Reading roundup, including Mistborn (finally) and Werewolf Marines, Ulysses Pact #1
Happy Passover and happy Easter to all who celebrate! I need to make a real update (lots of things have been happening!) and answer comments and comment on people's entries, but for now, have a reading roundup, as I've been busy there, too:
Ulysses Pact: Commenced and currently at 10% (location 1092). It's actually not as hard going as I expected it to be -- the writing is really enjoyable, even if I have no idea why it's doing what it seems to be doing. The hyperdescription of every action takes getting used to, but also fills me with admiration for how sharply it draws the tiny details. Mostly, though, I'm just reading it as I would poetry, paying more attention to alliteration and rhythm than anything I'd normally be focusing on in prose, like characters or dialogue. I did kind of like Buck Mulligan, though. Also, given how few pages I've read, there's been rather more talk of "I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews" (from multiple mouths) than I had expected
Quotes so far:
"The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea."
"Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide."
"The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close."
"pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock."
Bloom's cat: "She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth."
"his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety."
Also! now that we've actually started, a thought: since the novel takes place on June 16, 1904, should we aim to finish up our pact by June 16? That gives us 11 weeks of reading instead of 13, but feels fitting. Since this is a very loose pact, we can definitely stay with end of June as the overall goal, but I'm going to try for the 16th.
Regular reading roundup:
14. R.J.Palacio, Wonder -- O's reading group is doing this book at school, which meant he had to read really slowly to keep up with the others, to his great frustration. I thought I'd check it out because of that, and because the cover is really striking, and also because, while I had things in mind for the "physical disability" bingo square, this seemed to fit really well, as well as being about a kid (another square). So, I picked it up one Monday after work, and read the whole evening, and the following evening, until I was done. It's been a while since a kidlit book clicked for me, but this one did. And I quite enjoyed it until the ending, which somewhat spoiled the book for me. I understand it had to end on a positive note, and I'm glad it did, but it felt too saccharine all of a sudden, and one particular authorial choice left a bad taste in my mouth. Spoilers!
So, Wonder is mostly narrated by August (Auggie), a ten-year-old with a severe cranio-facial deformity, who is in all other respects a normal ten/eleven-year-old kid -- a very smart, funny kid who likes playing video games, reading Tolkien and C.S.Lewis, and is obsessed with Star Wars. August's narration opens and closes the book, and I thought the whole thing was in his POV when I started, but it's not. We also get chapters of various length narrated by his older sister Via, two kids in his class (he is attending school for the first time starting with fifth grade), Summer and Jack, Via's new boyfriend and Via's best friend, who's known Auggie since he was a baby and has a special relationship with him. Some of these POVs worked better for me than others. I liked Auggie's and Via's POVs best -- and, in fact, wished we had gotten to hear more from Via, though we get her viewpoint early enough that it gives an adequate feel for all her later actions. Jack's POV felt pretty pointless to me, especially the 'authentically misspelled' Facebook message exchanges, but O said it was his favorite, so it could be a target audience thing. I didn't get much out of Summer's POV either, beyond the confirmation that she's a really nice girl, and Justin (Via's boyfriend) POV just feels completely extraneous -- and is written without capital letters or quotation marks, which just seemed really silly. (This annoyed O even more than it annoyed me; he (semi-jokingly) complained to Mr B that their Social Issues Book Club book is definitely not helping them learn punctuation :P) Miranda's POV was more relevant and also more interesting... but it's introduced so late that it feels kind of tacked on. I would've been very happy if the book had just done alternating Auggie and Via POVs with the other perspectives coming out in conversation with these characters, but ah well. Other than Justin's, I didn't feel like the other POVs detracted from the book, either, so, fine. I would have really liked to see *Julian's* POV actually (and see from reviews that this is a common complaint) -- because you get various sides of the story, but Julian just remains a one-dimensional villain with no attempt to see things from his point of view...
Another general quibble is that the ages of the characters seem pretty arbitrarily chosen. Auggie and his classmates DO NOT feel like fifth-graders to me -- not even fifth-graders in a prestigious prep school for bright kids. O being just a year older than Auggie et al makes it easy to compare and, like, fifth graders don't behave this way, on the whole, or at least not any fifth-graders I know -- especially fifth-grader boys. Some stuff, like another kid wanting to know details about a video game when they're supposed to be getting to know each other, or the game of Plague do sound realistic; other stuff, like co-ed parties and pretty much anything said or done by Julian, not so much. Julian, the insiduous bully, just doesn't act like a kid at all -- he convinces the other kids to stage a boycott of Jack as an intervention 'for his own good', asks Auggie very subtle questions that Auggie knows are painful insults but which on the surface are meant to be innocent "taking an interest" type things, and just does manipulation in a very adult sort of way. Even if he's meant to be a full-blown sociopath, which I don't think he is, it's kind of straining my credulity. And I read a review that complained about the idea of Julian bullying Jack and Auggie by stuffing mean notes in their lockers being stupid, because that's not how boys bully at that age, and, yep, I can't see it either. There are other little things, too -- two boys who are known for playing D&D, where I don't think that's likely for today's fifth-graders -- they could be obsessed with Clash of Clans, or something, or a video game, Pokemon or maybe even Magic, but D&D I kind of doubt, even if they're "nerds". And Olivia, Miranda, and Justin, who are in their first year of high school, so, what, somewhere between 13 and 15? also felt like they were at least a couple of years older than that, when I compare them to L and her friends. I know it's a pitfall of writing books with young characters, especially kid POVs, but this did periodically bug me. Mostly, though, I just decided mentally that everybody's ages were shifted by, like, two years, and just went with that.
But these things are not the point of the story. The point of the story is Auggie and his family, living with Auggie's difficult condition. I really like the way Auggie and Via's POVs play off each other here -- Auggie doesn't like to focus too much on his medical problems, because he would rather be an ordinary kid, so we really only get a feeling for the extent of them when we get to Via's POV. But a couple of details or questions that underline this space he doesn't talk about really stand out, and that was very effective for me, some of the most poignant moments -- like how much Auggie loves Halloween, because wearing a mask alongside tons of other kids doing the same is the only time he feels like a normal kid, or his question (after Daisy the dog dies) about whether people look the same in Heaven (and the conversation with his mother about how they will recognize each other if people don't). Via is a great character in her own right: she clearly loves Auggie fiercely, is consistently the one who gets angry at people who dismiss him or stare at him because of the way he looks, but she's also the "non-problem" child whose needs come second even though neither the reader nor Via doubt for a moment that her parents love her very much. That perspective, the reluctance to bring Auggie to her new school, where people think of her as *her*, not Auggie's sister, and the special relationship with her grandmother, ended too soon, and the bonded session with her mother that gets interrupeted by another Auggie emergency -- I thought everything about Via was really well done, and wanted more of her. I also liked Auggie's parents, Isabel and Nate, who are funny and warm and really trying to do the best thing for Auggie even when they aren't always sure and don't always agree what the best thing for him *is*. I like that they argue about whether or not he's ready to go to school, that Isabel isn't sure of it herself and changes her mind, that Auggie found out about the plan to send him to school by accident, overhearing them talk to other grownups, that Nate surreptitiously threw away Auggue's beloved spaceman helmet because Auggie was hiding behind it -- and that while he eventually comes clean about it to Auggie himself, he's never told his ife and isn't planning to, that Isabel tries to cover for Via . They feel human and fallible and believable and I really liked that Palacio did with them.
At first it felt like there was a fair bit of diversity in the book, but ultimately I have decided the way that's handled is a weakness rather than a strength. There is diversity -- but on the level of, you know, modern math problems: 'Yumiko has three more apples than Abdullah and Svetlana has five less than Ajay, who has half as many as Abdullah, etc.' Like, Auggie and Via's mother and father are, respectively, Brazilian and Ashkenazi Jewish (via Latin American on one side and direct emigration to the US on the other), but other than Spanish showing up exactly twice, with their mother and her mother, there's really no other indication of this, besides names, which is too bad, as that could be a neat combination. I mean, of course that's not what this book is about, and it's not a very long book, but I also think it would've have been that hard to have some... texture to people's backgrounds. The book is (presumably?) set in NYC, but other than a nice spread of names in the class, I didn't really get any sort of feeling for the environment, and it wouldn't have been hard -- music, food, stuff August and his friends wouldn't necessarily be paying a ton of attention to but that could be there in the background.
