging stuff, mostly -- not because all the detail wasn't interesting (it was), but the pacing felt off, I felt like they weren't building tension properly because they went on too long. And the ending was more open-ended than I had expected, although that's not necessarily a criticism -- open-ended, with hope that things could be better at both silo 18 and silo 17, actually felt like the right note to strike.
So, all in all, it was one of those books that I enjoyed reading but wished it had been written by a better craftsman so that I could have enjoyed it MORE. But for a self-published first novel, it's definitely not bad at all! And the world is a neat one, which I'm glad to have gotten to know. There is a prequel series that apparently deals with the situation that led to the state of the world in this book, and I'm curious to check it out. Plus I assume that was more traditionally published, and maybe I'll like the writing better with an editor's inputs? But the short story/part 1, which is a freebie on Amazon is very much worth reading.
bingo: author I've never read before, book given to me as a gift, rec from friend, self-published book, red cover
8. Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2) -- So, as evidenced by the fact that I swallowed down Lies in like a day and it took me roughly two and a half years to read this one, I think it's safe to say I didn't love the sequel as much as the original. I didn't DISlike it by any means, I enjoyed it rather a lot actually! But not with the same caper glee that was so great about Lies. Spoilers! A lot of it was the ships -- I have come to the conclusion that I find ships deeply, deeply boring, and any time a swashbuckling adventure gets mired in ships, I automatically become less interested in it (see, for example, my progress through book 2/3 of Inda vs the first one, the second set of Robin Hobb doorstoppers, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting). Even aside from ships, I found myself missing Camorr (Tal Verrar didn't feel nearly so lived in, partly because we spent much less time there -- because of the goddamn ships -- partly because Locke and Jean did not grow up and build their lives there), I found myself missing the characters from the first book (I don't even mean the ones Scott Lynch killed off, though those too, of course, but even the secondary ones like the Salvaras and Dona V).
I like a number of the new characters -- Zamira the badass pirate mommy, Ezri the well-educated and kickass first mate, Scholar Treganne and her pet spider (but I had a hard time believing she would shoot at a guy holding a dead-man's switch), Rodanov the pirate with a classical education and knowledge of Capa Barsavi in his professor of rhetoric days (I especially liked the bit where he and Jean argue Therin plays; as Drakasha says, "I can't tell if you two are about to pull steel or found a mystery cult."), Caldris, whose job it is to make seamen out of Locke and Jean. But Rodanov is a bit player, Caldris dies early on, Ezri... yeah, she gets a heroic sacrifice and all, but that still sucked. Actually, my favorite new character overall was probably Zamira's daughter Cosetta, who is awesome, but when one's favorite character in the book is a toddler, that also says something. Requin was interesting, but not as interesting to me as I thought he was to the author (and I tend to be pretty easy for mob bosses). Stragos had the potential to be interesting -- I liked his mechanical insects collection, as you might expect -- but never developed into feeling like a real character.
IDK, it just felt like a very transitional book, with a lot of setup and moving things and characters into place but with not much in the way of consistent payoff. I enjoyed it whenever I was reading it, and the Jean and Locke moments, especially towards the end, are every bit as good as in the first book, but they diluted with a lot of other stuff I really didn't care about. Still, the good parts include: Jean and Locke each being willing to be the one to go assassinate Stragos on their own to protect the other, Locke trying to convince Jean to sell him out to the sailors when the whole Ravelle things falls apart on the Red Messenger, Locke pointing out to Jean that he knows he's told Ezri his real name ("I'm not angry, Jean. I'm just showing off.") and "Maybe you could do better-- but I know for a solid fact that she couldn't. Ever."), Locke pouring the single dose of antidote they have into Jean's wine and pointing out that Jean was willing to forcefeed it to him when Jean is angry about not being given a choice (this is so them), just the overall Locke-and-Jean-ness throughout, which was my favorite thing about the first book and the main reason I persevered with the second one. Although I have to say that Locke believing that Jean had really turned on him, even if he couldn't see the handsignal for lying is hard for me to believe, after everything they've been through, even given Locke's thoughts on what he does and does not deserve. But there are so many great moments of cameraderie, including the silly ones early on, before things go pearshaped, like (dyswidt) Locke and Jean fighting about Jean eating the cores of pears ("Go on, eat your other core; it's got a nice juicy pear wrapped around it"), eating little pastry version of themselves ("Alas, poor Locke and Jean." "They died of consumption."), Locke eating Jean's food, arguing about fiction vs non-fiction reading, and the absolutely hilarious situation when they are about to be robbed by a bandit when they're on their climbing ropes, and the reverse-burglary + non-assassination of Cordo, both of which made me laugh aloud.
