Reading roundup(ish), Hugos, book meme
Hugo nominations are out! I didn't nominate this year, but judging by the fact that more of the short list made me go "ooh!" as opposed to "ugh", maybe I'll spring for a supporting membership and vote.
Novel: I'm totally rooting for Network Effect, which I loved, but am also reasonably pleased to see Piranesi on the list. I was interested in Black Sun until ikel89 DNF'd it after ranting to Best Chat at length, which rather cooled my interest. I was not really interested in the Jemisin, am reserving judgement on Harrow (I've made very little progress on Gideon), and didn't even realize Lady Astronaut 3 was out. But even with that, this is already two books I liked ahead of 2020, so.
Novella: Nothing I've read, but I've heard good things about Riot Baby, Ring Shout, and Empress of Salt and Fortune, and am intrigued by the latter two. There's also the inevitable Seanan McGuire Wayward Children thing, but it's about Jack again, so I'm actually somewhat positively inclined. The other two are something by Nino Cipri (I liked their short fiction when I encountered it) and a Sarah Gailey thing, but one can't have everything.
Novelette: Also nothing I've read, though I've had it on my list to check out the Sarah Pinsker, and I usually enjoy Naomi Kritzer's work, so am happy to see her nominated. The one that made me sit up the most was "Helicopter Story" by Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020), which I assume is the one referred to here. I remember this going down, though I did not see the story before it was taken down (Wikipedia entry). I wonder how the story ended up being nominated, considering it's been down for about a year, and I wonder if people nominating it have actually read it or are making a point (I don't think I can say I agree with the point since I haven't been able to read the story, but from what Clarke wrote, the cancel culture approach was bullshit). Oh hey, though! Apparently it's been archived.
Short story: Haven't read any of these either, but was glad to see
yhlee, T.Kingfisher, Jina Vie-Min Prasad, and Naomi Kritzer on the list.
Best series: Whoa, look at that, six series I've actually read at least in part! Murderbot is quite firmly at the top for me. I feel like I need to read more of the Lady Astronauts and Daevabad to judge them fully (I liked the first installments but not enough to keep reading proactively), The Interdependency and The Poppy War were series where I liked the first book and was disappointed enough by book 2 that I haven't finished the series (although book 1 Poppy War >>> Collapsing Empire), and October Daye is, well, kind of the opposite, where I'm not actually a fan, and yet I've read a lot more of it than of any of the others, probably, uh, combined... (You know, though, just the series entry in the voting packet, if included, would make the supporting membership worth it for me, probably, since I do plan to read all of these that I haven't read yet, and wouldn't mind owning even the ones I've read, which were mostly via libraries or loans from friends...)
Best related work: Unexpectedly, I am familiar with 3 of the 6 already -- the Beowulf translation (which is awesome, but I'm not sure how it is a related work...), Jenny Nicholson's The Last Bronycon (I may have it mixed up with some other fandom autopsy in my impressions, but I remember enjoying it reasonably?), and “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” (lol XD) I'm not sure what the other non-book things are...
Best graphic story: Nothing I've read or am particularly intrigued by and Seanan McGuire is here too?? XD
Best dramatic presentation, long form: Not unexpectedly, this is a much more eclectic year of nominees than the usual superhero / Star Wars blockbusters: Birds of Prey, The Old Guard, Palm Springs, Soul, Tenet, and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I've only watched Soul, which was nice enough, but am curious about another 2-3.
Best dramatic presentation, short form: I've seen two of these, and not even from the same show! She-Ra two-part series finale is nominated, as is The Good Place series finale (I liked both of them, but not sure how one would pick between them... probably She-Ra, though). Plus Doctor Who, The Expanse, and two Manadlorian episodes.
Best editor (long and short): the usual suspects. Navah Wolfe is nominated for long form again
Pro artist: most names I recognize, including John Picacio and Alyssa Winans (who was on my nominations list the last time I nominated)
Semiprozine: Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Strange Horizons (who appear to have included every person they employ in their editor list XD), Escape Pod AND PodCastle, and FIYAH.
Fanzine: Sadly no Rocking Stack Rank again, but actually some new names this year -- The Full Lid and Unofficial Hugo Book Club, plus the usual suspects (Lady Business, nerds of a feather, Quick Sip Reviews, and Journey Planet)
Fancast: Serpents!! And Our Opinions Are Correct must've recused themselves after their back-to-back wins, so maybe they would actually have a shot. The Coode Street podcast is back, too, and a couple of other names I recognize for the last year, but Worldbuilding for Masochists and Kalanadi (which seems to be another BookTuber thing) seem new to the list.
Fan writer: no strong feelings, but am glad to see Elsa Sjunneson nominated.
Best fan artist: no feelings at all.
Lodestar: Huh, A Deadly Education made it in despite the controversy. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is on the list too (yay, Kingfisher!), and I've heard very intriguing things about Raybearer and want to read it.
Campbell/Astounding: Very happy to see Emily Tesh nominated (2nd year) and A.K.Larkwood showing up in her first (bummed that Waggoner is not on the list, if she was eligible). Also nominated are Lindsay Ellis (I've been curious to check out Axiom's End), and other authors I've heard of -- Jenn Lyons and Micaiah Johnson, but have never even heard of Simon Jimenez (apparently a debut novelist).
There's also a Video Game special category, but I have no opinions on it, though I'm aware enough of video games by osmosis that I'm not surprised that Hades and Blaseball are on the list.
I note the nominating ballots are down quite a bit from 1584 nominating ballots for CoNZealand to 1249 for DisCon III (>20% down), but I wonder if that's common when the previous year's Worldcon was outside the US?
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10. C.M.Waggoner, A Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry -- this is a sort of sequel to Unnatural Magic, which was one of the books I most enjoyed in my otherwise largely-desultory 2020 reading -- it's set in the same rich world, and one central character is connected to principals from the first book, but I'm pretty sure it can be read as a pure standalone. It may actually be more satisfying that way; I thoroughly enjoyed this one as well, but I didn't enjoy it as a sequel, and not for the same reasons I enjoyed the first one. The main thing I loved about the first one was the richness of the world -- religions, wizardry, history of political and cultural relationships between humans and trolls, troll and human culture individually, fairies suddenly -- which is not overexplained but you're just sort of tossed in the middle of it, with some chapter-heading epigraphs to help you along, and I love this kind of stuff. The world is still there in this book, obviously, but I'm not sure how much of that richness one can pick up on without prior grounding. While Unnatural Magic jumped around the continent and gave us a close look at several different cities/settlements/societies, so you could absorb and piece together a flavor of the world as a whole, ARLGtW is much smaller and more contained: it mostly takes place in one city (capital of a relative backwater), with just a brief sojourn on a country estate, and we get it through a single POV, instead of three different ones. But the POV is greatly entertaining, and the story is tight and fun -- the first book made some very odd structural/pacing choices, and this one avoids them, by virtue of eschewing the more complicated structure if nothing else -- and was basically a wonderful romp, while also being occasionally quite poignant. And there's something of a Pratchett-y feel to this book as to the first one -- I don't compare this series to Discworld, but I do think this loose series is aiming for/working in the same tradition, and not doing a bad job of it at all.
Anyway, so this book absolutely turns on the protagonist and POV character, Delly, who is a fire-witch living rough in Leiscourt and trying to look after her drip-addicted mother (and by the way, not only is drip a great made-up word for a drug, but I also really loved that it gives rise to "faucet" as the terminology for "dealer"). The book is thrid person POV, but it is a third person that is entirely attuned to Delly's very specific voice, which mostly was very entertaining and only occasionally a little too much (and the way Delly speaks is not just an authorial affectation but also making a point, while being just fun). Anyway, Delly great, clever and resourceful and believably flawed, and her growth through the book, which she herself is mostly oblivious to, was also really well done, I thought. SPOILERS from here Oh, and I really enjoyed Delly figuring out the way back to the secret laboratory where they're led blindfolded through a combination of cleverness and knowing the city streets even with a most of her vision blanked out -- that was very Vimes. <3
I also enjoyed the other long-term members of the heist-team/mystery-solving squad, Abstentia Dok, first in her class at wizarding school, brilliant and snide and combative (the eventual mutual respect and friendship between her and Delly were the most interesting arc in the book for me), and Mrs Totham, the genteel old-lady "body-scientist" (i.e. necromancer), with her twittering about birds and combination of compassion and ruthlessness, and the undead mouse possessed by the spirit of a great wizard whom Mrs Totham names Buttons. (Every review I've read remarks on the undead mouse, so it's not just me and my rodents; the undead mouse is great XD)
I happened to listen to the Serpentcast episode on girl gangs shortly after finishing this book, and it was basically only at that point that it occurred to me that the main characters of this book were an all-female heist team. Until then I was just thinking of them as a heist team with no qualifiers, even though the book establishes it very deliberately and openly that only female characters had been gathered for the inciting incident. Like, the dynamic did not feel like "let's tell this story with only female characters", the way heavily-female-skewed narratives sometimes do, and just flowed naturally. But if you think about it, there are only a handful of men who show up in this story briefly -- the warden, Squint Jok, Mittens, Delly's footman dalliance, the kid who is serving as the runner for the Kind Companions, and Elo her actor friend -- oh, and Winn's Pop showing up at the end.