There is another sort of diversity the book does do pretty well, I thought -- Auggie and Via's parents are a loving family, close to their extended families. Jack's parents are loving but poor; Summer's mom is widowed; Justin's parents have long been divorced and don't seem to care about him; Miranda's parents are going through a divorce now that she's in high school -- none of this is the point, either (except maybe in Miranda's case), but it is all there.
Here's the thing that really bothered me, though, and which I thought weakened the whole book: the ending. Not the part where, at the field trip, Auggie's classmates rally around him, protecting him from the mean kids who aren't used to him (though I do feel like not having Julian there is kind of a cop-out, and also weakens the shift). What annoyed me was the graduation ceremony, because Auggie gets an award -- the award for outstanding individual service to the school -- on the basis of the individual bravery he exhibited (OK, I can buy this part) and the way this lifted everybody's spirits. Which... O.o To me that really felt like turning Auggie into a kind of mascot for the school -- and the way all the students cluster around him at the end, and all the parents, really underlined that. And I am totally in favor of a happy ending, and of course it has to be a happy ending of acceptance, but it doesn't have to be quite that saccharine and just, the mascot-y thing, that really rubbed me the wrong way. Auggie's undeniable bravery is not a lesson to others, and not even, I think, something it's appropriate to award a medal for. And I mean, it's a decision and words by a character in the book, they don't necessarily have to reflect what the author thinks is RIGHT, but giving it such a pivotal position, having that be the resolution and closure... that felt really weird to me.
To end on a more positive note, though -- because I actually did enjoy the book, despite the ending -- one thing I thought the book did with a decent degree of subtlety and quite neatly is a meta little thing: the way it shows how fiction pretty much always portrays people who look like Auggie as evil monsters. The kids compare him to a zombie, to Gollum and Orcs, to Darth Sidious, and he reads an excerpt from Narnia where the troops of evil are deformed hordes which read to me similarly to the bit from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao where Oscar reads the passage from Tolkien about the dark men from the south.
So, a book I really enjoyed reading, but not a flawless book by any, any means. In fact, like a couple of reviews have said, I sort of like it less the more I think about/poke at it. But am still glad I read it and enjoyed the experience itself a whole lot. Apparently there are several short stories to go with it, including Julian's chapter, as well as snippets from Charlotte's and Christopher's POVs.
bingo: protagonist with a physical disability, book heavily featuring children (CHALLENGE MODE: narrated by a kid -- August, Summer, and Jack are all ten, and narrate more than half the book), author I've never read before.
15. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn -- Heeey, I finished a Sanderson book, finally! After a false start with Elantris (way overhyped by a cover blurb and so very, very juvenalia) and those Alcatraz Smedry books the rodents used to read, and after bringing home several doorstoppers from the library and returning them unread, I finally managed to read a book of his. And mostly like it, even, though I found the beginning kinda weak and have a lot of quibbles. Mostly, though, it's that while I find the worldbuilding and ideas and some of the characters interesting, none of them really GRAB me in a way that makes me love something. We just... don't click. I foresee continuing to read at least the Mistborn books, but I don't foresee calling myself a fan...
Pretty much the only thing I knew about Mistborn going in was the concept of Allomancy, but I didn't now anything about HOW that worked, beyond "magic based on metals". I do appreciate the very structured approach, but I have several sizeable quibbles. And will go into them at length because, well, you know me. The most basic one is just that Allomancy is systematic, but it doesn't make any kind of INTRINSIC sense, and so when Sanderson goes into all the detail about paired metals and alloys and blah blah blah, it only makes sense to a point, but invites much deeper analysis by virtue of being so exhaustively showing-your-work, and the foundations just don't stand up to that kind of scrutiny. (As an aside, Rothfuss's 'applied thermodynamics' approach to magic is absolute genius at this, because the magical bits where he goes into detail ACTUALLY TOTALLY MAKE PHYSICAL SENSE -- they just assume that you can DIRECTLY manipulate quantities that you, in reality, cannot. But if you could, it would totally work like this! Of course there are things that DON'T have that kind of thermodynamical foundtaion -- like sygaldry -- but that one is not eplored in any sort of detail, so there's nothing to be bugged by.) Like, OK, the alloy pairs sort of make sense, but shy does tin sharpen your senses? what is it about the atomic or crystallographic nature of tin that allows that? and what is it about the addition of lead that changes it to magnifying physical strength? What happens if you were to try burning lead -- presumably it would be deadly, but why? (other than, you know, the normal answer of lead poisoning). Also, like, brass is an alloy of zinc and copper, and bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and yet mixing these three metals: copper, zinc, and tin in various proportions gives qualitatively different effects and... I'm overthinking this, clearly, but the structure INVITES overthinking. OK, moving on...
(note to self:
Pewter -- ~90% tin, with copper and antimony in real life, but apparently w/ lead in Mistborn
Brass -- zinc with copper
Bronze -- copper and tin
Steel -- iron hardened with carbon inclusions
Also, it bugged me that there were nine real metals mentioned but atium was a made up metal. Presumably it was because Sanderson needed something super-exotic to mine, but it feels like a cop-out. Also, Coinpushing specifically bugged me because it doesn't make intuitive sense to me that by pushing off a tiny coin (pressed against an unmoveable ground, but still) you can vault over walls. I can believe it with, like, a steel plate, or something else that is sufficiently large, but it just feels like the coin is too small to... IDK, support that weight... to just "push back" (I went and googled for physics of Allomancy, and there's this) and this and this, which I think shows some of the same uneasiness -- if an Allomantic force is proportional to the 'stuff'-ness of the object being manipulated (and an inverse square), and it feels like it SHOULD be, the coin-pushing involves a lot of force pushing on a very small coin, which I think at minimum would deform the coins a lot more than it seems to. But anyway. Spoilers from here!
Oh, and also, the Feruchemy/Allomancy hybrid that the Ruler apparently used did not make sense to me even with Sazed's repeated explanations. I could understand if he burned pewter to generate strength to store up in metal for later, without the flare limitations. But what about things like time/youth or other things for which there is no Allomantic metal you could burn? Or is something else supposedly happening, but then I don't understand how it obeys conservation laws which both Allomancy (sorta) and Feruchemy obey...
(I did like the way Vin was able to deduce that gold and atium weren't paired metals, so there had to be more metals that were actually paired with them, by extension of the 8 common metals. I assume we will get to "meet" them at some point in the later books. And I liked that the Mistings she meets teach her various high-level and subtle things about their individual metals that Kelsier, the Mistborn, doesn't know or doesn't care about (because Iron/Steel is "his" thing.)
But, OK, enough with the nerdery. There's actually an aspect of Allomancy that doesn't really work for me that has nothing to do with whether or not it obeys physics. And that's just that it feels very... mechanical, and also the endless descriptions of zig-zagging was just not very interesting to read. It would probably look better in a visual medium (it felt quite video-gamey) but in a book it got boring pretty quickly and I just skimmed a lot. Although some things, like the spikeway, are genuinely neat, largely because they're not constantly belabored.