I also liked Jean and Ezri a lot as a couple, quoting plays at each other and kicking ass together and separately, and find it really annoying that Lynch killed her off, especially if Locke is going to find a happy ending with Sabetha at some point down the line, because, dammit, Jean deserves some happiness, and Ezri was a really fun character in her own right, and I would've been happy to see her join the duo like they'd planned. My favorite Ezri line was probably from the bit when Jean and Ezri had just gotten together in her cabin and the crew was cheering, and she hollered, "Put your names on a list, so I can kill you all in the morning! [...] Or maybe it'll have to wait for the afternoon."
Plot-wise, the ship battles made me want to skim, the sailor training ditto, except for Locke's creative incorporation of nautical terms into his swearing. The caper was exciting, but that was, like 20 pages out of 800 (but I appreciate both the misdirection with the vault and the paintings they go to such trouble to steal being fakes and the real ones being locked up in the vault after all).
Quotes:
Requin to Locke, after he finds out Locke is planning to get into his vault: "But this is silly -- we could sit here all night contrasting cocklengths. I say mine is five feet long, you say yours is six, and shoots fire upon command."
Jean and Locke in pretty much any situation ever:
Drakasha: "Just this morning, [Jean], you friend here tried to convince me to let him do exactly what you're planning right now."
"What?" Jean glared at Locke. [...] "You miserable little sneak, how could you--"
"What? How dare I contemplate what you were going to do to me? You self-righteous strutting cock, I'll--"
"What?" shouted Jean.
"--I'll throw myself at you, and you'll beat the shit out of me," said Locke. "And then you'll feel awful! How about that, huh?"
I am looking forward to book 3 (which I have on hand thanks to aome), at least parts of which are flashbacks and take place in Camorr, plus more Bastards and Father Chains and other things I've missed in this one.
bingo: second book in a series, book with red cover, book given to me as a gift (waves at aome). Sort of book I started and did not finish? I never fully set it aside, I was just reading it very, very infrequently. Also, I wouldn't call her a protagonist, as that's clearly reserved for Jean and Locke, but there's a prominent secondary character of color (Zamira), and a secondary? tertiary? character with a physical disability (Selendri).
Bonus:
- So lunasariel's original link to Scott Lynch's journal was to this post on what sexy Halloween costumes the characters would wear (my favorites are Dona V, the Salvaras, the Sanzas, and Jean) and then someone actually drew the kids and Lorenzo.