Winn, the love interest is... Winn is pleasant! This book has a romance arc in addition to the mystery/heist arc, and it's cute and sweet (and I definitely felt like Delly and Winn had chemistry), but Winn doesn't get a POV, and I don't think Winn gets any kind of arc or growth or anything, less than Abstentia and Mrs Totham, and so she just still kind of comes off as the prize Delly gets at the end of the book, rather than a full-fledged character, let alone a co-protagonist. I was OK with that, since I do want Delly to have nice things, but I do feel like if this book has a weakness, it's that. Winn is the daughter of Jeckran and Tsira from Unnatural Magic, which makes her a quarter-troll girl from high society, but if there are any nuances or complications inherent in that, they did not come through in this book at all -- her parents were interestingly complicated characters; Winn is just full of hearty good cheer and human decency, who really loves her dad (and almost never mentions her mother, to the degree that I really wondered if something had happened to Tsira or if Jeckran and Tsira continued to live mostly separately, or what). Which, that set of traits makes her a good foil for Delly, but not very interesting on her own. I did like the detail of Winn having a dorky sense of humour and laughing at her jokes when nobody else would.
One thing I really did appreciate is the way Delly's relationship with her mother is handled, and the way her drip-addicted mother is portrayed in general. Delly loves her and worries about her but, very understandably, feels angry about having to be the one taking care of her mother, who never really took care of her as a little girl -- there are some harrowing memories from her childhood that get mentioned almost casually where six-year-old Delly had to keep awake all night because she didn't trust the creepy men her mother had brought home. But then you learn that Delly's mothe rwas 14 when she had Delly, and that, you know, puts things in a different light, though of course it doesn't make Delly's anger at her not valid. One of my favorite scenes along those lines was when Marvie is living with the Tothams at the lab and we learn through Mrs Totham that Marvie is in constant pain from arthritis, and is thus her addiction is at least partially self-medicating with the drip, while Delly basically can't break out of her accustomed way of thinking, that her mother is an addict, pulling one over on the others in order to get her fix. (And they are probably both right, but nobody learns a Very Important Lesson -- Delly does not explicitly reflect on or accept that her mother's addiction may be anything more complicated, but the reader gets those two points of view and left to draw conclusions for themselves.
This book still has magic in it, though it's much less the grand, rigorously quantitative magic of Weltsir and Hexos -- I mean, it IS the same magic, but Delly doesn't really think of it that way unless Abstentia the academic wizard asks her directly -- this I thought was a really neat touch! She just sets things on fire and melts things. But there's still neat, like, street-level magic that plays a role, "hard promises" (i.e. a promise that if broken curses you with something unpleasant. Also, I think "cloved women" were new to this book, or at least explained for the first time -- basically, were-pigs -- and I kind of wished we'd seen more of that -- it's refreshingly insane. One thing I'm a bit confused about at first was who was Lord-Mage at this point -- but I think that's just a bit of shorthand in the writing. Winn says, "And in Hexos all you need to get a government posting is to be friends with the Lord-Mage, and Mother and Pop have known Uncle Loga for ages" -- which would seem to suggest that it was still Loga. But then Delly reflects that "After it got out that the old Lord-Mage of Hexos had been some kind of street urchin, and his successor a clanless girl from Daeslund's North Country" and later Winn explictly refers to him as "the former Lord-Mage", so I guess Winn was just trying to say, with that first, that Jekran got a job in government while Loga was still Lord-Mage, but it just threw me off.
What I did finally understand better as a result of this book, which had never been completely clear to me in the first one, is how householding works -- it seems to be a general term for, like, a civil family contract? I'd gathered that it was something like marriage in book 1, and it can certainly be that (but marriage also exists? or marriage is the sacrament and householding is the civil/legal arrangement? and householding might be inherently asymmetric? -- Delly thnks "Winn struck her as the independent-minded type of gull who'd much rather be the householder, even if it meant she had to find paying employment in order to provide for her lady. Delly, for her part, would much rther be the householded and be provided for" -- still not clear on those points), but it also seems to be the word for adoption -- Ermintrude is Mrs Totham's householded daughter, and Ainette is the Wexins'. So basically it seems like "householder" = "head of household" in US tax terms, and "householded" = "dependent". Which is an interesting axis to coexist and overlap with marriage as an institution, though I'm wondering if there is such a thing as joint heads of household and what that's called? When the Wexin/Crossick marrieage is being discussed, Jok Fairnbrook explains that "Husband or householeder get the property", so even in the case of 'regular' marriage, it's not particularly symmetric or egalitarian.
Speaking of worldbuilding, I also enjoyed the alley-chat Delly and her mother and occasional others code-switch into when talking to others of that background, or which Delly uses intentionally to emphasize her background. I thought this was really nicely done, especially since it's the kind of thing that would be super easy to do badly -- it's very distinct but perfectly intelligible, fun but not over the top. (I wonder, actually, if she lifted a specific dialect wholesale or cobbled this together from a couple of different ones, because if she made it up, it's really great and feels like a real dialect that could exist in the streets.) And the code-switching is always done mindfully, in a way that felt very realistic to me.
Also, there was a really glorious, lovingly described coffee shop that I'd love to visit and while away some time in.
Oh, and I liked the repetition of "hard times" as sort of a resigned acknowledgement by everyone, including a moment of weird cameraderie between Delly and the guy who attempted to kidnap her.
Quotes:
"That was the way it was when you paid someoen's way: it went straight from you doing them a favor to them thinkingyou doling out cash was all part of nature's plan, like a bee making honey. But Dellaria hadn't yet discovered how to make a moneycomb."
"and within very short order an exceedingly irritated-looking warden reinflicted Dellaria Wells upon the populace."
"at the places where he mght be doing his part to keep a barstoole from floating off into the firmament."
"The atmosphere around her was enduring a process of ongoing endonkeyfication."
"she'd always been under the impression that young ladies weren't supposed to know what knickers were, even while they were putting them on in the morning."
Delly, living in the country manor: "There was food befor eyou realized that you were hungry, clean clothes when you'd barely dirtied them, hot water, endless gaslight. Even breathing was effortless when someone else had already carried away anything that might make a stink. [...] Her childhood memories all seemed much worse now, and people who'd grown up with something better seemed like something other than ordinary people. Like trees, maybe, or tigers, or creatures that lived at the bottom of the sea. The sort of creature that woudldn't have any reason to know howhuman beings went about their long, stupid, grasping little days."
"'Oh, there's no need to fuss,' Miss Dok said irritably, as if she hadn't been the one to present them with the image of her sobbing in the bath."
"as a born-and-bred Liscourter she was used to talking about rooms available to rent, the rising cost of rooms available to rent, and the lack of any suitable rooms available to rent at a reasonable cost in the same way that people from other towns might converse casually about the weather" (Relatable, LOL!)
"Sometimes being irritated with Winn felt a bit as if you had suddenly found yourself on a busy street corner in a shouting match with an oak tree."
"Mrs Medlow, Delly's landlady, had a sitting room thoroughly enkittenated on nearly every surface that was not already too thickly barnackled with ribbons, doilies, and porceilain shepherdesses to be an appropriate canvas for kittenization."
Elo: "Ghosts don't bother us much, at least: I expect they're worried about a bunch of actors asking them to borrow money."
"The nurse stared at her for a long moment, with the look of someone who had worn her ees out on the jagged faces of miserable people."
Abstentia: "You ought to come back to Weltsir. [...] You only had a year there, and you're -- quite frankly, one of the more accomplished young wizards I've ever met. Imagine what they'd make of your in five."
Delly: "They could have ten years with me, and they'd never make me half the wizard that you already are."
Abstentia smiled, very slightly. "Well, Delly," she said, "I should think that that was obvious."
*
I ended up writing another poem for the Multifandom Poetry Fest:
The Unspoken Name/The Serpent Gates, The Beach (for
minutia_r's prompt "Tal Charossa, self-care"). It's a short little poem, but I knew I had to do something as soon as I saw that prompt:
Gold-daubed cliffs, stained-glass water, sand
silver-salt, and above, sea-birds wheeling.
Children's laughter; a drink in hand...
No hard feelings.
Watching the sea-waves' swell,
dancing kelp briefly hidden from view;
sipping peace, sweet and chill: Farewell
and fuck you.
While I was messing around with The Serpent Gates, I ended up googling to see if there was any fanart for the series, and there is some, but more interestingly there are some drawings by Larkwood herself:
- Twitter thread of character sketches (my favorite are the Sethennai and Oranna ones_
- also, modern AU Csorwe, Tal, and Shuthmili
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Book meme stolen from
giallarhorn. (It's meant to be a "give me a number" sort of meme, but I prefer to just answer all the questions up front.)
1: What book did you last finish? When was that?
*points up* Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry. I don't remember when I finished it, but it's been about two weeks?
2: What are you currently reading?
I'm actively reading A Desolation Called Peace (in a scab-picking sort of way). I'm also in the middle of rereading Taltos (which is
sholio's fault :), but I had to put it on backburner and focus on 'Desolation', which I need to finish before it disappears off my Kindle app -- it's due back at the library soon.
3: What book are you planning to read next?
I generally don't forecast ahead, but probably the RoL Abigail novella, since I have that on hand and I do miss the series.
4: What was the last book you added to your tbr?
I don't have a physical TBR pile -- I mean, I have piles of books around the house, but I don't think of them as TBR piles, they're just piles of books, some of them unread. Thus the closest thing I have to a TBR file is my holds list at the library. The last thing I added to that was The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers 4) and Fugitive Telemetry (the next Murderbot), which are not yet out. The last book I added to it which is out was A Desolation Called Peace.
5: Which book did you last re-read?
I am currently rereading Steve Brust's Taltos, as mentioned above. This is one of the books I've read the most in general, so the odds are pretty good that it would be this anyway, plus I was overdue for a reread -- for a while there, I was rereading it every 4 years, I noticed, but this time I'd gone about 6 -- but it was
sholio rereading the book and posting about it that got me to start my reread.