OK, other things than Allomancy. I'd actually also heard a little bit about Kelsier (mainly I remember that this was the name of regendy's car), and I tend to love Chessmaster characters. I did like Kelsier, but I didn't love him. I do enjoy him very methodically and clearheadedly going about setting himself up as a martyr figure -- the way the others are worried about him potentially seizing power after buying into his own personality cult, but the personality cult is totally the point. The kandra was neat from a worldbuilding perspective and also the way Kelsier just hires him to eat his bones and act as his posthumous stunt double -- damn, that takes guts. But even Kelsier is missing some spark that makes me fall in love with a character. Vin was OK, but didn't grip me either. The bit characters are cute, but sort of in a trying-too-hard way -- Hammond the soldier-philosopher and Breeze the politician -- and the book suffers from an ensemble that is kind of tell-more-than-show -- I didn't sense as much chemistry from the crew as I was meant to, I think, and there were scenes that I think were meant to be companionable banter and were just kind of flat. Oh, and Elend... he was cute as a layabout philosopher-noble, but I totally don't buy him as King (though it's lampshaded that the nobles and rebel leaders agree to his kingship because they think he can be manipulated).
That actually *is* something I liked a lot about the book -- the twists. The reversals when the army we've spent half of the book painstakingly building is destroyed wastefully because Kelsier sold his hope act too well; Kelsier's death, as mentioned; the revelation that the Ruler is not the would-be Hero who authored the logbook (although I do think a Hero who doubts himself and at the last moment succumbs to temptation and proves unequal to the full weight of his task makes for a better story -- you know, Frodo on Mount Doom and all that), that the skaa rebellion succeeds... and promptly elects themselves a king from among the nobles -- I don't think I've seen that in fantasy before. Even the small but vital revelation that Vin's brother didn't abandon her but rather died to protect her. Not all revelations work equally well for me -- Marsh's reappearance as one of the Inquisitors with the secret of how to kill them kinda fell flat (to be honest, when the secret turned out to be pulling out a spike from their back, I flashed to the Rothfuss in-story story about the boy with the golden screw in his belly button XP).
Little things that irked me to various degrees: the way everybody's nicknames were just one-syllable forms of their names -- BO-ring. The way the Eastern dialect was shown, because, oh my god, that was so painful, and also doesn't sound like anything a real language would do. Like, I thought I disliked phonetic accents in fantasy, but this is a lot worse.
Oh, and, randomly -- early on, the political plot and the general worldbuilding with the subjugated skaa (who are, in fact, less magically talented than the nobles), kept making me think of (a) the Vlad Taltos books (Easterners vs Dragaerans) and the Elvenbane books (still with the Elves vs humans divide). Except, of course, that I find both Dragaera and Elvenbane much more id-dy reading.
So, the twists are definitely the strength of this book for me -- and that's normally not enough to make me love something, but it worked for me for ~700 pages, so that's not bad. And while the writing is still nothing to swoon over (there's this one bit, during the executions, where everything to do with the skaa is very deliberately and blatantly written in passive voice, and it's so clunky and gradeschool DYSWIDT that I had to roll my eyes), it's at least a lot better than Elantris...
bingo: rec from friend (multiple ;), female protagonist (possibly also book where main male and female don't fall in love, since Kelsier is much more of a prominent male character than Elend is). Don't think I can count it for author I'd never read before, because I have tried reading Sanderson before, it just didn't go anywhere :P
16. Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch -- I checked out Akata Witch for myself because the title was intriguing, and I've been meaning to read more of Okorafor than the short stories I've encountered in anthologies. But then L picked it up and read it first, and liked it, and it took me ages to get around to reading it myself. Now I've caught up and, hm... I'm glad to have read it and enjoyed it, but it was also an oddly frustrating experience, like reading the account of someone else's dream -- there is just all this context missing that makes things feel illogical, and also the pacing is all weird. I really wonder how much of that is cultural vs individual style... spoilers from here
Also, adding to the frustration of missing context, was the fact that Sunny herself spends a lot of the time confused and baffled and not being told things. It makes it pretty easy to empathize with her, but it also made me really annoyed with the book, so, kind of a mixed bag.
The things I liked about the book: The setting. And when I say the *diversity* of the setting, I don't mean that all the primary characters, all the secondary characters, and like 95% of the tertiary characters are POCs -- why wouldn't they be, since the book takes place in Nigeria -- but rather the diversity within that pool. I found it really cool the way there was a multitude of languages (and some degree of language barrier being negotiated) present in so many interactions -- Sasha having to learn to speak Igbo, the international soccer team needing to use both English and French as lingua franca, several non-mutually-intelligible African languages in addition to Igbo, pidgin -- it was very neat. And the way there's all this back-and-forth in the represented cultures -- Sunny's dual heritage, born in America of Nigerian parents and living in Nigeria now, the way the locals look down on "akata" (foreign-born blacks), the teen boys trying way too hard to immitate African-American culture, the way traditional and Western styles of dress both feature and are blended, the presence of Christianity, Islam, and African religions side by side. I wasn't sure I was expecting something in particular in a book set in Africa, but this richness and layering of setting was my favorite part of the books. And I like that Okorafor mostly doesn't stop to explain or define things that Sunny would be familiar with, so you kind of have to catch up. (There are also aspects of the setting that are really jarring in a kid/YA book but are presented quite unflinchingly -- corporal punishment as a matter of course from parents, teachers, and elders, the brutal fight to the death at the wrestling match.)
The magical worldbuilding is... just really weird to me. Which is cool -- it's actually really neat to read an urban fantasy book rooted in a real tradition I know pretty much nothing about. But, like I said above, I felt like I kept missing things because they didn't resonate with me. Like the spirit faces -- I just never got over the weirdness of their descriptions and so could not feel their appearances as triumphant/joyful moments, just weird ones. Or masquerades -- I was too busy trying to visualize the things to be properly scared of them. And L commented that the way chittim, the Leopard People money, kept raining down on people for achievements felt like something out of a video game. I did like the description of the juju knife selection process and how it feels in Sunny's hand, the drama-queen artist wasp, and the exploding balls of flesh and teeth (because EW).
Characters-wise... Sasha eventually grew on me as someone I actually liked, but other than him, I didn't feel personally invested in anyone. Sunny was OK, but I actually didn't really care about her as a person, probably the least of all of the kids. Chichi is at least entertaining in her brashness, and I liked Orlu's quiet decency even though he's not a flashy character at all.
I was also somewhat surprised by how Sunny's magical awakening means that the physical problems associated with her albinism go away -- she no longer needs an umbrella to hide from the sun. This seems to be a theme rather than a cop-out -- because the albinism is a mark of her Leopard gift, it seems like the magic can be used to counteract the original lack, not just for Sunny but in general, the way figuring out unraveling juju means Orlu can learn to read despite his dyslexia. But it still feels weird, like magic is "fixing' her.
There is a sequel that's apparently supposed to come out next year. I will probably pick it up, but mostly for more of the setting, and for Sasha.
bingo: book set on a continent I've never been to (Africa), book with a PoC author, book with a PoC protagonist, book with a female protagonist, sort of book with a protagonist with disability (albinism)?
17. Lia Silver, Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) -- OK, so, heh, my great plan was to save this book to read alongside one of the "classic" bingo squares so I'd have something fast and fun to intersperse with the stuffy. So, I figured I'd read it alongside Ulysses. Only once I started, I couldn't stop, to the point of hiding in the bathroom at work to read, which hasn't happened for a while (since Foxglove Summer). So, you know, as an Ulysses-reading-carrot, this approach has been a failure, but the book was a susccess in all other respects. Spoilers
I really, really like DJ. As the book itself points out ("maybe the billionaire's best friend or the heroine's brother. The one who didn't get his own book, due to being insufficiently scrwed up and bossy"), he's not typical leading man material, and I'm not swooning over him, but I'd love to have his as a buddy. I'll pass on his taste in music, but his sense of humour and tendency to ramble are great, and the way he thinks and talks about his family is wonderful (I was hoping to get to meet Grandma Steel, who sounds like a pretty cool lady, and the rest of the family, but, alas, earwax; maybe in the sequels?), and it was just such a pleasure to spend so long in his POV. I liked his cheerful unwillingness to give up -- what Echo calls "a terminal inability to know when to quit" (and that he basically sees his situation as being a prisoner of war, whose duty it is to escape).