- Also, Sir-Heartsalot drew some characters (implied spoilers for the first two books)
Bingo Progress:
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
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
Completion: 6/25 squares
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Completion: 5/25 squares
Free Space: Lies of Locke Lamora
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Completion: 5/25 squares
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
*
Rodents and I also finished off B5 season 3: HUGE SPOILERS for the last 2 eps of s3
Shadow Dancing (3x21) -- This has the big Shadows vs good guys battle, but I mainly remember it for the funny bits: Marcus offering to teach Ivanova Minbari (with "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever met"), Ivanova vs the Minbari bed (which scene made all of us LOL, and then L pointed out that she had cobbled together a bed on the floor out of all the little triangular pillows), "Who wants to live forever?" 'I do, actually.", the look Ivanova gives Marcus when he volunteers that he also likes gardens and four-poster beds. Also Delenn and Sheridan were cute, too -- the look on his face when she says they will spend the night together, and then explains that it's not like that, and that the Minbari woman "can even cut off his... access to her family" (the rodents laughed so hard XP). (I do wonder, though, why the female gets to watch the male sleep, but not the other way around. We do seem to see a lot more male Minbari out and about -- is there gender imbalance? It doesn't seem like Minbari culture lacks gender equality when it comes to the way Delenn is treated by her male peers, but there don't seem to be a lot of female Minbari in positions of power...) I'm mixed on the Franklin aprt of this episode. I like the 'inner asshole" (as L called him) version of himself that he meets, I like the reunion with Garibaldi ("I found [...] a short sharp kick to the head." "I could've given you that! All you had to do was ask." "You would've enjoyed it too much." and "Were you worried about me? I'm touched." "Hell no, I just can't afford to lose another 30 credits"), and Franklin going back to bossing people around even from the wheelchair. Injured Franklin hallucinating and the hear-to-heart with Sheridan, the revelations/realizations about always running away -- those worked for me less well. (Thuough apparently a lot of that storyline is actually autobiographical for JMS, which he also apparently did not realize while he was writing the ep. That makes it more interesting...) And then Anna Sheridan showed up, and the rodents were suitably intrigued. (O wanted to know why people kept looking at her, and apparently that wasn't what JMS had intended.) Also, as a random note, the "Z minus x days' thing has been really bothering the rodents.
Z'ha'dum (3x22) -- before we started watching the show, L said, "Of course you shouldn't go to a place that has "doom" in its name." Yes. XD And when Sheridan saw Kosh behind him in the mirror and then looked back and there was no-one there, L said, "Vampires!", and I said, "Naoborot", and then we both chorused: "Reverse vampires!", which continued to amuse us for a while after. Oh, and when Sheridan was getting the monologue about Vorlons vs Shadows, and "the Vorlons are like your parents, they want you to play nice, clean your room", both rodents looked meaningfully at me. XP
I remember watching this episode, remember Sheridan's jump and the White Star hurtling towards Z'ha'dum; the smaller details I have pretty much forgotten against the backdrop of that, so it was almost like watching it for the first time: Garibaldi talking to Sheridan about the weather, Justin puttering about with the tea service, Anna Sheridan's perky, earnest voice speaking for the Shadows. (Incidentally: Lurker's Guide had JMS confirm that the wedding photos of John and Anna Sheridan are actual photos from Bruce Boxleitner and Melissa Gilbert's wedding, which is pretty cool.) And eep, Garibaldi. I mean, I know what happens to him, but still/even more so: eep.
Also, it occurs to me that somebody should write a B5/Vorkosiverse crossover in which a Betan Survey ship stumbles through a wormhole into the B5 verse, because much as Aral/Cordelia is my OTP, I would kind of like to see the epic, EPIC crush Sheridan would be sure to have on Cordelia. I mean, she's a redhead who does space exploration like Anna, and she's got a strong spiritual side -- she is basically perfect.
The characters are secondary for me in this one, but I still liked some of them. I like Tara, who is ambitious and proud and does some pretty questionable things but also, as the climax and the end show, has her priorities straight; I feel like you don't get a lot of protagonists (in general, but especially female protagonists) who are that ambitious and non-humble where it's not a flaw for them to get over, so that was nice and refreshing. But my favorite character is probably Raz Pelham, the vampire captain; I couldn't even tell you why, although his conversation with Cat about bloodsucking consent was pretty great ("Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven't you ever heard of consent?"); he just seems like a good guy and he was the one I was hoping would survive intact, and was happy he did. Abelard is not bad, either; I especially liked that, after carrying Kos within him all this time, the only thing he asks for/arranges for himself is a less sucky prayer shift. And I like the somewhat mutually baffled respect that grows between him and Tara as they talk about the things they are each competent in, completely outside the other's milieu. Alexander Denovo was a pretty good villain, and Cardinal Gustave was someone I was sorry to see be the murderer of Judge Cabot because I had liked him, but I also bought his motivation; I liked Elayne and found her admirable/terrifying in proper measure; basically, everyone except Cat worked as intended for me, I think.