The last book I actually finished rereading would've been Monday Starts on Saturday for Yuletide purposes (but I did reread it twice, once in English translation and once in Russian).
6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved?
Counting new books only, Network Effect! I've enjoyed all the Murderbot books, but this one I may love even more than Artificial Condition, which I was not expecting. But I've had a good reading streak lately -- I also really enjoyed Winter's Orbit, The Unspoken Name, and The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry.
7: What was/were the last book/books you bought?
I had originally said that I bought some books as presents for people most recently. The last book I bought for myself was Winter's Orbit on pre-order. But actually last night I "bought" -- it was $0.99 and I had $1 off, so it was technically free -- a book by an author I learned about via Flights of Foundry, PJ Manney -- R(EVOLUTION).
8: Paperback or hardcover? Why?
Mostly ebook at this point, but if I'm buying a hard copy, I prefer paperback if it's in decent shape. They're more compact, and I never have enough room for books.
9: Children's, YA, NA or Adult? Why?
I don't think I've ever read anything that I realized was categorized as "New Adult", although I've certainly read books that show up on New Adult lists, like Fangirl or Red, White & Royal Blue. Probably not this category, though, because the carveout seems to be, eh, particularly vapid? Like, I liked Fangirl a lot and had a ton to say about it, but the aspects of it I liked most were the ones which felt the most YA -- the family relationship -- and the least whatever caused people to put it in this category. I pretty much only read genre (or classics) when it comes to Adult -- I've read and enjoyed some of the stereotypical "English professor's mid-life crisis" literary novels, but generally don't read them. I happily read YA, both genre and non-genre, and can enjoy both the genuinely good ones and the absolute trash -- for some reason I have more tolerance for trash YA than trash other things. My problem with YA comes when something is trying to be all deep and important but is actually just incompetent (yes, Offbrand Zukos, I'm looking at you). I do tend to enjoy Children's books I pick up at probably greater rates than any of the other categories. Not that I think it means that Children's books are inherently better, but probably for me to pick up a children's book as an adult, it has to be special to come onto my radar at all, so they're sort of preselected for me already.
10: Sci-Fi or fantasy? Why?
I do like both genres, but tend to read fantasy more, and to enjoy more sub-genres of fantasy than I do of SF. Like, at this point, I pretty much only like space opera type SF? Social SF, ideally with space, character-driven. While in fantasy -- which I think is a broader genre overall, actually -- I still enjoy epic fantasy and urban fantasy and even historical fantasy and can enjoy paranormal romance if we lump it in there. And I go through periods where I don't much feel like reading sci-fi, but I very rarely don't feel like reading fantasy at all, though I've had periods where I'd burnt myself out on epic fantasy or urban fantasy/PNR through overexposure. I think that's what it comes down to, probably -- fantasy is just a broader genre, and if I get sick of one part of it, there's still more of other corners of it left.
11: Classic or modern? Why?
Classic. I guess becuase the setting feels more fantastical of the two? Like, there's no magic or aliens, but, being set in the eighteenth century or whatever is still sufficiently alien to keep the setting interesting? I guess really the reason is that setting is one of the things I'm really interested in when I read books, and classic works tend to have more interesting settings because it isn't just the same life I'm familiar with. (I suppose reading modern books set in/written by authors from unfamiliar-to-me places would have a similar effect, and I do tend to like those more, I guess? But on the whole, classics are still more different.) And the language tends to be more interesting, too.
12: Political memoirs or comedic memoirs?
What's a comedic memoir -- just one written to be amusing? Or memoirs by professional comedians? I've never read the latter, but I can enjoy the former, if it's things like Dave Barry's books -- him writing about his life in a funny way -- though I do still prefer and find funnier his topic-based books. I have LESS THAN ZERO interest in political memoirs, and don't really understand the attraction.
13: Name a book with a really bad movie/tv adaption
Where I've both read the book and seen the movie: the first Percy Jackson. I guess it's a passably entertaining movie if you don't know the book, and I'm amused by some of the casting choices, but it makes some BAFFLING choices as an adaption. Although I can't hate it per se: the rodents watched the movie and liked it enough that they wanted to read the Percy Jackson books, which I had previously been trying to get them to read (
aome had introduced me to them), and they became much bigger fans of the series than I am, and read all the subsequent Rick Riordan books long after I'd jumped off the wagon.
I've also heard dire things about The Dark is Rising (read some of the book, never watched the movie) and I feel like there's another one that's famous for being a terrible adaptation but I'm blanking on it...
14: Name a book where the movie/tv adaption actually was better than the original
I feel this way about the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust -- I read the book and thought it was merely OK (granted, this was on the heels of Good Omens, which not a lot of things can live up to, though Discworld did -- I was so impressed by GO that I went and got whatever else the library had by the authors, with the result that I became a Discworld fan but didn't pick up another Gaiman until a a kid of my parents' friends recommended American Gods to all of us). But I really loved the movie.
Oh, and we were just talking about it on Zoom Best Chat the other day: I don't know if the movie is better than the book per se, but I definitely enjoyed both Blade Runner and Minority Report more than that Philip K. Dick's stories that they're based on -- that's probably just a sign that I don't like Philip K. Dick :P In addition to Blade Runner on this list, I also agree with Silence of the Lambs probably, and disagree EXTREMELY STRONGLY with the inclusion of LotR. Don't get me wrong, I love the movies, for the most part, but calling them better than the books is blasphemy -- just because something is more accessible doesn't mean it's better.
15: What book changed your life?
Oh look, and we were already talking about Lord of the Rings :P I've written about it more than once: LotR was the book that made me realize that there was such a thing as fantasy for grown-ups, and that absolutely shaped my habits from age 13 to the present day, brought me into fandom in any significant way, led to or deepened many of my friendships, got me started writing poems in English, etc. etc.
16: If you could bring three books to a deserted island which would you bring and why?
Lord of the Rings and Lolita are the two that immediately occur to me -- the first one because immersing myself in it is so enjoyable, the latter because I feel like there's all kinds of neat stylistic things to discover in there (I want it to be the bilingual edition). Ooh, and my copy of Top 500 Poems in the English Language -- a lot of my favorite poems in there, and a nice variety, since it's a very broad anthology.
17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it?
I love this question but don't have any brilliant ideas... I'm tempted to steal
giallarhorn's idea and name it after a fantasy place that I love, especially maybe a somewhat more obscure or books-and-learning associated one, maybe Isengard or something. (Is that allowed, actually? Those names are probably all trademarked by now XD) Then I thought maybe a fantasy book reference? -- meaning, a book that exists in a fantasy universe I like. I guess one way to combine the two would be to call the bookstore "West March" or something and have a red book in the logo?
18: Which character from a book is the most like you?
There was a meme going around to describe yourself in three characters; two of mine were book characters: Perscitia from the Temeraire series and Kragar from the Dragaera books.
19: Which character from a book is the least like you?
Pretty much any Gryffindor-type protagonist, starting with, say, Harry Potter.
20: Best summer read?
21: Best winter read?
I don't think of books as seasonal things -- they're not like stone fruit or clementines XD I was going to say that thrillers make for good summer reading, but then realized that most of the examples I'm thinking of were books I'd read in the winter -- just, in Hawaii :P But, yeah, thrillers are probably my beach read of choice -- I don't like reading outside very much, but they're engrossing enough to keep me reading anyway, but the characters are not such that I get attached and am happy to put the book aside when it's time to go do something else. And if the book gets sand in it or ends up getting a little wet, well, that's OK, they're pretty much disposable anyhow.
For winter, I think I end up wanting to read the "comfort food" version of books, because when it's gloomy and dark it's just nice to be cozy, so either one of the books I enjoy rereading (Monday Begins on Saturday or Steven Brust's Taltos or bits of other things) or books that remind me of books that I love, e.g. Pratchetty feeling ones.
22: Pro or anti e-readers? Why?
Very pro! I love the instant gratification of being able to procure a book immediately, I love being able to bring my entire TBR pile with me on vacation, I love the search capability. And it's nice that e-books don't take up any physical space. I do wish it were easier to share Kindle books -- like, I've went and dug up pirated copies of books I paid for, because I wanted L or O to be able to read them too, and short of handing them my phone, Amazon does not make that easy.
23: Bookdepository or Amazon?
I don't think I've ever bought from Bookdepository. Amazon may be terrible but they are also very good at what they do, and since we now have Prime, they are pretty much my first stop for most anything I buy online.
24: Do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?
I love browsing in bookshops, but end up mostly buying things that aren't books -- cute stationery, novelty gifts, mugs with bookish statements on them, games. Partly because I don't buy books lightly/on impulse, partly because it's hard to match Amazon's breadth of selection, partly because mostly when I'm buying books, unless it's a present, I'm buying e-books.
25: If you could be a character from a book for just one day who would you be and why? (Bonus: any specific day in the story?)
One day is a reasonable period where I could carve out something that would be both fascinating and not too perilous. Like, I wouldn't want to be stuck in Rivendell or Lorien for long, but I'd love to see it for a day, so changing places with, say, Gimli while he's visiting one or the other would be nice (or visiting the Glittering Caves after the war). But I think what would be coolest would be getting to do some magic. Maybe something from Kvothe's time at the university, a period when he was not doing something dumb and not just barely treading water financially -- it should be possible to find one day like that, eh? I find the Kingkiller-verse magic to be the most interesting, so it's the kind I'd most like to try. And I guess it doesn't have to be Kvothe -- it can be Elxa Dal or Kilvin or someone else already fully established and reasonably happy-seeming.
26: If you could be a character from a book for their entire life who would you be and why?