Echo is much less my kind of character, and her sections really mostly worked for me for the outside POV of DJ, but I do like the trope that's playing out here, with DJ's decency, humour, openness and sheer humanity dragging her into humanity herself, fucking feelings an all. I don't actually ship DJ/Echo, but I loved the scene where they met ("I'm an idiot, DJ thought. Taken in by a tank top. She's not a civilian, she's just out of uniform."), the banter between them throughout the book (the running gag about what kind of shifter Echo might be, trying to guess each other's favorite movies), the sharing of quirks (DJ's caffeine addiction to the point of chewing instant coffee crystals, Echo's sweet tooth), the sex scene at the end (which features a lot of talking and laughing, including the great line: "I'll give you coordinates. Clitoris, latitude forty-eight degrees north, longitude twenty degrees east." And I also like their conversation about how feeling in love (for the first time for real) feels different than they'd expected, that Echo thought it would feel "More I want you no matter what, less I want you to be happy." But, anyway, it would appear that DJ and Echo work better for me as friends fighting side-by-side than a couple, possibly because Echo seems more emotionally damaged than people I like having in my ships.
The reason I don't ship them is probably in part also because I was kinda feeling DJ/Roy from about the third page on (and by "kinda" I mean "a lot"), which feelings only deepened during DJ's story (I know it's totally lampshaded with Echo's "was it love at first sight"), but I'm a huge sucker for brothers-in-arms ships, and this one begins with such glorious h/c. DJ and Echo have some good h/c scenes, too, but Roy was there first, and has hung out with DJ's family, and reads him books out loud, and... Basically, I'm deeply disappointed in the fact that there's no DJ/Roy on AO3. But I read the DJ/Echo porn fic which works as an after-credits scene :D
It's a really funny book -- I grinned through much of it -- but the poignant moments worked really well for me, too. DJ's breakdown after he mercy-kills Match (because while he's killed before, he's never killed up close, being a rifleman), DJ sitting up with Justin (the young security guard bitten by Match) and trying to help him survive the change. And the base is very creepy (though the handlers/scientists feel a little too evil; it makes sense that people made uncomfortable by the sorts of things going on there simply wouldn't end up at the base / stay there long, but still). Random note: it jumped out at me that the clone boys get normal names (Alan, Brian, David, Ethan, etc.) while the clone girls get slight variations on the phonetic alphabet tables, though presumably they were created at the same time.
My one reluctance about this series, which I've been hearing great things about for a while, was the werewolf angle -- I've never really liked the shifter side of UF, and I outright overdosed on it last year, between Mercy Thompson and Kate Daniels. But I needn't have worried -- this is the least werewolfy werewolf book ever, which is perfect for my needs. DJ's personality, quirks, conflicts, etc. have nothing to do with him being a werewolf -- it's so nice! And on a worldbuilding level this is something I appreciated, too. A decent chunk of the plot, including the climax, is driven by the pack of made wolves, but not in any kind of way I've encountered before, and the pack's insistence on protecting Match has more to do with the *human* mentaility of the military pack members (and Emmett's inability to handle another loss after his wife and daughter's death) than any kind of wolf thing. And I really liked the way in this universe being an alpha has nothing to do with personality -- it's a... dolzhnost', a social compact, and people can be good at it or bad (like Emmett), but there's no mystical macho crap that seems to be associated with it at all, which is very refreshing. Also, scent names are super-fun (e.g. best part of the psychic wolves books, too), and I liked the way so many of them in this book were fairly unusual -- Lechon (suckling pig roasting on a spit), and Five (Chanel No. 5), and Guinness, and Nutmeg, alongside more expected things like steel and such. The werewolf superpowers feel fairly random -- like something out of X-Men, given the range from super-strength and eidetic memory to pretty far-out there stuff like possessing people, but their role so far has been fairly low key. (Also, I totally want to hear about the time DJ met a were-binturong).
Quotes!
"He hoped he wasn't trying to walk to the coast of Utah."
DJ: "Have you ever heard a SAW? It's not exactly stealthy. You want a guy who'll creep up and kill people and creep away unseen, you go kidnap yourself a scout sniper."
DJ on Tagalog: "I'm fluent, more or less, but my vocabulary's not that great when it comes to words my parents wouldn't say in front of a kid."
"There was nothing in the world, no cat or shark or flying thing, that could move more gracefully than her own human form."
"[Echo] smiled at him. It didn't make her look any softer, but she looked less like she might try to kill him at any second, and more like she was standing ready to kill anyone who might attack him."
Charlie's romance novel: "The cover showed a woman with a lot of cleavage plastering herself to a man riding a motorcycle along a mountain road. He wore leather pants, an unzipped leather jacket, no shirt, and no helmet. She wore a crop top, a miniskirt, and no helmet. DJ imagined the title: Our Worst Road Rash Ever. Or maybe Future Organ Donors in Love."
"It [the secret base] was weirdly similar to Camp Pendleton, though much smaller. And, of course, evil."
DJ thinking that Roy is thinking: "Fucking new guy who hates my favorite rabbit book." (also, this book reminded me that I meant to finally read Watership Down for the "heavily featuring animals" bingo square.)
DJ on Roy: "In a lot of ways he was a better wolf than me, except he couldn't shift."
"he'd once gotten hooked on a Norwegian death metal band and only belatedly learned that the members were white supremacists. [...] 'Anyway, the song I'm going to play is by the group I got into as a substitute. They have a similar sound, but they're not evil.' He paused. 'I may have phrased that wrong. They're Satanists. But they're not Nazis.'"
"Are you listening, Torres?" Mr Dowling barked.
Reflexively, DJ said, "yes, sir!"
Both Mr Dowling and Echo stared at him.
"What did I just say?" Mr Dowling inquired.
"You were briefing us on the mission," DJ replied.
"Specifically, what did I just say?"
DJ had been completely checked out, but Mr.Dowling was holding an EpiPen and had a box of them in his other hand. "You were explaining how to use the EpiPens, in case we get tagged by Amber. Take off the safety cap, jam the orange end into your thigh until it clicks, hold for five seconds, then wait a minute or so and see if symptoms improve. If they don't, use another one. Then rush to a hospital."
Echo laughed. Mr. Dowling looked torn between annoyance and grudging approval.
"What?" DJ asked. He'd been so sure that was it.
"I asked if you were familiar with EpiPens," Mr. Dowling said. "Obviously, the answer is yes."
DJ: "I've always believed I could do anything if I just tried hard enough and didn't give up. Either that's not true or I fucked up, and I don't know which is worse."
"Bats. [...] Thousands of bats. The light draws moths, and the bats come to eat them. And then owls come to eat the bats. It's an entire ecosystem in mid-air, powered by thirthy-nine xenon lamps and millions of tourist dollars."
The first bit of Laura's Wolf was included in the ebook, which I've now also read. I'm hoping there will be some DJ in it later on, because I definitely missed him in that chapter. Which is why I'm now 28% into Partner XP *waves at holodets as instructed by egelantier* (candied baby pinecones!!! XD)
And the ebook is free on Amazon as a promo for the sequel. (It was one of those books that I liked much more than I would have guessed from the ad copy, which makes it sound more generically romance and a lot less funny than it is.)
bingo: PoC protagonist (DJ is Pinoy), protagonist w/ mental disability (DJ is severely dyslexic and probably has ADHD); I don't think this counts as a book by an author I've not read before since, although I have not read her pubished work before (under any pen name), I have read her fic :)
CSRB progress: [under the cut]
Mix'n'match: (14/25, 0/6 challenges); 1 bingo
Book with a protagonist with a disability: Wonder
Rec from friend or media: Mistborn
Book with a female protagonist: Akata Witch
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
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
Serious: (12/25, 0/7 challenges)
Book with a protagonist with a physical disability: Wonder
Book by an author of color: Akata Witch
Book with a protagonist with a mental/social disability: Prisoner
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
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
Random: (11/25, 2/7 challenges)
Book heavily featuring kids (CHALLENGE MODE: from a child's POV): Wonder
Book set on a continent you've never been to: Akata Witch (Africa)
Book from friends or media: Mistborn
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
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
Cards and recs
Sharing and bragging post
tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb
Ulysses Pact: Commenced and currently at 10% (location 1092). It's actually not as hard going as I expected it to be -- the writing is really enjoyable, even if I have no idea why it's doing what it seems to be doing. The hyperdescription of every action takes getting used to, but also fills me with admiration for how sharply it draws the tiny details. Mostly, though, I'm just reading it as I would poetry, paying more attention to alliteration and rhythm than anything I'd normally be focusing on in prose, like characters or dialogue. I did kind of like Buck Mulligan, though. Also, given how few pages I've read, there's been rather more talk of "I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews" (from multiple mouths) than I had expected
Quotes so far:
"The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea."
"Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide."
"The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close."
"pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock."
Bloom's cat: "She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth."
"his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety."
Also! now that we've actually started, a thought: since the novel takes place on June 16, 1904, should we aim to finish up our pact by June 16? That gives us 11 weeks of reading instead of 13, but feels fitting. Since this is a very loose pact, we can definitely stay with end of June as the overall goal, but I'm going to try for the 16th.
Regular reading roundup:
14. R.J.Palacio, Wonder -- O's reading group is doing this book at school, which meant he had to read really slowly to keep up with the others, to his great frustration. I thought I'd check it out because of that, and because the cover is really striking, and also because, while I had things in mind for the "physical disability" bingo square, this seemed to fit really well, as well as being about a kid (another square). So, I picked it up one Monday after work, and read the whole evening, and the following evening, until I was done. It's been a while since a kidlit book clicked for me, but this one did. And I quite enjoyed it until the ending, which somewhat spoiled the book for me. I understand it had to end on a positive note, and I'm glad it did, but it felt too saccharine all of a sudden, and one particular authorial choice left a bad taste in my mouth. Spoilers!
So, Wonder is mostly narrated by August (Auggie), a ten-year-old with a severe cranio-facial deformity, who is in all other respects a normal ten/eleven-year-old kid -- a very smart, funny kid who likes playing video games, reading Tolkien and C.S.Lewis, and is obsessed with Star Wars. August's narration opens and closes the book, and I thought the whole thing was in his POV when I started, but it's not. We also get chapters of various length narrated by his older sister Via, two kids in his class (he is attending school for the first time starting with fifth grade), Summer and Jack, Via's new boyfriend and Via's best friend, who's known Auggie since he was a baby and has a special relationship with him. Some of these POVs worked better for me than others. I liked Auggie's and Via's POVs best -- and, in fact, wished we had gotten to hear more from Via, though we get her viewpoint early enough that it gives an adequate feel for all her later actions. Jack's POV felt pretty pointless to me, especially the 'authentically misspelled' Facebook message exchanges, but O said it was his favorite, so it could be a target audience thing. I didn't get much out of Summer's POV either, beyond the confirmation that she's a really nice girl, and Justin (Via's boyfriend) POV just feels completely extraneous -- and is written without capital letters or quotation marks, which just seemed really silly. (This annoyed O even more than it annoyed me; he (semi-jokingly) complained to Mr B that their Social Issues Book Club book is definitely not helping them learn punctuation :P) Miranda's POV was more relevant and also more interesting... but it's introduced so late that it feels kind of tacked on. I would've been very happy if the book had just done alternating Auggie and Via POVs with the other perspectives coming out in conversation with these characters, but ah well. Other than Justin's, I didn't feel like the other POVs detracted from the book, either, so, fine. I would have really liked to see *Julian's* POV actually (and see from reviews that this is a common complaint) -- because you get various sides of the story, but Julian just remains a one-dimensional villain with no attempt to see things from his point of view...
Another general quibble is that the ages of the characters seem pretty arbitrarily chosen. Auggie and his classmates DO NOT feel like fifth-graders to me -- not even fifth-graders in a prestigious prep school for bright kids. O being just a year older than Auggie et al makes it easy to compare and, like, fifth graders don't behave this way, on the whole, or at least not any fifth-graders I know -- especially fifth-grader boys. Some stuff, like another kid wanting to know details about a video game when they're supposed to be getting to know each other, or the game of Plague do sound realistic; other stuff, like co-ed parties and pretty much anything said or done by Julian, not so much. Julian, the insiduous bully, just doesn't act like a kid at all -- he convinces the other kids to stage a boycott of Jack as an intervention 'for his own good', asks Auggie very subtle questions that Auggie knows are painful insults but which on the surface are meant to be innocent "taking an interest" type things, and just does manipulation in a very adult sort of way. Even if he's meant to be a full-blown sociopath, which I don't think he is, it's kind of straining my credulity. And I read a review that complained about the idea of Julian bullying Jack and Auggie by stuffing mean notes in their lockers being stupid, because that's not how boys bully at that age, and, yep, I can't see it either. There are other little things, too -- two boys who are known for playing D&D, where I don't think that's likely for today's fifth-graders -- they could be obsessed with Clash of Clans, or something, or a video game, Pokemon or maybe even Magic, but D&D I kind of doubt, even if they're "nerds". And Olivia, Miranda, and Justin, who are in their first year of high school, so, what, somewhere between 13 and 15? also felt like they were at least a couple of years older than that, when I compare them to L and her friends. I know it's a pitfall of writing books with young characters, especially kid POVs, but this did periodically bug me. Mostly, though, I just decided mentally that everybody's ages were shifted by, like, two years, and just went with that.
But these things are not the point of the story. The point of the story is Auggie and his family, living with Auggie's difficult condition. I really like the way Auggie and Via's POVs play off each other here -- Auggie doesn't like to focus too much on his medical problems, because he would rather be an ordinary kid, so we really only get a feeling for the extent of them when we get to Via's POV. But a couple of details or questions that underline this space he doesn't talk about really stand out, and that was very effective for me, some of the most poignant moments -- like how much Auggie loves Halloween, because wearing a mask alongside tons of other kids doing the same is the only time he feels like a normal kid, or his question (after Daisy the dog dies) about whether people look the same in Heaven (and the conversation with his mother about how they will recognize each other if people don't). Via is a great character in her own right: she clearly loves Auggie fiercely, is consistently the one who gets angry at people who dismiss him or stare at him because of the way he looks, but she's also the "non-problem" child whose needs come second even though neither the reader nor Via doubt for a moment that her parents love her very much. That perspective, the reluctance to bring Auggie to her new school, where people think of her as *her*, not Auggie's sister, and the special relationship with her grandmother, ended too soon, and the bonded session with her mother that gets interrupeted by another Auggie emergency -- I thought everything about Via was really well done, and wanted more of her. I also liked Auggie's parents, Isabel and Nate, who are funny and warm and really trying to do the best thing for Auggie even when they aren't always sure and don't always agree what the best thing for him *is*. I like that they argue about whether or not he's ready to go to school, that Isabel isn't sure of it herself and changes her mind, that Auggie found out about the plan to send him to school by accident, overhearing them talk to other grownups, that Nate surreptitiously threw away Auggue's beloved spaceman helmet because Auggie was hiding behind it -- and that while he eventually comes clean about it to Auggie himself, he's never told his ife and isn't planning to, that Isabel tries to cover for Via . They feel human and fallible and believable and I really liked that Palacio did with them.
At first it felt like there was a fair bit of diversity in the book, but ultimately I have decided the way that's handled is a weakness rather than a strength. There is diversity -- but on the level of, you know, modern math problems: 'Yumiko has three more apples than Abdullah and Svetlana has five less than Ajay, who has half as many as Abdullah, etc.' Like, Auggie and Via's mother and father are, respectively, Brazilian and Ashkenazi Jewish (via Latin American on one side and direct emigration to the US on the other), but other than Spanish showing up exactly twice, with their mother and her mother, there's really no other indication of this, besides names, which is too bad, as that could be a neat combination. I mean, of course that's not what this book is about, and it's not a very long book, but I also think it would've have been that hard to have some... texture to people's backgrounds. The book is (presumably?) set in NYC, but other than a nice spread of names in the class, I didn't really get any sort of feeling for the environment, and it wouldn't have been hard -- music, food, stuff August and his friends wouldn't necessarily be paying a ton of attention to but that could be there in the background.