But more than characters, I think I liked the writing. I found especially fun the schtick where the high-flown epic style is mixed with the everyday, or with technical jargon, or the everyday with horror. Some of my favorite bits:
"deific couplings might uncouple or misalign, grace exchangers overheat, prayer wheels spin free of their prayer axles"
"Just as the sentence [of legalese] was about to mean something, a particularly vicious gust tore the page from her fingers"
Tara: "Why are we over the ocean?"
Ms K: "Why do you think?"
Tara: "This is a test."
Ms K: "Of course it's a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions."
"the awe at how well divine hands had made a thing, and the insatiable need to improve on that design."
"The second, and far more insidious, obstacle to surviving such a fall is the pleasant inevitability of death."
"Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face."
"She excused herself from the conversation with a nod. The assassination attempt she thwarted according to club regulations, which politely but firmly requested memebers not damage the premises in their business dealings. [...] And she accepted the bridge date form the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next weveral weeks."
"You kep the rituals, worshiped her, sacrificed to her, to keep her alive. Even though she could do nothing for you, whatsover, other than love and be loved by you? [...] It makes you the most stupid, singleminded collection of religious fanatics I've ever come across. I mean [...] I could not imagine ever doing something like that, but it's terribly sweet."
Gladstone writes some very fun similes/metaphors and general descriptions, too: "a tremor in her soul like a caress from everyone who had ever wronged her", "His angular mouth had trapped an approving smile and did not relinquish it no matter how it struggled", "a heavy diffuse collapse behind him, like a hundred pounds of dead insects falling from the ceiling", "a pair of leather breeches more breach than leather".
Definitely planning on continuing on with the series.
bingo: author I've never read before, protagonist of color, female protagonist, book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love; maybe more than two protagonists? IDK if Cat counts as a full-fledged one, though she gets multiple POV bits
7. Hugh Howey, Wool -- My friend R gave me this book several birthdays ago, after telling me how she had been blown away by it. It started out as a self-published short story (which became part 1 of the novel), followed by four novellas, also self-published, with reader feedback it sounds like (so, something like copperbadge does with Extribulum, I guess), which was eventually picked up by a major publisher and became a NYT best seller. The original short story is really good! The writing was a bit clunky, for my taste, but the twist ending worked for me really well, and after finishing the short story I definitely wanted to read more.
The rest of the book... Not bad, but I was less impressed. Spoilers, including for some major twists! The novellas are linked by setting, characters, and plot, but they didn't feel to me like a single coherent book -- there are different conventions they use (like, epigraphs from Shakespeare for part 4, alternating sections with location headings in part 5) which bugged me in their non-symmetry. The twists continue to be interesting (though I think the original one, in the first part, is still my favorite), and the worldbuilding is neat -- at the macro level the postapocalyptic underground-dwelling setting is creepy, and the details are nicely solid -- lots of sensory detail from the farms, the machinery, the metal staircase that runs the entire length of the silo.
The writing was definitely the weakest point for me, though. He has these little authorial tics like "her young head" and "his old voice", as well as a tendency to misapply adjectives (e.g. "her withered gaze") that were driving me nuts by the end of the book, even though it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. And it felt like somebody had told him characters needed to show emotion, so everybody is always crying in this book. Granted, lots of terrible and tragic things happen, but people have more than one way of showing emotion, and all the crying stretched my credulity.