Nope, no thanks. I even wrote a poem about it once: which you can read here
27: If you could change one thing about mainstream literature what would you change? (i.e. more diversity, better writing, better plot etc.)
By mainstream do we mean, like, non-genre? If so, I don't care personally, because I don't tend to read it, but more diversity wouldn't hurt. (I feel like if the general public wanted better writing and better plot, then books with better writing, etc. would be more popular.)
28: How many books have you read so far this year?
10 books, apparently. So yeah, I'm definitely running behind my book-a-week goal still.
29: How do you sort your shelves? (i.e. by color, author, title etc.)
By genre (fantasy, sci-fi, poetry, non-fiction, the occult, etc.), then grouped by authoer and ordered by how much I like them, more or less. I might group/order things like non-fiction and poetry in other logical ways -- e.g. the Romantics all together, or science in this group and language in this group. The physical books I own are not very numerous -- one bookshelf in my office with a little bit of overflow to a largely non-book shelf and two shelves in the living room, so it's not like I'd have to roam the stacks in search of a book in any case.
30: Who’s your favorite author?
When I was young, I had a very pretentious distinction I drew between favorite "authors" -- creators of the worlds and characters I loved -- and favorite "writers" -- i.e. those where I loved them for the prose. So Tolkien was my favorite author but Oscar Wilde was my favorite writer at the time (I would've been about sixteen at this point, and really really into Wilde). I do still think there's something to that distinction, and I would still say that Tolkien is my favorite author therefore. I really don't think any one person, before or since, has created a world that's so complete (in the apsects that matter to me in this kind of story, anyway; I've heard his mountains make no sense, but I don't care if they do or not).
But also a very honorable mention to Terry Pratchett here. The roots of Discworld don't go as deep, but the bredth and growth of it are staggering.
31: Who’s your favorite contemporary author?
As I've mentioned, I don't read much contemporary. But googling "contemporary authors" brings up some I have read, mostly ones with some speculative elements -- Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace), Zadie Smith (White Teeth), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas). I enjoyed all of the works, though all of these were books I picked up with some external impetus, school, book club, someone else reading it, bingo square. I don't know that I feel I have enough of an informed opinion to say one of them is a favorite. But White Teeth made me want to read more Zadie Smith to a greater degree than the other books made me want to read the other authors, although I do actually want to read more Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, too -- it's just that Zadie Smith's writing was also really funny, and I prefer funny books to also very good but darker/denser ones.
32: Who’s your favorite fantasy author?
Tolkien, duh. But I already mentioned Tolkien and Pratchett as transcending the genre.
33: Who’s your favorite Sci-Fi author?
At this point Lois McMaster Bujold, because the Vorkosigan Saga is very firmly my favorite sci-fi book series. Of the classics, I do really like Asimov.
34: List five OTPs
This is a weird question to find in the middle of a book meme... If we're talking canonical OTPs from book series, let's just go with Aral/Cordelia in the Vorkosigan Saga and Sam Vimes/Sybil Ramkin in the Discworld books.
35: Name a book you consider to be terribly underrated
I actually totally understand why it's so under the radar -- it's an odd series to get into, there are a lot of stumbling blocks to getting into it* -- but I really do wish Dragaera were better known. (*long series with years between books, confusing publication/chronological order, unreliable narrator mafia protagonist who is not a nice person, elided writing, each book changes genre slightly)
Oh, also, Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series. Also for reasons I completely understand -- even more so, to be honest, talk about your unreliable narrator who is not a nice person XD -- but as with Dragaera, I wish there were more people who recognized the brilliance of the work with whom I could talk about these books.
36: Name a book you consider to be terribly overrated
This one's easy! Children of Blood and Bone, which won all kinds of genre awards despite being, I firmly believe, and objectively bad book. (Nope, apparently still not over it.)
I also see a lot of books coming out in the last 5 years or so which get widely praised on Twitter by authors I like, get blurbed by authors I love, get nominated for and sometimes even win the genre awards, and I just think they're not very good books? Not terrible, the way offbrand Zukos above is, but with some significant flaws that it feels like most people just don't care about or overlook because they're swept away by something I'm not seeing, I guess? I felt that way about A Memory Called Empire, Witchmark, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (aka My Favorite Book that I Hate), a number of other high-profile SFF debuts of the recent years. Primarily debuts, which actually makes me think that maybe what I'm seeing is Twitter as PR machine as opposed to Twitter as source of people's actual opinions, which would explain the over-hype.
37: How many books are actually in your bookshelf/shelves right now?
By a rough estimated count, ~150 on the main shelf in my office + 65 on my overflow shelf (oversized books, signed books) + ~150-200 on the shelf in the living room that has the general (non-genre) books. Not counting the shelf of children's and reference books next to it, or the bookshelves with O's and L's books, or the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in B's office or the garage.
38: What language do you (most often) read in?
English almost exclusively, though I can read fluently in Russian, and sometimes do.
39: Name one of your favorite childhood books
Let me go with Аля, Кляксич и буква "А" by Irina Tokmakova, which is something like a Russian The Phantom Tollbooth -- a kid's adventures in a land of letters (and later, math). It was one of the books I made sure to track down a copy of for my own kids when we were in Israel, though sadly they weren't really into it.
(I guess I could go with Monday Begins on Saturday, too, but I was 11 when I discovered it, or Roadside Picnic for my obsession from when I was ten (which, no, it's definitely not actually a children's book), while the Tokmakova is tied into much earlier memories.)
40: Name one of your favorite books from your teenage years
Let me put it this way: I read LotR when I was 13.
41: Do you own a library card? How often do you use it?
I do! I go through periods of using the library heavily and not as much. when the rodents were small, we would go every week and fill up on books. Then they became independent and could borrow books from the school library or their friends or go to the public library on their own, and I was mostly reading in ebook, which is more of a pain to borrow from the library (fewer options, longer hold waits, the check-out process is annoying from a UX perspective, and you can't hold on to overdue books for a couple more days to finish up), so I went through a couple of years when I wasn't using the library almost at all. Then I got into Hugo voting in 2018 and the library made it much easier to get ahold of things like novellas and graphic novels, so I started using the library heavily again. And it turned out that going on a weekly walk just to browse on my own was something I'd missed (this nearest branch library was closed for a while, which probably contributed from my falling out of the library habit, though there are two other libraries that are within walking distance of me). Then libraries were closed to physical interaction for most of 2020, and I really missed that weekly walk. I did continue to use the e-book borrowing function of the library which was still active, but as you can imagine the hold lines were even longer, since now that was the ONLY way to get books from the library. Not too long ago a few of the libraries for curbside pickup, and I've been using that a little, although the hours of the nearest curbside pickup option are not great -- weekdays only and with a 30 min window after normal work hours, which means mostly I just don't have time to stop by.
42: Which was the best book you had to read in school?
If uni counts as school, I'll say Paradise Lost. If we're talking only primary school, hm... The story that most stuck with me is actually a short story -- "The Rule of Names", which was my introduction to Ursula LeGuin. Novel-length, what did I even have to read in high school? Freshman year the Odyssey, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I'm blanking on what else. Things Fall Apart, maybe? Sophomore year, Romeo and Juliet, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Huckleberry Finn. Junior year was creative writing and expository writing, and the AP English class I took senior year was also not the kind where we did novel-reading -- we read essays and excerpts, I guess? and then Hamlet after the AP exams. I enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and Hamlet (Lord of the Flies and the Odyssey, too, but I'd read them before), but Hamlet is probably "the best book" (if a play can be called a book).
43: Are you the kind of person who reads several books at once or the kind of person who can only read one book at a time?
I usually read them in parallel or even more specifically, nested.
44: Do you like to listen to music when you read?
Nope, I generally don't listen to music, but I also specifically don't listen to music when reading.
45: What is your favorite thing to eat when you read?
I don't have a specific snack I'll eat while reading, although I will read while eating dinner and stuff. But reading is the secondary activity in that case.
46: What is your favorite thing to drink when you read?
Tea, I guess? But coffee, wine/beer, and other things you can sip slowly are also OK.
47: What do you do to get out of a reading slump?
I don't know... I just need to come across a book that really grabs my imagination -- often something from a series I love. But I let it happen organically.
48: Where is your favorite place to read?
49: When is your favorite time to read?
For the last 25 years, I read primarily on public transit, in the morning and after my work day. For the last year, that was no longer an option, which meant that I had to find a different place to read. My favorite place/time to read is in bed, at night, but these days I just fall asleep, so it's not a very effective place to read...
50: Why do you love to read?
I... don't think I've ever had to answer this question before. It's a bit like having to answer "why do you like dessert?" -- because it's tasty? But I guess trying to think about it... I love reading because it introduces me to and lets me explore new settings -- different countries, jungles, time periods (in the adventure fiction I loved reading as a kid), fantastic settings and far-future or alternate worlds where magic powers exist within the world I know with the genres I mostly read now. I love reading because it introduces me to interesting characters and lets me "try them on" -- I've always liked thinking of myself as favorite characters in the stuff I read and play-acting them to some degree. And also acquiring a "stable" of character I could then think about interacting with each other in fun ways, something else I've done ever since I was a kid. I do like the plot aspect of some books -- this is why I enjoyed reading mysteries as a kid and trying to figure out the resolution from the clues, or at least being able to follow how the detective did it. And I like looking at stories and seeing how they're put together, how plot lines and arcs interweave, that sort of thing -- this is also something I started doing on my own, before anybody ever asked me to do this level of narrative analysis in school. And finally, I do love words and the way they fit together, so reading a well-written peace of prose appeals to me, well, on a competence kink level -- it's a skill I can appreciate and admire better than most. So, there you go, that's five reasons.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1148766.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
Novel: I'm totally rooting for Network Effect, which I loved, but am also reasonably pleased to see Piranesi on the list. I was interested in Black Sun until ikel89 DNF'd it after ranting to Best Chat at length, which rather cooled my interest. I was not really interested in the Jemisin, am reserving judgement on Harrow (I've made very little progress on Gideon), and didn't even realize Lady Astronaut 3 was out. But even with that, this is already two books I liked ahead of 2020, so.