There is another sort of diversity the book does do pretty well, I thought -- Auggie and Via's parents are a loving family, close to their extended families. Jack's parents are loving but poor; Summer's mom is widowed; Justin's parents have long been divorced and don't seem to care about him; Miranda's parents are going through a divorce now that she's in high school -- none of this is the point, either (except maybe in Miranda's case), but it is all there.
Here's the thing that really bothered me, though, and which I thought weakened the whole book: the ending. Not the part where, at the field trip, Auggie's classmates rally around him, protecting him from the mean kids who aren't used to him (though I do feel like not having Julian there is kind of a cop-out, and also weakens the shift). What annoyed me was the graduation ceremony, because Auggie gets an award -- the award for outstanding individual service to the school -- on the basis of the individual bravery he exhibited (OK, I can buy this part) and the way this lifted everybody's spirits. Which... O.o To me that really felt like turning Auggie into a kind of mascot for the school -- and the way all the students cluster around him at the end, and all the parents, really underlined that. And I am totally in favor of a happy ending, and of course it has to be a happy ending of acceptance, but it doesn't have to be quite that saccharine and just, the mascot-y thing, that really rubbed me the wrong way. Auggie's undeniable bravery is not a lesson to others, and not even, I think, something it's appropriate to award a medal for. And I mean, it's a decision and words by a character in the book, they don't necessarily have to reflect what the author thinks is RIGHT, but giving it such a pivotal position, having that be the resolution and closure... that felt really weird to me.
To end on a more positive note, though -- because I actually did enjoy the book, despite the ending -- one thing I thought the book did with a decent degree of subtlety and quite neatly is a meta little thing: the way it shows how fiction pretty much always portrays people who look like Auggie as evil monsters. The kids compare him to a zombie, to Gollum and Orcs, to Darth Sidious, and he reads an excerpt from Narnia where the troops of evil are deformed hordes which read to me similarly to the bit from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao where Oscar reads the passage from Tolkien about the dark men from the south.
So, a book I really enjoyed reading, but not a flawless book by any, any means. In fact, like a couple of reviews have said, I sort of like it less the more I think about/poke at it. But am still glad I read it and enjoyed the experience itself a whole lot. Apparently there are several short stories to go with it, including Julian's chapter, as well as snippets from Charlotte's and Christopher's POVs.
bingo: protagonist with a physical disability, book heavily featuring children (CHALLENGE MODE: narrated by a kid -- August, Summer, and Jack are all ten, and narrate more than half the book), author I've never read before.
15. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn -- Heeey, I finished a Sanderson book, finally! After a false start with Elantris (way overhyped by a cover blurb and so very, very juvenalia) and those Alcatraz Smedry books the rodents used to read, and after bringing home several doorstoppers from the library and returning them unread, I finally managed to read a book of his. And mostly like it, even, though I found the beginning kinda weak and have a lot of quibbles. Mostly, though, it's that while I find the worldbuilding and ideas and some of the characters interesting, none of them really GRAB me in a way that makes me love something. We just... don't click. I foresee continuing to read at least the Mistborn books, but I don't foresee calling myself a fan...
Pretty much the only thing I knew about Mistborn going in was the concept of Allomancy, but I didn't now anything about HOW that worked, beyond "magic based on metals". I do appreciate the very structured approach, but I have several sizeable quibbles. And will go into them at length because, well, you know me. The most basic one is just that Allomancy is systematic, but it doesn't make any kind of INTRINSIC sense, and so when Sanderson goes into all the detail about paired metals and alloys and blah blah blah, it only makes sense to a point, but invites much deeper analysis by virtue of being so exhaustively showing-your-work, and the foundations just don't stand up to that kind of scrutiny. (As an aside, Rothfuss's 'applied thermodynamics' approach to magic is absolute genius at this, because the magical bits where he goes into detail ACTUALLY TOTALLY MAKE PHYSICAL SENSE -- they just assume that you can DIRECTLY manipulate quantities that you, in reality, cannot. But if you could, it would totally work like this! Of course there are things that DON'T have that kind of thermodynamical foundtaion -- like sygaldry -- but that one is not eplored in any sort of detail, so there's nothing to be bugged by.) Like, OK, the alloy pairs sort of make sense, but shy does tin sharpen your senses? what is it about the atomic or crystallographic nature of tin that allows that? and what is it about the addition of lead that changes it to magnifying physical strength? What happens if you were to try burning lead -- presumably it would be deadly, but why? (other than, you know, the normal answer of lead poisoning). Also, like, brass is an alloy of zinc and copper, and bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and yet mixing these three metals: copper, zinc, and tin in various proportions gives qualitatively different effects and... I'm overthinking this, clearly, but the structure INVITES overthinking. OK, moving on...
(note to self:
Pewter -- ~90% tin, with copper and antimony in real life, but apparently w/ lead in Mistborn
Brass -- zinc with copper
Bronze -- copper and tin
Steel -- iron hardened with carbon inclusions
Also, it bugged me that there were nine real metals mentioned but atium was a made up metal. Presumably it was because Sanderson needed something super-exotic to mine, but it feels like a cop-out. Also, Coinpushing specifically bugged me because it doesn't make intuitive sense to me that by pushing off a tiny coin (pressed against an unmoveable ground, but still) you can vault over walls. I can believe it with, like, a steel plate, or something else that is sufficiently large, but it just feels like the coin is too small to... IDK, support that weight... to just "push back" (I went and googled for physics of Allomancy, and there's this) and this and this, which I think shows some of the same uneasiness -- if an Allomantic force is proportional to the 'stuff'-ness of the object being manipulated (and an inverse square), and it feels like it SHOULD be, the coin-pushing involves a lot of force pushing on a very small coin, which I think at minimum would deform the coins a lot more than it seems to. But anyway. Spoilers from here!
Oh, and also, the Feruchemy/Allomancy hybrid that the Ruler apparently used did not make sense to me even with Sazed's repeated explanations. I could understand if he burned pewter to generate strength to store up in metal for later, without the flare limitations. But what about things like time/youth or other things for which there is no Allomantic metal you could burn? Or is something else supposedly happening, but then I don't understand how it obeys conservation laws which both Allomancy (sorta) and Feruchemy obey...
(I did like the way Vin was able to deduce that gold and atium weren't paired metals, so there had to be more metals that were actually paired with them, by extension of the 8 common metals. I assume we will get to "meet" them at some point in the later books. And I liked that the Mistings she meets teach her various high-level and subtle things about their individual metals that Kelsier, the Mistborn, doesn't know or doesn't care about (because Iron/Steel is "his" thing.)
But, OK, enough with the nerdery. There's actually an aspect of Allomancy that doesn't really work for me that has nothing to do with whether or not it obeys physics. And that's just that it feels very... mechanical, and also the endless descriptions of zig-zagging was just not very interesting to read. It would probably look better in a visual medium (it felt quite video-gamey) but in a book it got boring pretty quickly and I just skimmed a lot. Although some things, like the spikeway, are genuinely neat, largely because they're not constantly belabored.
OK, other things than Allomancy. I'd actually also heard a little bit about Kelsier (mainly I remember that this was the name of regendy's car), and I tend to love Chessmaster characters. I did like Kelsier, but I didn't love him. I do enjoy him very methodically and clearheadedly going about setting himself up as a martyr figure -- the way the others are worried about him potentially seizing power after buying into his own personality cult, but the personality cult is totally the point. The kandra was neat from a worldbuilding perspective and also the way Kelsier just hires him to eat his bones and act as his posthumous stunt double -- damn, that takes guts. But even Kelsier is missing some spark that makes me fall in love with a character. Vin was OK, but didn't grip me either. The bit characters are cute, but sort of in a trying-too-hard way -- Hammond the soldier-philosopher and Breeze the politician -- and the book suffers from an ensemble that is kind of tell-more-than-show -- I didn't sense as much chemistry from the crew as I was meant to, I think, and there were scenes that I think were meant to be companionable banter and were just kind of flat. Oh, and Elend... he was cute as a layabout philosopher-noble, but I totally don't buy him as King (though it's lampshaded that the nobles and rebel leaders agree to his kingship because they think he can be manipulated).