And because of the mediocre writing, none of the characters came alive for me. I'd liked old deputy Marnes, but he wasn't around much, and neither was mayor Jahns, who had the potential to be an interesting character, too. Walker, the old electrician, was kind of neat, also -- I guess I just like the way Howey writes old people. I liked Juliette well enough, best of the POVs we get -- I like her mechanic's approach to both people and problem-solving -- but she was not anyone I was emotionally invested in or really wanted to know more about. And Lukas I just kind of found embarrassing. I'm not even going to talk about his falling in love with Juliette and vice versa, because that's embarrassing squared. Oh, and Bernard actually had some moments of being interesting -- I thought it was pretty neat that he realizes how fucked up the system he is helping to maintain and proliferate is, but feels himself a victim of the people who set it up, long ago, powerless to change anything. Too bad the rest of his characterization did not support this and was just plain melodramatic villain.
I found some sections dragged on for me, Juliette jury-rigging stuff, mostly -- not because all the detail wasn't interesting (it was), but the pacing felt off, I felt like they weren't building tension properly because they went on too long. And the ending was more open-ended than I had expected, although that's not necessarily a criticism -- open-ended, with hope that things could be better at both silo 18 and silo 17, actually felt like the right note to strike.
So, all in all, it was one of those books that I enjoyed reading but wished it had been written by a better craftsman so that I could have enjoyed it MORE. But for a self-published first novel, it's definitely not bad at all! And the world is a neat one, which I'm glad to have gotten to know. There is a prequel series that apparently deals with the situation that led to the state of the world in this book, and I'm curious to check it out. Plus I assume that was more traditionally published, and maybe I'll like the writing better with an editor's inputs? But the short story/part 1, which is a freebie on Amazon is very much worth reading.
bingo: author I've never read before, book given to me as a gift, rec from friend, self-published book, red cover
8. Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2) -- So, as evidenced by the fact that I swallowed down Lies in like a day and it took me roughly two and a half years to read this one, I think it's safe to say I didn't love the sequel as much as the original. I didn't DISlike it by any means, I enjoyed it rather a lot actually! But not with the same caper glee that was so great about Lies. Spoilers! A lot of it was the ships -- I have come to the conclusion that I find ships deeply, deeply boring, and any time a swashbuckling adventure gets mired in ships, I automatically become less interested in it (see, for example, my progress through book 2/3 of Inda vs the first one, the second set of Robin Hobb doorstoppers, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting). Even aside from ships, I found myself missing Camorr (Tal Verrar didn't feel nearly so lived in, partly because we spent much less time there -- because of the goddamn ships -- partly because Locke and Jean did not grow up and build their lives there), I found myself missing the characters from the first book (I don't even mean the ones Scott Lynch killed off, though those too, of course, but even the secondary ones like the Salvaras and Dona V).
I like a number of the new characters -- Zamira the badass pirate mommy, Ezri the well-educated and kickass first mate, Scholar Treganne and her pet spider (but I had a hard time believing she would shoot at a guy holding a dead-man's switch), Rodanov the pirate with a classical education and knowledge of Capa Barsavi in his professor of rhetoric days (I especially liked the bit where he and Jean argue Therin plays; as Drakasha says, "I can't tell if you two are about to pull steel or found a mystery cult."), Caldris, whose job it is to make seamen out of Locke and Jean. But Rodanov is a bit player, Caldris dies early on, Ezri... yeah, she gets a heroic sacrifice and all, but that still sucked. Actually, my favorite new character overall was probably Zamira's daughter Cosetta, who is awesome, but when one's favorite character in the book is a toddler, that also says something. Requin was interesting, but not as interesting to me as I thought he was to the author (and I tend to be pretty easy for mob bosses). Stragos had the potential to be interesting -- I liked his mechanical insects collection, as you might expect -- but never developed into feeling like a real character.