Novella: Nothing I've read, but I've heard good things about Riot Baby, Ring Shout, and Empress of Salt and Fortune, and am intrigued by the latter two. There's also the inevitable Seanan McGuire Wayward Children thing, but it's about Jack again, so I'm actually somewhat positively inclined. The other two are something by Nino Cipri (I liked their short fiction when I encountered it) and a Sarah Gailey thing, but one can't have everything.
Novelette: Also nothing I've read, though I've had it on my list to check out the Sarah Pinsker, and I usually enjoy Naomi Kritzer's work, so am happy to see her nominated. The one that made me sit up the most was "Helicopter Story" by Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020), which I assume is the one referred to here. I remember this going down, though I did not see the story before it was taken down (Wikipedia entry). I wonder how the story ended up being nominated, considering it's been down for about a year, and I wonder if people nominating it have actually read it or are making a point (I don't think I can say I agree with the point since I haven't been able to read the story, but from what Clarke wrote, the cancel culture approach was bullshit). Oh hey, though! Apparently it's been archived.
Short story: Haven't read any of these either, but was glad to see
yhlee, T.Kingfisher, Jina Vie-Min Prasad, and Naomi Kritzer on the list.
Best series: Whoa, look at that, six series I've actually read at least in part! Murderbot is quite firmly at the top for me. I feel like I need to read more of the Lady Astronauts and Daevabad to judge them fully (I liked the first installments but not enough to keep reading proactively), The Interdependency and The Poppy War were series where I liked the first book and was disappointed enough by book 2 that I haven't finished the series (although book 1 Poppy War >>> Collapsing Empire), and October Daye is, well, kind of the opposite, where I'm not actually a fan, and yet I've read a lot more of it than of any of the others, probably, uh, combined... (You know, though, just the series entry in the voting packet, if included, would make the supporting membership worth it for me, probably, since I do plan to read all of these that I haven't read yet, and wouldn't mind owning even the ones I've read, which were mostly via libraries or loans from friends...)
Best related work: Unexpectedly, I am familiar with 3 of the 6 already -- the Beowulf translation (which is awesome, but I'm not sure how it is a related work...), Jenny Nicholson's The Last Bronycon (I may have it mixed up with some other fandom autopsy in my impressions, but I remember enjoying it reasonably?), and “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” (lol XD) I'm not sure what the other non-book things are...
Best graphic story: Nothing I've read or am particularly intrigued by and Seanan McGuire is here too?? XD
Best dramatic presentation, long form: Not unexpectedly, this is a much more eclectic year of nominees than the usual superhero / Star Wars blockbusters: Birds of Prey, The Old Guard, Palm Springs, Soul, Tenet, and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I've only watched Soul, which was nice enough, but am curious about another 2-3.
Best dramatic presentation, short form: I've seen two of these, and not even from the same show! She-Ra two-part series finale is nominated, as is The Good Place series finale (I liked both of them, but not sure how one would pick between them... probably She-Ra, though). Plus Doctor Who, The Expanse, and two Manadlorian episodes.
Best editor (long and short): the usual suspects. Navah Wolfe is nominated for long form again
Pro artist: most names I recognize, including John Picacio and Alyssa Winans (who was on my nominations list the last time I nominated)
Semiprozine: Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Strange Horizons (who appear to have included every person they employ in their editor list XD), Escape Pod AND PodCastle, and FIYAH.
Fanzine: Sadly no Rocking Stack Rank again, but actually some new names this year -- The Full Lid and Unofficial Hugo Book Club, plus the usual suspects (Lady Business, nerds of a feather, Quick Sip Reviews, and Journey Planet)
Fancast: Serpents!! And Our Opinions Are Correct must've recused themselves after their back-to-back wins, so maybe they would actually have a shot. The Coode Street podcast is back, too, and a couple of other names I recognize for the last year, but Worldbuilding for Masochists and Kalanadi (which seems to be another BookTuber thing) seem new to the list.
Fan writer: no strong feelings, but am glad to see Elsa Sjunneson nominated.
Best fan artist: no feelings at all.
Lodestar: Huh, A Deadly Education made it in despite the controversy. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is on the list too (yay, Kingfisher!), and I've heard very intriguing things about Raybearer and want to read it.
Campbell/Astounding: Very happy to see Emily Tesh nominated (2nd year) and A.K.Larkwood showing up in her first (bummed that Waggoner is not on the list, if she was eligible). Also nominated are Lindsay Ellis (I've been curious to check out Axiom's End), and other authors I've heard of -- Jenn Lyons and Micaiah Johnson, but have never even heard of Simon Jimenez (apparently a debut novelist).
There's also a Video Game special category, but I have no opinions on it, though I'm aware enough of video games by osmosis that I'm not surprised that Hades and Blaseball are on the list.
I note the nominating ballots are down quite a bit from 1584 nominating ballots for CoNZealand to 1249 for DisCon III (>20% down), but I wonder if that's common when the previous year's Worldcon was outside the US?
*
10. C.M.Waggoner, A Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry -- this is a sort of sequel to Unnatural Magic, which was one of the books I most enjoyed in my otherwise largely-desultory 2020 reading -- it's set in the same rich world, and one central character is connected to principals from the first book, but I'm pretty sure it can be read as a pure standalone. It may actually be more satisfying that way; I thoroughly enjoyed this one as well, but I didn't enjoy it as a sequel, and not for the same reasons I enjoyed the first one. The main thing I loved about the first one was the richness of the world -- religions, wizardry, history of political and cultural relationships between humans and trolls, troll and human culture individually, fairies suddenly -- which is not overexplained but you're just sort of tossed in the middle of it, with some chapter-heading epigraphs to help you along, and I love this kind of stuff. The world is still there in this book, obviously, but I'm not sure how much of that richness one can pick up on without prior grounding. While Unnatural Magic jumped around the continent and gave us a close look at several different cities/settlements/societies, so you could absorb and piece together a flavor of the world as a whole, ARLGtW is much smaller and more contained: it mostly takes place in one city (capital of a relative backwater), with just a brief sojourn on a country estate, and we get it through a single POV, instead of three different ones. But the POV is greatly entertaining, and the story is tight and fun -- the first book made some very odd structural/pacing choices, and this one avoids them, by virtue of eschewing the more complicated structure if nothing else -- and was basically a wonderful romp, while also being occasionally quite poignant. And there's something of a Pratchett-y feel to this book as to the first one -- I don't compare this series to Discworld, but I do think this loose series is aiming for/working in the same tradition, and not doing a bad job of it at all.
Anyway, so this book absolutely turns on the protagonist and POV character, Delly, who is a fire-witch living rough in Leiscourt and trying to look after her drip-addicted mother (and by the way, not only is drip a great made-up word for a drug, but I also really loved that it gives rise to "faucet" as the terminology for "dealer"). The book is thrid person POV, but it is a third person that is entirely attuned to Delly's very specific voice, which mostly was very entertaining and only occasionally a little too much (and the way Delly speaks is not just an authorial affectation but also making a point, while being just fun). Anyway, Delly great, clever and resourceful and believably flawed, and her growth through the book, which she herself is mostly oblivious to, was also really well done, I thought. SPOILERS from here Oh, and I really enjoyed Delly figuring out the way back to the secret laboratory where they're led blindfolded through a combination of cleverness and knowing the city streets even with a most of her vision blanked out -- that was very Vimes. <3
I also enjoyed the other long-term members of the heist-team/mystery-solving squad, Abstentia Dok, first in her class at wizarding school, brilliant and snide and combative (the eventual mutual respect and friendship between her and Delly were the most interesting arc in the book for me), and Mrs Totham, the genteel old-lady "body-scientist" (i.e. necromancer), with her twittering about birds and combination of compassion and ruthlessness, and the undead mouse possessed by the spirit of a great wizard whom Mrs Totham names Buttons. (Every review I've read remarks on the undead mouse, so it's not just me and my rodents; the undead mouse is great XD)
I happened to listen to the Serpentcast episode on girl gangs shortly after finishing this book, and it was basically only at that point that it occurred to me that the main characters of this book were an all-female heist team. Until then I was just thinking of them as a heist team with no qualifiers, even though the book establishes it very deliberately and openly that only female characters had been gathered for the inciting incident. Like, the dynamic did not feel like "let's tell this story with only female characters", the way heavily-female-skewed narratives sometimes do, and just flowed naturally. But if you think about it, there are only a handful of men who show up in this story briefly -- the warden, Squint Jok, Mittens, Delly's footman dalliance, the kid who is serving as the runner for the Kind Companions, and Elo her actor friend -- oh, and Winn's Pop showing up at the end.