That actually *is* something I liked a lot about the book -- the twists. The reversals when the army we've spent half of the book painstakingly building is destroyed wastefully because Kelsier sold his hope act too well; Kelsier's death, as mentioned; the revelation that the Ruler is not the would-be Hero who authored the logbook (although I do think a Hero who doubts himself and at the last moment succumbs to temptation and proves unequal to the full weight of his task makes for a better story -- you know, Frodo on Mount Doom and all that), that the skaa rebellion succeeds... and promptly elects themselves a king from among the nobles -- I don't think I've seen that in fantasy before. Even the small but vital revelation that Vin's brother didn't abandon her but rather died to protect her. Not all revelations work equally well for me -- Marsh's reappearance as one of the Inquisitors with the secret of how to kill them kinda fell flat (to be honest, when the secret turned out to be pulling out a spike from their back, I flashed to the Rothfuss in-story story about the boy with the golden screw in his belly button XP).
Little things that irked me to various degrees: the way everybody's nicknames were just one-syllable forms of their names -- BO-ring. The way the Eastern dialect was shown, because, oh my god, that was so painful, and also doesn't sound like anything a real language would do. Like, I thought I disliked phonetic accents in fantasy, but this is a lot worse.
Oh, and, randomly -- early on, the political plot and the general worldbuilding with the subjugated skaa (who are, in fact, less magically talented than the nobles), kept making me think of (a) the Vlad Taltos books (Easterners vs Dragaerans) and the Elvenbane books (still with the Elves vs humans divide). Except, of course, that I find both Dragaera and Elvenbane much more id-dy reading.
So, the twists are definitely the strength of this book for me -- and that's normally not enough to make me love something, but it worked for me for ~700 pages, so that's not bad. And while the writing is still nothing to swoon over (there's this one bit, during the executions, where everything to do with the skaa is very deliberately and blatantly written in passive voice, and it's so clunky and gradeschool DYSWIDT that I had to roll my eyes), it's at least a lot better than Elantris...
bingo: rec from friend (multiple ;), female protagonist (possibly also book where main male and female don't fall in love, since Kelsier is much more of a prominent male character than Elend is). Don't think I can count it for author I'd never read before, because I have tried reading Sanderson before, it just didn't go anywhere :P
16. Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch -- I checked out Akata Witch for myself because the title was intriguing, and I've been meaning to read more of Okorafor than the short stories I've encountered in anthologies. But then L picked it up and read it first, and liked it, and it took me ages to get around to reading it myself. Now I've caught up and, hm... I'm glad to have read it and enjoyed it, but it was also an oddly frustrating experience, like reading the account of someone else's dream -- there is just all this context missing that makes things feel illogical, and also the pacing is all weird. I really wonder how much of that is cultural vs individual style... spoilers from here
Also, adding to the frustration of missing context, was the fact that Sunny herself spends a lot of the time confused and baffled and not being told things. It makes it pretty easy to empathize with her, but it also made me really annoyed with the book, so, kind of a mixed bag.
The things I liked about the book: The setting. And when I say the *diversity* of the setting, I don't mean that all the primary characters, all the secondary characters, and like 95% of the tertiary characters are POCs -- why wouldn't they be, since the book takes place in Nigeria -- but rather the diversity within that pool. I found it really cool the way there was a multitude of languages (and some degree of language barrier being negotiated) present in so many interactions -- Sasha having to learn to speak Igbo, the international soccer team needing to use both English and French as lingua franca, several non-mutually-intelligible African languages in addition to Igbo, pidgin -- it was very neat. And the way there's all this back-and-forth in the represented cultures -- Sunny's dual heritage, born in America of Nigerian parents and living in Nigeria now, the way the locals look down on "akata" (foreign-born blacks), the teen boys trying way too hard to immitate African-American culture, the way traditional and Western styles of dress both feature and are blended, the presence of Christianity, Islam, and African religions side by side. I wasn't sure I was expecting something in particular in a book set in Africa, but this richness and layering of setting was my favorite part of the books. And I like that Okorafor mostly doesn't stop to explain or define things that Sunny would be familiar with, so you kind of have to catch up. (There are also aspects of the setting that are really jarring in a kid/YA book but are presented quite unflinchingly -- corporal punishment as a matter of course from parents, teachers, and elders, the brutal fight to the death at the wrestling match.)
The magical worldbuilding is... just really weird to me. Which is cool -- it's actually really neat to read an urban fantasy book rooted in a real tradition I know pretty much nothing about. But, like I said above, I felt like I kept missing things because they didn't resonate with me. Like the spirit faces -- I just never got over the weirdness of their descriptions and so could not feel their appearances as triumphant/joyful moments, just weird ones. Or masquerades -- I was too busy trying to visualize the things to be properly scared of them. And L commented that the way chittim, the Leopard People money, kept raining down on people for achievements felt like something out of a video game. I did like the description of the juju knife selection process and how it feels in Sunny's hand, the drama-queen artist wasp, and the exploding balls of flesh and teeth (because EW).
Characters-wise... Sasha eventually grew on me as someone I actually liked, but other than him, I didn't feel personally invested in anyone. Sunny was OK, but I actually didn't really care about her as a person, probably the least of all of the kids. Chichi is at least entertaining in her brashness, and I liked Orlu's quiet decency even though he's not a flashy character at all.
I was also somewhat surprised by how Sunny's magical awakening means that the physical problems associated with her albinism go away -- she no longer needs an umbrella to hide from the sun. This seems to be a theme rather than a cop-out -- because the albinism is a mark of her Leopard gift, it seems like the magic can be used to counteract the original lack, not just for Sunny but in general, the way figuring out unraveling juju means Orlu can learn to read despite his dyslexia. But it still feels weird, like magic is "fixing' her.
There is a sequel that's apparently supposed to come out next year. I will probably pick it up, but mostly for more of the setting, and for Sasha.
bingo: book set on a continent I've never been to (Africa), book with a PoC author, book with a PoC protagonist, book with a female protagonist, sort of book with a protagonist with disability (albinism)?
17. Lia Silver, Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) -- OK, so, heh, my great plan was to save this book to read alongside one of the "classic" bingo squares so I'd have something fast and fun to intersperse with the stuffy. So, I figured I'd read it alongside Ulysses. Only once I started, I couldn't stop, to the point of hiding in the bathroom at work to read, which hasn't happened for a while (since Foxglove Summer). So, you know, as an Ulysses-reading-carrot, this approach has been a failure, but the book was a susccess in all other respects. Spoilers
I really, really like DJ. As the book itself points out ("maybe the billionaire's best friend or the heroine's brother. The one who didn't get his own book, due to being insufficiently scrwed up and bossy"), he's not typical leading man material, and I'm not swooning over him, but I'd love to have his as a buddy. I'll pass on his taste in music, but his sense of humour and tendency to ramble are great, and the way he thinks and talks about his family is wonderful (I was hoping to get to meet Grandma Steel, who sounds like a pretty cool lady, and the rest of the family, but, alas, earwax; maybe in the sequels?), and it was just such a pleasure to spend so long in his POV. I liked his cheerful unwillingness to give up -- what Echo calls "a terminal inability to know when to quit" (and that he basically sees his situation as being a prisoner of war, whose duty it is to escape).
