wednesday reads 'n things
It's been two weeks - I was on vacation last week with no internet to speak of - so today's update is rather long. Also I'm including some fanfiction in here, mostly from the Fandom 5K fest.
What I've recently finished reading:
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, which was a free book from Tor in their monthly promotion. This book has a lot of really great big ideas in it, and some amazing worldbuilding and interesting characters. However, it felt to me as though the disparate parts never really coalesced into a story. My favorite aspects were the "Tines" people, the dog-packs which each operated as a single thinking being, and their rather alien perspective on humans ("mantis people"); and the net messages that have a familiar resonance to anybody who used Usenet or other message groups. But the whole Blight plot felt more like a MacGuffin than a real story, and there were a lot of diversions from the main plot (and oh god space battles) that didn't really advance the plot.
Saga, Volume One by Brian K. Vaughan, a fantasy graphic novel which a friend loaned me. Vivid art, a deep streak of humor, and some very cool and interesting ideas and worldbuilding (and characters!) but it's really not a complete story, just a set-up, and so it's hard to rate this properly until I've read the whole arc. (Which I'd like to do!)
"Fragments [special edition preview]" by Jake Kerr, which I got free through...some mailing list or the other. This is four chapters from a forthcoming novel. The first, "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince" has been previously published as a standalone short story, and is a faux-documentary-excerpt story about a fictional journalist and novelist who wrote (in this future world) seminal essays and novels about the asteroid impact that destroyed most of North America in 2023. The other chapters are (I think) "excerpts" from Prince's books. They are all fairly self-contained, and add up as a picture of the novel's world. I enjoyed it a lot - it's not really cliff-hangery, it's a pretty reasonable novella as is - and would like to read the actual book when it is published.
Twisted by Uvi Poznanski, which I downloaded from an instafreebie promotion. Four short stories with unusual narrators and feminist perspective. The writing's quite nice, though it suffers from the usual editing flaws of self-published works, but the actual stories didn't really appeal to me.
The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I read because I enjoyed (for some value of enjoyed) two of his other books. An easier and more cohesive read than Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker or The Water Knife, but less interesting than either, partly because it's not quite SF (modulo some of the hacking abilities?) and partly because the author's message is wielded with an even bigger sledgehammer. There's a lot of exposition about the evils of Big Pharma and the even more amoral people who contrive study results to cast doubts on problems with their products. Ostensibly a thriller, the twists are telegraphed far in advance, and if you can't figure out by the midpoint how it's going to end you're not paying attention. (Also, for a smart girl Alix is not a very good judge of character, and the romantic plot made me HELL NO in a couple of places.)
In Our Backyard: Human Trafficking in America and What We Can Do to Stop It by Nita Belles (audio). I got this book through the Audiofile Sync summer program of audiobooks for teens, drawn to the subject because of the recent excellent essay in the Atlantic, My Family's Slave, about a Filipino family who immigrated to the US along with their slave. I found this book interesting but exasperating; the subject matter is fascinating, but the way it's presented here is more emotional than factual, more personal than informative, and more scattered than it should be. Which is not a bad thing, to a certain audience! It's just that I'm not that audience.
Human trafficking is a hidden tragedy that takes a terrible toll on many lives, and most Americans are not aware of how many people are essentially slaves, let alone how to spot victims and how to aid them. The statistics in the book are horrifying and informative, and the case stories are heartrending. That said, the book feels disorganized, as the stories are not presented in any coherent grouping (e.g. forced prostitution, forced labor, etc.) and the information on what can be done is both repetitive, as it appears at the end of many chapters, and also seems rather nonspecific, except in the particular case of pornography (more later). There's an awful lot of "I did X" and "I feel Y", reflecting on the author's experiences with trafficking victims, which makes the book sometimes feel like a personal manifesto.
Speaking of personal manifesto, Belles is anti-pornography and anti-legalized-prostitution, stating that the majority of sex workers are coerced and that pornography leads to buying sex from coerced sex workers. She is also clearly religious and approaches much of the material from a religious viewpoint. I disagree with both of these positions.
I would have liked to see more of a systematic overview of human trafficking, with separate sections on forced prostitution, forced industrial/commercial labor, and forced personal labor, with guides at the end of each section on how to spot possible slaves and how to aid them. Belles gave a long list of websites of organizations that will help people overcome "addiction to pornography"; I would have loved a list of websites that list companies which use forced labor, for example, those who exploit agricultural workers or who bring them in under false pretenses. I would like to have seen more about those who fight trafficking in the courts and in the legislature, and in particular interviews with FBI or police personnel who work on bringing those who exploit others to justice. But I can't fault Belles for writing the book she wanted to write, not the one I wanted to read, and I would hope readers find it a sobering eye-opener about things that many of us feel "can't happen here".
A Year in Toussaint by
astolat, Geralt/Emyhr, explicit, 31K. I have only read a few of astolat's previous works in this fandom, and disliked them all, as this pairing baffles me. I really enjoyed the Blood and Wine DLC, though, which takes place in Toussaint, so I gave this one a try and I'm glad I did, because it references many of the people, quests, geographical features, and evident history of the duchy from the game. I enjoyed the plot a lot, and of course her writing's top-notch. (Still don't care for the pairing.)