Winn, the love interest is... Winn is pleasant! This book has a romance arc in addition to the mystery/heist arc, and it's cute and sweet (and I definitely felt like Delly and Winn had chemistry), but Winn doesn't get a POV, and I don't think Winn gets any kind of arc or growth or anything, less than Abstentia and Mrs Totham, and so she just still kind of comes off as the prize Delly gets at the end of the book, rather than a full-fledged character, let alone a co-protagonist. I was OK with that, since I do want Delly to have nice things, but I do feel like if this book has a weakness, it's that. Winn is the daughter of Jeckran and Tsira from Unnatural Magic, which makes her a quarter-troll girl from high society, but if there are any nuances or complications inherent in that, they did not come through in this book at all -- her parents were interestingly complicated characters; Winn is just full of hearty good cheer and human decency, who really loves her dad (and almost never mentions her mother, to the degree that I really wondered if something had happened to Tsira or if Jeckran and Tsira continued to live mostly separately, or what). Which, that set of traits makes her a good foil for Delly, but not very interesting on her own. I did like the detail of Winn having a dorky sense of humour and laughing at her jokes when nobody else would.
One thing I really did appreciate is the way Delly's relationship with her mother is handled, and the way her drip-addicted mother is portrayed in general. Delly loves her and worries about her but, very understandably, feels angry about having to be the one taking care of her mother, who never really took care of her as a little girl -- there are some harrowing memories from her childhood that get mentioned almost casually where six-year-old Delly had to keep awake all night because she didn't trust the creepy men her mother had brought home. But then you learn that Delly's mothe rwas 14 when she had Delly, and that, you know, puts things in a different light, though of course it doesn't make Delly's anger at her not valid. One of my favorite scenes along those lines was when Marvie is living with the Tothams at the lab and we learn through Mrs Totham that Marvie is in constant pain from arthritis, and is thus her addiction is at least partially self-medicating with the drip, while Delly basically can't break out of her accustomed way of thinking, that her mother is an addict, pulling one over on the others in order to get her fix. (And they are probably both right, but nobody learns a Very Important Lesson -- Delly does not explicitly reflect on or accept that her mother's addiction may be anything more complicated, but the reader gets those two points of view and left to draw conclusions for themselves.
This book still has magic in it, though it's much less the grand, rigorously quantitative magic of Weltsir and Hexos -- I mean, it IS the same magic, but Delly doesn't really think of it that way unless Abstentia the academic wizard asks her directly -- this I thought was a really neat touch! She just sets things on fire and melts things. But there's still neat, like, street-level magic that plays a role, "hard promises" (i.e. a promise that if broken curses you with something unpleasant. Also, I think "cloved women" were new to this book, or at least explained for the first time -- basically, were-pigs -- and I kind of wished we'd seen more of that -- it's refreshingly insane. One thing I'm a bit confused about at first was who was Lord-Mage at this point -- but I think that's just a bit of shorthand in the writing. Winn says, "And in Hexos all you need to get a government posting is to be friends with the Lord-Mage, and Mother and Pop have known Uncle Loga for ages" -- which would seem to suggest that it was still Loga. But then Delly reflects that "After it got out that the old Lord-Mage of Hexos had been some kind of street urchin, and his successor a clanless girl from Daeslund's North Country" and later Winn explictly refers to him as "the former Lord-Mage", so I guess Winn was just trying to say, with that first, that Jekran got a job in government while Loga was still Lord-Mage, but it just threw me off.
What I did finally understand better as a result of this book, which had never been completely clear to me in the first one, is how householding works -- it seems to be a general term for, like, a civil family contract? I'd gathered that it was something like marriage in book 1, and it can certainly be that (but marriage also exists? or marriage is the sacrament and householding is the civil/legal arrangement? and householding might be inherently asymmetric? -- Delly thnks "Winn struck her as the independent-minded type of gull who'd much rather be the householder, even if it meant she had to find paying employment in order to provide for her lady. Delly, for her part, would much rther be the householded and be provided for" -- still not clear on those points), but it also seems to be the word for adoption -- Ermintrude is Mrs Totham's householded daughter, and Ainette is the Wexins'. So basically it seems like "householder" = "head of household" in US tax terms, and "householded" = "dependent". Which is an interesting axis to coexist and overlap with marriage as an institution, though I'm wondering if there is such a thing as joint heads of household and what that's called? When the Wexin/Crossick marrieage is being discussed, Jok Fairnbrook explains that "Husband or householeder get the property", so even in the case of 'regular' marriage, it's not particularly symmetric or egalitarian.
Speaking of worldbuilding, I also enjoyed the alley-chat Delly and her mother and occasional others code-switch into when talking to others of that background, or which Delly uses intentionally to emphasize her background. I thought this was really nicely done, especially since it's the kind of thing that would be super easy to do badly -- it's very distinct but perfectly intelligible, fun but not over the top. (I wonder, actually, if she lifted a specific dialect wholesale or cobbled this together from a couple of different ones, because if she made it up, it's really great and feels like a real dialect that could exist in the streets.) And the code-switching is always done mindfully, in a way that felt very realistic to me.
Also, there was a really glorious, lovingly described coffee shop that I'd love to visit and while away some time in.
Oh, and I liked the repetition of "hard times" as sort of a resigned acknowledgement by everyone, including a moment of weird cameraderie between Delly and the guy who attempted to kidnap her.
Quotes:
"That was the way it was when you paid someoen's way: it went straight from you doing them a favor to them thinkingyou doling out cash was all part of nature's plan, like a bee making honey. But Dellaria hadn't yet discovered how to make a moneycomb."
"and within very short order an exceedingly irritated-looking warden reinflicted Dellaria Wells upon the populace."
"at the places where he mght be doing his part to keep a barstoole from floating off into the firmament."
"The atmosphere around her was enduring a process of ongoing endonkeyfication."
"she'd always been under the impression that young ladies weren't supposed to know what knickers were, even while they were putting them on in the morning."
Delly, living in the country manor: "There was food befor eyou realized that you were hungry, clean clothes when you'd barely dirtied them, hot water, endless gaslight. Even breathing was effortless when someone else had already carried away anything that might make a stink. [...] Her childhood memories all seemed much worse now, and people who'd grown up with something better seemed like something other than ordinary people. Like trees, maybe, or tigers, or creatures that lived at the bottom of the sea. The sort of creature that woudldn't have any reason to know howhuman beings went about their long, stupid, grasping little days."
"'Oh, there's no need to fuss,' Miss Dok said irritably, as if she hadn't been the one to present them with the image of her sobbing in the bath."
"as a born-and-bred Liscourter she was used to talking about rooms available to rent, the rising cost of rooms available to rent, and the lack of any suitable rooms available to rent at a reasonable cost in the same way that people from other towns might converse casually about the weather" (Relatable, LOL!)
"Sometimes being irritated with Winn felt a bit as if you had suddenly found yourself on a busy street corner in a shouting match with an oak tree."
"Mrs Medlow, Delly's landlady, had a sitting room thoroughly enkittenated on nearly every surface that was not already too thickly barnackled with ribbons, doilies, and porceilain shepherdesses to be an appropriate canvas for kittenization."
Elo: "Ghosts don't bother us much, at least: I expect they're worried about a bunch of actors asking them to borrow money."
"The nurse stared at her for a long moment, with the look of someone who had worn her ees out on the jagged faces of miserable people."
Abstentia: "You ought to come back to Weltsir. [...] You only had a year there, and you're -- quite frankly, one of the more accomplished young wizards I've ever met. Imagine what they'd make of your in five."
Delly: "They could have ten years with me, and they'd never make me half the wizard that you already are."
Abstentia smiled, very slightly. "Well, Delly," she said, "I should think that that was obvious."
*
I ended up writing another poem for the Multifandom Poetry Fest:
The Unspoken Name/The Serpent Gates, The Beach (for
minutia_r's prompt "Tal Charossa, self-care"). It's a short little poem, but I knew I had to do something as soon as I saw that prompt:
Gold-daubed cliffs, stained-glass water, sand
silver-salt, and above, sea-birds wheeling.
Children's laughter; a drink in hand...
No hard feelings.
Watching the sea-waves' swell,
dancing kelp briefly hidden from view;
sipping peace, sweet and chill: Farewell
and fuck you.
While I was messing around with The Serpent Gates, I ended up googling to see if there was any fanart for the series, and there is some, but more interestingly there are some drawings by Larkwood herself:
- Twitter thread of character sketches (my favorite are the Sethennai and Oranna ones_
- also, modern AU Csorwe, Tal, and Shuthmili
*
Book meme stolen from
giallarhorn. (It's meant to be a "give me a number" sort of meme, but I prefer to just answer all the questions up front.)
1: What book did you last finish? When was that?
*points up* Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry. I don't remember when I finished it, but it's been about two weeks?
2: What are you currently reading?
I'm actively reading A Desolation Called Peace (in a scab-picking sort of way). I'm also in the middle of rereading Taltos (which is
sholio's fault :), but I had to put it on backburner and focus on 'Desolation', which I need to finish before it disappears off my Kindle app -- it's due back at the library soon.
3: What book are you planning to read next?
I generally don't forecast ahead, but probably the RoL Abigail novella, since I have that on hand and I do miss the series.
4: What was the last book you added to your tbr?
I don't have a physical TBR pile -- I mean, I have piles of books around the house, but I don't think of them as TBR piles, they're just piles of books, some of them unread. Thus the closest thing I have to a TBR file is my holds list at the library. The last thing I added to that was The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers 4) and Fugitive Telemetry (the next Murderbot), which are not yet out. The last book I added to it which is out was A Desolation Called Peace.
5: Which book did you last re-read?
I am currently rereading Steve Brust's Taltos, as mentioned above. This is one of the books I've read the most in general, so the odds are pretty good that it would be this anyway, plus I was overdue for a reread -- for a while there, I was rereading it every 4 years, I noticed, but this time I'd gone about 6 -- but it was
sholio rereading the book and posting about it that got me to start my reread.
The last book I actually finished rereading would've been Monday Starts on Saturday for Yuletide purposes (but I did reread it twice, once in English translation and once in Russian).