IDK, it just felt like a very transitional book, with a lot of setup and moving things and characters into place but with not much in the way of consistent payoff. I enjoyed it whenever I was reading it, and the Jean and Locke moments, especially towards the end, are every bit as good as in the first book, but they diluted with a lot of other stuff I really didn't care about. Still, the good parts include: Jean and Locke each being willing to be the one to go assassinate Stragos on their own to protect the other, Locke trying to convince Jean to sell him out to the sailors when the whole Ravelle things falls apart on the Red Messenger, Locke pointing out to Jean that he knows he's told Ezri his real name ("I'm not angry, Jean. I'm just showing off.") and "Maybe you could do better-- but I know for a solid fact that she couldn't. Ever."), Locke pouring the single dose of antidote they have into Jean's wine and pointing out that Jean was willing to forcefeed it to him when Jean is angry about not being given a choice (this is so them), just the overall Locke-and-Jean-ness throughout, which was my favorite thing about the first book and the main reason I persevered with the second one. Although I have to say that Locke believing that Jean had really turned on him, even if he couldn't see the handsignal for lying is hard for me to believe, after everything they've been through, even given Locke's thoughts on what he does and does not deserve. But there are so many great moments of cameraderie, including the silly ones early on, before things go pearshaped, like (dyswidt) Locke and Jean fighting about Jean eating the cores of pears ("Go on, eat your other core; it's got a nice juicy pear wrapped around it"), eating little pastry version of themselves ("Alas, poor Locke and Jean." "They died of consumption."), Locke eating Jean's food, arguing about fiction vs non-fiction reading, and the absolutely hilarious situation when they are about to be robbed by a bandit when they're on their climbing ropes, and the reverse-burglary + non-assassination of Cordo, both of which made me laugh aloud.
I also liked Jean and Ezri a lot as a couple, quoting plays at each other and kicking ass together and separately, and find it really annoying that Lynch killed her off, especially if Locke is going to find a happy ending with Sabetha at some point down the line, because, dammit, Jean deserves some happiness, and Ezri was a really fun character in her own right, and I would've been happy to see her join the duo like they'd planned. My favorite Ezri line was probably from the bit when Jean and Ezri had just gotten together in her cabin and the crew was cheering, and she hollered, "Put your names on a list, so I can kill you all in the morning! [...] Or maybe it'll have to wait for the afternoon."
Plot-wise, the ship battles made me want to skim, the sailor training ditto, except for Locke's creative incorporation of nautical terms into his swearing. The caper was exciting, but that was, like 20 pages out of 800 (but I appreciate both the misdirection with the vault and the paintings they go to such trouble to steal being fakes and the real ones being locked up in the vault after all).
Quotes:
Requin to Locke, after he finds out Locke is planning to get into his vault: "But this is silly -- we could sit here all night contrasting cocklengths. I say mine is five feet long, you say yours is six, and shoots fire upon command."
Jean and Locke in pretty much any situation ever:
Drakasha: "Just this morning, [Jean], you friend here tried to convince me to let him do exactly what you're planning right now."
"What?" Jean glared at Locke. [...] "You miserable little sneak, how could you--"
"What? How dare I contemplate what you were going to do to me? You self-righteous strutting cock, I'll--"
"What?" shouted Jean.
"--I'll throw myself at you, and you'll beat the shit out of me," said Locke. "And then you'll feel awful! How about that, huh?"
I am looking forward to book 3 (which I have on hand thanks to aome), at least parts of which are flashbacks and take place in Camorr, plus more Bastards and Father Chains and other things I've missed in this one.
bingo: second book in a series, book with red cover, book given to me as a gift (waves at aome). Sort of book I started and did not finish? I never fully set it aside, I was just reading it very, very infrequently. Also, I wouldn't call her a protagonist, as that's clearly reserved for Jean and Locke, but there's a prominent secondary character of color (Zamira), and a secondary? tertiary? character with a physical disability (Selendri).
Bonus:
- So lunasariel's original link to Scott Lynch's journal was to this post on what sexy Halloween costumes the characters would wear (my favorites are Dona V, the Salvaras, the Sanzas, and Jean) and then someone actually drew the kids and Lorenzo.