Echo is much less my kind of character, and her sections really mostly worked for me for the outside POV of DJ, but I do like the trope that's playing out here, with DJ's decency, humour, openness and sheer humanity dragging her into humanity herself, fucking feelings an all. I don't actually ship DJ/Echo, but I loved the scene where they met ("I'm an idiot, DJ thought. Taken in by a tank top. She's not a civilian, she's just out of uniform."), the banter between them throughout the book (the running gag about what kind of shifter Echo might be, trying to guess each other's favorite movies), the sharing of quirks (DJ's caffeine addiction to the point of chewing instant coffee crystals, Echo's sweet tooth), the sex scene at the end (which features a lot of talking and laughing, including the great line: "I'll give you coordinates. Clitoris, latitude forty-eight degrees north, longitude twenty degrees east." And I also like their conversation about how feeling in love (for the first time for real) feels different than they'd expected, that Echo thought it would feel "More I want you no matter what, less I want you to be happy." But, anyway, it would appear that DJ and Echo work better for me as friends fighting side-by-side than a couple, possibly because Echo seems more emotionally damaged than people I like having in my ships.
The reason I don't ship them is probably in part also because I was kinda feeling DJ/Roy from about the third page on (and by "kinda" I mean "a lot"), which feelings only deepened during DJ's story (I know it's totally lampshaded with Echo's "was it love at first sight"), but I'm a huge sucker for brothers-in-arms ships, and this one begins with such glorious h/c. DJ and Echo have some good h/c scenes, too, but Roy was there first, and has hung out with DJ's family, and reads him books out loud, and... Basically, I'm deeply disappointed in the fact that there's no DJ/Roy on AO3. But I read the DJ/Echo porn fic which works as an after-credits scene :D
It's a really funny book -- I grinned through much of it -- but the poignant moments worked really well for me, too. DJ's breakdown after he mercy-kills Match (because while he's killed before, he's never killed up close, being a rifleman), DJ sitting up with Justin (the young security guard bitten by Match) and trying to help him survive the change. And the base is very creepy (though the handlers/scientists feel a little too evil; it makes sense that people made uncomfortable by the sorts of things going on there simply wouldn't end up at the base / stay there long, but still). Random note: it jumped out at me that the clone boys get normal names (Alan, Brian, David, Ethan, etc.) while the clone girls get slight variations on the phonetic alphabet tables, though presumably they were created at the same time.
My one reluctance about this series, which I've been hearing great things about for a while, was the werewolf angle -- I've never really liked the shifter side of UF, and I outright overdosed on it last year, between Mercy Thompson and Kate Daniels. But I needn't have worried -- this is the least werewolfy werewolf book ever, which is perfect for my needs. DJ's personality, quirks, conflicts, etc. have nothing to do with him being a werewolf -- it's so nice! And on a worldbuilding level this is something I appreciated, too. A decent chunk of the plot, including the climax, is driven by the pack of made wolves, but not in any kind of way I've encountered before, and the pack's insistence on protecting Match has more to do with the *human* mentaility of the military pack members (and Emmett's inability to handle another loss after his wife and daughter's death) than any kind of wolf thing. And I really liked the way in this universe being an alpha has nothing to do with personality -- it's a... dolzhnost', a social compact, and people can be good at it or bad (like Emmett), but there's no mystical macho crap that seems to be associated with it at all, which is very refreshing. Also, scent names are super-fun (e.g. best part of the psychic wolves books, too), and I liked the way so many of them in this book were fairly unusual -- Lechon (suckling pig roasting on a spit), and Five (Chanel No. 5), and Guinness, and Nutmeg, alongside more expected things like steel and such. The werewolf superpowers feel fairly random -- like something out of X-Men, given the range from super-strength and eidetic memory to pretty far-out there stuff like possessing people, but their role so far has been fairly low key. (Also, I totally want to hear about the time DJ met a were-binturong).
Quotes!
"He hoped he wasn't trying to walk to the coast of Utah."
DJ: "Have you ever heard a SAW? It's not exactly stealthy. You want a guy who'll creep up and kill people and creep away unseen, you go kidnap yourself a scout sniper."
DJ on Tagalog: "I'm fluent, more or less, but my vocabulary's not that great when it comes to words my parents wouldn't say in front of a kid."
"There was nothing in the world, no cat or shark or flying thing, that could move more gracefully than her own human form."
"[Echo] smiled at him. It didn't make her look any softer, but she looked less like she might try to kill him at any second, and more like she was standing ready to kill anyone who might attack him."
Charlie's romance novel: "The cover showed a woman with a lot of cleavage plastering herself to a man riding a motorcycle along a mountain road. He wore leather pants, an unzipped leather jacket, no shirt, and no helmet. She wore a crop top, a miniskirt, and no helmet. DJ imagined the title: Our Worst Road Rash Ever. Or maybe Future Organ Donors in Love."
"It [the secret base] was weirdly similar to Camp Pendleton, though much smaller. And, of course, evil."
DJ thinking that Roy is thinking: "Fucking new guy who hates my favorite rabbit book." (also, this book reminded me that I meant to finally read Watership Down for the "heavily featuring animals" bingo square.)
DJ on Roy: "In a lot of ways he was a better wolf than me, except he couldn't shift."
"he'd once gotten hooked on a Norwegian death metal band and only belatedly learned that the members were white supremacists. [...] 'Anyway, the song I'm going to play is by the group I got into as a substitute. They have a similar sound, but they're not evil.' He paused. 'I may have phrased that wrong. They're Satanists. But they're not Nazis.'"
"Are you listening, Torres?" Mr Dowling barked.
Reflexively, DJ said, "yes, sir!"
Both Mr Dowling and Echo stared at him.
"What did I just say?" Mr Dowling inquired.
"You were briefing us on the mission," DJ replied.
"Specifically, what did I just say?"
DJ had been completely checked out, but Mr.Dowling was holding an EpiPen and had a box of them in his other hand. "You were explaining how to use the EpiPens, in case we get tagged by Amber. Take off the safety cap, jam the orange end into your thigh until it clicks, hold for five seconds, then wait a minute or so and see if symptoms improve. If they don't, use another one. Then rush to a hospital."
Echo laughed. Mr. Dowling looked torn between annoyance and grudging approval.
"What?" DJ asked. He'd been so sure that was it.
"I asked if you were familiar with EpiPens," Mr. Dowling said. "Obviously, the answer is yes."
DJ: "I've always believed I could do anything if I just tried hard enough and didn't give up. Either that's not true or I fucked up, and I don't know which is worse."
"Bats. [...] Thousands of bats. The light draws moths, and the bats come to eat them. And then owls come to eat the bats. It's an entire ecosystem in mid-air, powered by thirthy-nine xenon lamps and millions of tourist dollars."
The first bit of Laura's Wolf was included in the ebook, which I've now also read. I'm hoping there will be some DJ in it later on, because I definitely missed him in that chapter. Which is why I'm now 28% into Partner XP *waves at holodets as instructed by egelantier* (candied baby pinecones!!! XD)
And the ebook is free on Amazon as a promo for the sequel. (It was one of those books that I liked much more than I would have guessed from the ad copy, which makes it sound more generically romance and a lot less funny than it is.)
bingo: PoC protagonist (DJ is Pinoy), protagonist w/ mental disability (DJ is severely dyslexic and probably has ADHD); I don't think this counts as a book by an author I've not read before since, although I have not read her pubished work before (under any pen name), I have read her fic :)
CSRB progress: [under the cut]
Mix'n'match: (14/25, 0/6 challenges); 1 bingo
Book with a protagonist with a disability: Wonder
Rec from friend or media: Mistborn
Book with a female protagonist: Akata Witch
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
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
Serious: (12/25, 0/7 challenges)
Book with a protagonist with a physical disability: Wonder
Book by an author of color: Akata Witch
Book with a protagonist with a mental/social disability: Prisoner
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
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
Random: (11/25, 2/7 challenges)
Book heavily featuring kids (CHALLENGE MODE: from a child's POV): Wonder
Book set on a continent you've never been to: Akata Witch (Africa)
Book from friends or media: Mistborn
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
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
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tag: http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/tag/csrb