6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved?
Counting new books only, Network Effect! I've enjoyed all the Murderbot books, but this one I may love even more than Artificial Condition, which I was not expecting. But I've had a good reading streak lately -- I also really enjoyed Winter's Orbit, The Unspoken Name, and The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry.
7: What was/were the last book/books you bought?
I had originally said that I bought some books as presents for people most recently. The last book I bought for myself was Winter's Orbit on pre-order. But actually last night I "bought" -- it was $0.99 and I had $1 off, so it was technically free -- a book by an author I learned about via Flights of Foundry, PJ Manney -- R(EVOLUTION).
8: Paperback or hardcover? Why?
Mostly ebook at this point, but if I'm buying a hard copy, I prefer paperback if it's in decent shape. They're more compact, and I never have enough room for books.
9: Children's, YA, NA or Adult? Why?
I don't think I've ever read anything that I realized was categorized as "New Adult", although I've certainly read books that show up on New Adult lists, like Fangirl or Red, White & Royal Blue. Probably not this category, though, because the carveout seems to be, eh, particularly vapid? Like, I liked Fangirl a lot and had a ton to say about it, but the aspects of it I liked most were the ones which felt the most YA -- the family relationship -- and the least whatever caused people to put it in this category. I pretty much only read genre (or classics) when it comes to Adult -- I've read and enjoyed some of the stereotypical "English professor's mid-life crisis" literary novels, but generally don't read them. I happily read YA, both genre and non-genre, and can enjoy both the genuinely good ones and the absolute trash -- for some reason I have more tolerance for trash YA than trash other things. My problem with YA comes when something is trying to be all deep and important but is actually just incompetent (yes, Offbrand Zukos, I'm looking at you). I do tend to enjoy Children's books I pick up at probably greater rates than any of the other categories. Not that I think it means that Children's books are inherently better, but probably for me to pick up a children's book as an adult, it has to be special to come onto my radar at all, so they're sort of preselected for me already.
10: Sci-Fi or fantasy? Why?
I do like both genres, but tend to read fantasy more, and to enjoy more sub-genres of fantasy than I do of SF. Like, at this point, I pretty much only like space opera type SF? Social SF, ideally with space, character-driven. While in fantasy -- which I think is a broader genre overall, actually -- I still enjoy epic fantasy and urban fantasy and even historical fantasy and can enjoy paranormal romance if we lump it in there. And I go through periods where I don't much feel like reading sci-fi, but I very rarely don't feel like reading fantasy at all, though I've had periods where I'd burnt myself out on epic fantasy or urban fantasy/PNR through overexposure. I think that's what it comes down to, probably -- fantasy is just a broader genre, and if I get sick of one part of it, there's still more of other corners of it left.
11: Classic or modern? Why?
Classic. I guess becuase the setting feels more fantastical of the two? Like, there's no magic or aliens, but, being set in the eighteenth century or whatever is still sufficiently alien to keep the setting interesting? I guess really the reason is that setting is one of the things I'm really interested in when I read books, and classic works tend to have more interesting settings because it isn't just the same life I'm familiar with. (I suppose reading modern books set in/written by authors from unfamiliar-to-me places would have a similar effect, and I do tend to like those more, I guess? But on the whole, classics are still more different.) And the language tends to be more interesting, too.
12: Political memoirs or comedic memoirs?
What's a comedic memoir -- just one written to be amusing? Or memoirs by professional comedians? I've never read the latter, but I can enjoy the former, if it's things like Dave Barry's books -- him writing about his life in a funny way -- though I do still prefer and find funnier his topic-based books. I have LESS THAN ZERO interest in political memoirs, and don't really understand the attraction.
13: Name a book with a really bad movie/tv adaption
Where I've both read the book and seen the movie: the first Percy Jackson. I guess it's a passably entertaining movie if you don't know the book, and I'm amused by some of the casting choices, but it makes some BAFFLING choices as an adaption. Although I can't hate it per se: the rodents watched the movie and liked it enough that they wanted to read the Percy Jackson books, which I had previously been trying to get them to read (
aome had introduced me to them), and they became much bigger fans of the series than I am, and read all the subsequent Rick Riordan books long after I'd jumped off the wagon.
I've also heard dire things about The Dark is Rising (read some of the book, never watched the movie) and I feel like there's another one that's famous for being a terrible adaptation but I'm blanking on it...
14: Name a book where the movie/tv adaption actually was better than the original
I feel this way about the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust -- I read the book and thought it was merely OK (granted, this was on the heels of Good Omens, which not a lot of things can live up to, though Discworld did -- I was so impressed by GO that I went and got whatever else the library had by the authors, with the result that I became a Discworld fan but didn't pick up another Gaiman until a a kid of my parents' friends recommended American Gods to all of us). But I really loved the movie.
Oh, and we were just talking about it on Zoom Best Chat the other day: I don't know if the movie is better than the book per se, but I definitely enjoyed both Blade Runner and Minority Report more than that Philip K. Dick's stories that they're based on -- that's probably just a sign that I don't like Philip K. Dick :P In addition to Blade Runner on this list, I also agree with Silence of the Lambs probably, and disagree EXTREMELY STRONGLY with the inclusion of LotR. Don't get me wrong, I love the movies, for the most part, but calling them better than the books is blasphemy -- just because something is more accessible doesn't mean it's better.
15: What book changed your life?
Oh look, and we were already talking about Lord of the Rings :P I've written about it more than once: LotR was the book that made me realize that there was such a thing as fantasy for grown-ups, and that absolutely shaped my habits from age 13 to the present day, brought me into fandom in any significant way, led to or deepened many of my friendships, got me started writing poems in English, etc. etc.
16: If you could bring three books to a deserted island which would you bring and why?
Lord of the Rings and Lolita are the two that immediately occur to me -- the first one because immersing myself in it is so enjoyable, the latter because I feel like there's all kinds of neat stylistic things to discover in there (I want it to be the bilingual edition). Ooh, and my copy of Top 500 Poems in the English Language -- a lot of my favorite poems in there, and a nice variety, since it's a very broad anthology.
17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it?
I love this question but don't have any brilliant ideas... I'm tempted to steal
giallarhorn's idea and name it after a fantasy place that I love, especially maybe a somewhat more obscure or books-and-learning associated one, maybe Isengard or something. (Is that allowed, actually? Those names are probably all trademarked by now XD) Then I thought maybe a fantasy book reference? -- meaning, a book that exists in a fantasy universe I like. I guess one way to combine the two would be to call the bookstore "West March" or something and have a red book in the logo?
18: Which character from a book is the most like you?
There was a meme going around to describe yourself in three characters; two of mine were book characters: Perscitia from the Temeraire series and Kragar from the Dragaera books.
19: Which character from a book is the least like you?
Pretty much any Gryffindor-type protagonist, starting with, say, Harry Potter.
20: Best summer read?
21: Best winter read?
I don't think of books as seasonal things -- they're not like stone fruit or clementines XD I was going to say that thrillers make for good summer reading, but then realized that most of the examples I'm thinking of were books I'd read in the winter -- just, in Hawaii :P But, yeah, thrillers are probably my beach read of choice -- I don't like reading outside very much, but they're engrossing enough to keep me reading anyway, but the characters are not such that I get attached and am happy to put the book aside when it's time to go do something else. And if the book gets sand in it or ends up getting a little wet, well, that's OK, they're pretty much disposable anyhow.
For winter, I think I end up wanting to read the "comfort food" version of books, because when it's gloomy and dark it's just nice to be cozy, so either one of the books I enjoy rereading (Monday Begins on Saturday or Steven Brust's Taltos or bits of other things) or books that remind me of books that I love, e.g. Pratchetty feeling ones.
22: Pro or anti e-readers? Why?
Very pro! I love the instant gratification of being able to procure a book immediately, I love being able to bring my entire TBR pile with me on vacation, I love the search capability. And it's nice that e-books don't take up any physical space. I do wish it were easier to share Kindle books -- like, I've went and dug up pirated copies of books I paid for, because I wanted L or O to be able to read them too, and short of handing them my phone, Amazon does not make that easy.
23: Bookdepository or Amazon?
I don't think I've ever bought from Bookdepository. Amazon may be terrible but they are also very good at what they do, and since we now have Prime, they are pretty much my first stop for most anything I buy online.
24: Do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?
I love browsing in bookshops, but end up mostly buying things that aren't books -- cute stationery, novelty gifts, mugs with bookish statements on them, games. Partly because I don't buy books lightly/on impulse, partly because it's hard to match Amazon's breadth of selection, partly because mostly when I'm buying books, unless it's a present, I'm buying e-books.
25: If you could be a character from a book for just one day who would you be and why? (Bonus: any specific day in the story?)
One day is a reasonable period where I could carve out something that would be both fascinating and not too perilous. Like, I wouldn't want to be stuck in Rivendell or Lorien for long, but I'd love to see it for a day, so changing places with, say, Gimli while he's visiting one or the other would be nice (or visiting the Glittering Caves after the war). But I think what would be coolest would be getting to do some magic. Maybe something from Kvothe's time at the university, a period when he was not doing something dumb and not just barely treading water financially -- it should be possible to find one day like that, eh? I find the Kingkiller-verse magic to be the most interesting, so it's the kind I'd most like to try. And I guess it doesn't have to be Kvothe -- it can be Elxa Dal or Kilvin or someone else already fully established and reasonably happy-seeming.
26: If you could be a character from a book for their entire life who would you be and why?