- Also, Sir-Heartsalot drew some characters (implied spoilers for the first two books)
Bingo Progress:
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
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
Completion: 6/25 squares
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Completion: 5/25 squares
Free Space: Lies of Locke Lamora
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Completion: 5/25 squares
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
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Rodents and I also finished off B5 season 3: HUGE SPOILERS for the last 2 eps of s3
Shadow Dancing (3x21) -- This has the big Shadows vs good guys battle, but I mainly remember it for the funny bits: Marcus offering to teach Ivanova Minbari (with "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever met"), Ivanova vs the Minbari bed (which scene made all of us LOL, and then L pointed out that she had cobbled together a bed on the floor out of all the little triangular pillows), "Who wants to live forever?" 'I do, actually.", the look Ivanova gives Marcus when he volunteers that he also likes gardens and four-poster beds. Also Delenn and Sheridan were cute, too -- the look on his face when she says they will spend the night together, and then explains that it's not like that, and that the Minbari woman "can even cut off his... access to her family" (the rodents laughed so hard XP). (I do wonder, though, why the female gets to watch the male sleep, but not the other way around. We do seem to see a lot more male Minbari out and about -- is there gender imbalance? It doesn't seem like Minbari culture lacks gender equality when it comes to the way Delenn is treated by her male peers, but there don't seem to be a lot of female Minbari in positions of power...) I'm mixed on the Franklin aprt of this episode. I like the 'inner asshole" (as L called him) version of himself that he meets, I like the reunion with Garibaldi ("I found [...] a short sharp kick to the head." "I could've given you that! All you had to do was ask." "You would've enjoyed it too much." and "Were you worried about me? I'm touched." "Hell no, I just can't afford to lose another 30 credits"), and Franklin going back to bossing people around even from the wheelchair. Injured Franklin hallucinating and the hear-to-heart with Sheridan, the revelations/realizations about always running away -- those worked for me less well. (Thuough apparently a lot of that storyline is actually autobiographical for JMS, which he also apparently did not realize while he was writing the ep. That makes it more interesting...) And then Anna Sheridan showed up, and the rodents were suitably intrigued. (O wanted to know why people kept looking at her, and apparently that wasn't what JMS had intended.) Also, as a random note, the "Z minus x days' thing has been really bothering the rodents.
Z'ha'dum (3x22) -- before we started watching the show, L said, "Of course you shouldn't go to a place that has "doom" in its name." Yes. XD And when Sheridan saw Kosh behind him in the mirror and then looked back and there was no-one there, L said, "Vampires!", and I said, "Naoborot", and then we both chorused: "Reverse vampires!", which continued to amuse us for a while after. Oh, and when Sheridan was getting the monologue about Vorlons vs Shadows, and "the Vorlons are like your parents, they want you to play nice, clean your room", both rodents looked meaningfully at me. XP
I remember watching this episode, remember Sheridan's jump and the White Star hurtling towards Z'ha'dum; the smaller details I have pretty much forgotten against the backdrop of that, so it was almost like watching it for the first time: Garibaldi talking to Sheridan about the weather, Justin puttering about with the tea service, Anna Sheridan's perky, earnest voice speaking for the Shadows. (Incidentally: Lurker's Guide had JMS confirm that the wedding photos of John and Anna Sheridan are actual photos from Bruce Boxleitner and Melissa Gilbert's wedding, which is pretty cool.) And eep, Garibaldi. I mean, I know what happens to him, but still/even more so: eep.
Also, it occurs to me that somebody should write a B5/Vorkosiverse crossover in which a Betan Survey ship stumbles through a wormhole into the B5 verse, because much as Aral/Cordelia is my OTP, I would kind of like to see the epic, EPIC crush Sheridan would be sure to have on Cordelia. I mean, she's a redhead who does space exploration like Anna, and she's got a strong spiritual side -- she is basically perfect.