Nope, no thanks. I even wrote a poem about it once: which you can read here
27: If you could change one thing about mainstream literature what would you change? (i.e. more diversity, better writing, better plot etc.)
By mainstream do we mean, like, non-genre? If so, I don't care personally, because I don't tend to read it, but more diversity wouldn't hurt. (I feel like if the general public wanted better writing and better plot, then books with better writing, etc. would be more popular.)
28: How many books have you read so far this year?
10 books, apparently. So yeah, I'm definitely running behind my book-a-week goal still.
29: How do you sort your shelves? (i.e. by color, author, title etc.)
By genre (fantasy, sci-fi, poetry, non-fiction, the occult, etc.), then grouped by authoer and ordered by how much I like them, more or less. I might group/order things like non-fiction and poetry in other logical ways -- e.g. the Romantics all together, or science in this group and language in this group. The physical books I own are not very numerous -- one bookshelf in my office with a little bit of overflow to a largely non-book shelf and two shelves in the living room, so it's not like I'd have to roam the stacks in search of a book in any case.
30: Who’s your favorite author?
When I was young, I had a very pretentious distinction I drew between favorite "authors" -- creators of the worlds and characters I loved -- and favorite "writers" -- i.e. those where I loved them for the prose. So Tolkien was my favorite author but Oscar Wilde was my favorite writer at the time (I would've been about sixteen at this point, and really really into Wilde). I do still think there's something to that distinction, and I would still say that Tolkien is my favorite author therefore. I really don't think any one person, before or since, has created a world that's so complete (in the apsects that matter to me in this kind of story, anyway; I've heard his mountains make no sense, but I don't care if they do or not).
But also a very honorable mention to Terry Pratchett here. The roots of Discworld don't go as deep, but the bredth and growth of it are staggering.
31: Who’s your favorite contemporary author?
As I've mentioned, I don't read much contemporary. But googling "contemporary authors" brings up some I have read, mostly ones with some speculative elements -- Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace), Zadie Smith (White Teeth), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas). I enjoyed all of the works, though all of these were books I picked up with some external impetus, school, book club, someone else reading it, bingo square. I don't know that I feel I have enough of an informed opinion to say one of them is a favorite. But White Teeth made me want to read more Zadie Smith to a greater degree than the other books made me want to read the other authors, although I do actually want to read more Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, too -- it's just that Zadie Smith's writing was also really funny, and I prefer funny books to also very good but darker/denser ones.
32: Who’s your favorite fantasy author?
Tolkien, duh. But I already mentioned Tolkien and Pratchett as transcending the genre.
33: Who’s your favorite Sci-Fi author?
At this point Lois McMaster Bujold, because the Vorkosigan Saga is very firmly my favorite sci-fi book series. Of the classics, I do really like Asimov.
34: List five OTPs
This is a weird question to find in the middle of a book meme... If we're talking canonical OTPs from book series, let's just go with Aral/Cordelia in the Vorkosigan Saga and Sam Vimes/Sybil Ramkin in the Discworld books.
35: Name a book you consider to be terribly underrated
I actually totally understand why it's so under the radar -- it's an odd series to get into, there are a lot of stumbling blocks to getting into it* -- but I really do wish Dragaera were better known. (*long series with years between books, confusing publication/chronological order, unreliable narrator mafia protagonist who is not a nice person, elided writing, each book changes genre slightly)
Oh, also, Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series. Also for reasons I completely understand -- even more so, to be honest, talk about your unreliable narrator who is not a nice person XD -- but as with Dragaera, I wish there were more people who recognized the brilliance of the work with whom I could talk about these books.
36: Name a book you consider to be terribly overrated
This one's easy! Children of Blood and Bone, which won all kinds of genre awards despite being, I firmly believe, and objectively bad book. (Nope, apparently still not over it.)
I also see a lot of books coming out in the last 5 years or so which get widely praised on Twitter by authors I like, get blurbed by authors I love, get nominated for and sometimes even win the genre awards, and I just think they're not very good books? Not terrible, the way offbrand Zukos above is, but with some significant flaws that it feels like most people just don't care about or overlook because they're swept away by something I'm not seeing, I guess? I felt that way about A Memory Called Empire, Witchmark, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (aka My Favorite Book that I Hate), a number of other high-profile SFF debuts of the recent years. Primarily debuts, which actually makes me think that maybe what I'm seeing is Twitter as PR machine as opposed to Twitter as source of people's actual opinions, which would explain the over-hype.
37: How many books are actually in your bookshelf/shelves right now?
By a rough estimated count, ~150 on the main shelf in my office + 65 on my overflow shelf (oversized books, signed books) + ~150-200 on the shelf in the living room that has the general (non-genre) books. Not counting the shelf of children's and reference books next to it, or the bookshelves with O's and L's books, or the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in B's office or the garage.
38: What language do you (most often) read in?
English almost exclusively, though I can read fluently in Russian, and sometimes do.
39: Name one of your favorite childhood books
Let me go with Аля, Кляксич и буква "А" by Irina Tokmakova, which is something like a Russian The Phantom Tollbooth -- a kid's adventures in a land of letters (and later, math). It was one of the books I made sure to track down a copy of for my own kids when we were in Israel, though sadly they weren't really into it.
(I guess I could go with Monday Begins on Saturday, too, but I was 11 when I discovered it, or Roadside Picnic for my obsession from when I was ten (which, no, it's definitely not actually a children's book), while the Tokmakova is tied into much earlier memories.)
40: Name one of your favorite books from your teenage years
Let me put it this way: I read LotR when I was 13.
41: Do you own a library card? How often do you use it?
I do! I go through periods of using the library heavily and not as much. when the rodents were small, we would go every week and fill up on books. Then they became independent and could borrow books from the school library or their friends or go to the public library on their own, and I was mostly reading in ebook, which is more of a pain to borrow from the library (fewer options, longer hold waits, the check-out process is annoying from a UX perspective, and you can't hold on to overdue books for a couple more days to finish up), so I went through a couple of years when I wasn't using the library almost at all. Then I got into Hugo voting in 2018 and the library made it much easier to get ahold of things like novellas and graphic novels, so I started using the library heavily again. And it turned out that going on a weekly walk just to browse on my own was something I'd missed (this nearest branch library was closed for a while, which probably contributed from my falling out of the library habit, though there are two other libraries that are within walking distance of me). Then libraries were closed to physical interaction for most of 2020, and I really missed that weekly walk. I did continue to use the e-book borrowing function of the library which was still active, but as you can imagine the hold lines were even longer, since now that was the ONLY way to get books from the library. Not too long ago a few of the libraries for curbside pickup, and I've been using that a little, although the hours of the nearest curbside pickup option are not great -- weekdays only and with a 30 min window after normal work hours, which means mostly I just don't have time to stop by.
42: Which was the best book you had to read in school?
If uni counts as school, I'll say Paradise Lost. If we're talking only primary school, hm... The story that most stuck with me is actually a short story -- "The Rule of Names", which was my introduction to Ursula LeGuin. Novel-length, what did I even have to read in high school? Freshman year the Odyssey, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I'm blanking on what else. Things Fall Apart, maybe? Sophomore year, Romeo and Juliet, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Huckleberry Finn. Junior year was creative writing and expository writing, and the AP English class I took senior year was also not the kind where we did novel-reading -- we read essays and excerpts, I guess? and then Hamlet after the AP exams. I enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and Hamlet (Lord of the Flies and the Odyssey, too, but I'd read them before), but Hamlet is probably "the best book" (if a play can be called a book).
43: Are you the kind of person who reads several books at once or the kind of person who can only read one book at a time?
I usually read them in parallel or even more specifically, nested.
44: Do you like to listen to music when you read?
Nope, I generally don't listen to music, but I also specifically don't listen to music when reading.
45: What is your favorite thing to eat when you read?
I don't have a specific snack I'll eat while reading, although I will read while eating dinner and stuff. But reading is the secondary activity in that case.
46: What is your favorite thing to drink when you read?
Tea, I guess? But coffee, wine/beer, and other things you can sip slowly are also OK.
47: What do you do to get out of a reading slump?
I don't know... I just need to come across a book that really grabs my imagination -- often something from a series I love. But I let it happen organically.
48: Where is your favorite place to read?
49: When is your favorite time to read?
For the last 25 years, I read primarily on public transit, in the morning and after my work day. For the last year, that was no longer an option, which meant that I had to find a different place to read. My favorite place/time to read is in bed, at night, but these days I just fall asleep, so it's not a very effective place to read...
50: Why do you love to read?
I... don't think I've ever had to answer this question before. It's a bit like having to answer "why do you like dessert?" -- because it's tasty? But I guess trying to think about it... I love reading because it introduces me to and lets me explore new settings -- different countries, jungles, time periods (in the adventure fiction I loved reading as a kid), fantastic settings and far-future or alternate worlds where magic powers exist within the world I know with the genres I mostly read now. I love reading because it introduces me to interesting characters and lets me "try them on" -- I've always liked thinking of myself as favorite characters in the stuff I read and play-acting them to some degree. And also acquiring a "stable" of character I could then think about interacting with each other in fun ways, something else I've done ever since I was a kid. I do like the plot aspect of some books -- this is why I enjoyed reading mysteries as a kid and trying to figure out the resolution from the clues, or at least being able to follow how the detective did it. And I like looking at stories and seeing how they're put together, how plot lines and arcs interweave, that sort of thing -- this is also something I started doing on my own, before anybody ever asked me to do this level of narrative analysis in school. And finally, I do love words and the way they fit together, so reading a well-written peace of prose appeals to me, well, on a competence kink level -- it's a skill I can appreciate and admire better than most. So, there you go, that's five reasons.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1148766.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).