Routine Maintenance by
pendrecarc, Thomas Nightingale/Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina, explicit, 10K. I don't read a lot of Rivers of London fanfic, but I enjoy gen and unusual pairings in this fandom. The tone and style and language feels very in-tune with canon despite the non-canon-style POV, and I liked it a lot.
i have named you queen (listen) by
Damkianna, original f/f, 20K. I found this through a rec on ffa, and since that's how I found Course of Honor, another marriage of convenience story, I figured I'd check it out. This one is set in a vaguely Tuareg fantasy world, and the cultural worldbuilding is superb. The evocative writing is beautifully descriptive without going over the top. Recommended.
What I'm reading now:
Text: I discovered via
mtl's glowing review that Natasha Pulley's second book, The Bedlam Stacks, will be published next month and is currently available on NetGalley, so I requested it and yay, was approved! (Pulley wrote The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.) I'm just two chapters in but enjoying it greatly, although alas it's a PDF which is annoying to read on my phone, my reading device of choice.
Audio: Another Audiofile Sync offering, Freakling by Lana Krumwiede. So far it's being set up as a classic dystopian sibling rivalry. More middle-grade than YA, a bit simplistic, but I'm a sucker for the collision of modern-industrial and religious-magic worlds.
What I'm reading next:
Still waiting for my library request for Thick as Thieves. And while checking it, I just saw that Assassin's Fate is back on the shelf - I thought I'd requested it, huh. My planned run tomorrow goes by the library, and so I will check on the way home to see if it's still available. Also, I have requested Tarnished City, which is the sequel to Gilded Cage by Vic James, from NetGalley, though I haven't heard back yet. (thistle_chaser, did you know it's coming out? Have you read it yet?)
What I read a while ago, and now you can too:
Those of you who enjoyed
yhlee's Ninefox Gambit will be pleased to know that the second book in the series, Raven Stratagem is now available! I read a prepublished version, and I'm sure the actual published version is a bit different, but I actually liked this one a little more than the first, maybe because with the background of the first already absorbed it was easier to follow, maybe because the necessary prologue-to-action that is the first part of Ninefox Gambit isn't needed here, maybe because it expands the world in interesting ways, and maybe because (in a striking departure from the usual water-treading middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome) the ending is solid bang-up space-opera climax.
What I'm watching now:
We have two episodes to go in S2 of The Man in the High Castle! I have to say, all the Tagomi scenes fill me with joy, not least because I requested Tagomi's adventures in alternate-alternate-America for Yuletide, and it feels as though canon is making me a New Year's Resolution vid! The rest of it is interesting as well; while in S1 there were characters whose arcs interested me less than others, I'm pretty invested in all of them this season. Also, I'm amused that Callum Keith Rennie (who played Leoben Conoy on Battlestar Galactica) has been joined in the Resistance by Michael Hogan (who played Colonel Saul Tigh on Battlestar Galactica). Time for a round of Canadian Actor Bingo!
I have not yet seen Wonder Woman. Maybe this weekend.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth
What I've recently finished reading:
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, which was a free book from Tor in their monthly promotion. This book has a lot of really great big ideas in it, and some amazing worldbuilding and interesting characters. However, it felt to me as though the disparate parts never really coalesced into a story. My favorite aspects were the "Tines" people, the dog-packs which each operated as a single thinking being, and their rather alien perspective on humans ("mantis people"); and the net messages that have a familiar resonance to anybody who used Usenet or other message groups. But the whole Blight plot felt more like a MacGuffin than a real story, and there were a lot of diversions from the main plot (and oh god space battles) that didn't really advance the plot.
Saga, Volume One by Brian K. Vaughan, a fantasy graphic novel which a friend loaned me. Vivid art, a deep streak of humor, and some very cool and interesting ideas and worldbuilding (and characters!) but it's really not a complete story, just a set-up, and so it's hard to rate this properly until I've read the whole arc. (Which I'd like to do!)
"Fragments [special edition preview]" by Jake Kerr, which I got free through...some mailing list or the other. This is four chapters from a forthcoming novel. The first, "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince" has been previously published as a standalone short story, and is a faux-documentary-excerpt story about a fictional journalist and novelist who wrote (in this future world) seminal essays and novels about the asteroid impact that destroyed most of North America in 2023. The other chapters are (I think) "excerpts" from Prince's books. They are all fairly self-contained, and add up as a picture of the novel's world. I enjoyed it a lot - it's not really cliff-hangery, it's a pretty reasonable novella as is - and would like to read the actual book when it is published.
Twisted by Uvi Poznanski, which I downloaded from an instafreebie promotion. Four short stories with unusual narrators and feminist perspective. The writing's quite nice, though it suffers from the usual editing flaws of self-published works, but the actual stories didn't really appeal to me.
The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I read because I enjoyed (for some value of enjoyed) two of his other books. An easier and more cohesive read than Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker or The Water Knife, but less interesting than either, partly because it's not quite SF (modulo some of the hacking abilities?) and partly because the author's message is wielded with an even bigger sledgehammer. There's a lot of exposition about the evils of Big Pharma and the even more amoral people who contrive study results to cast doubts on problems with their products. Ostensibly a thriller, the twists are telegraphed far in advance, and if you can't figure out by the midpoint how it's going to end you're not paying attention. (Also, for a smart girl Alix is not a very good judge of character, and the romantic plot made me HELL NO in a couple of places.)
In Our Backyard: Human Trafficking in America and What We Can Do to Stop It by Nita Belles (audio). I got this book through the Audiofile Sync summer program of audiobooks for teens, drawn to the subject because of the recent excellent essay in the Atlantic, My Family's Slave, about a Filipino family who immigrated to the US along with their slave. I found this book interesting but exasperating; the subject matter is fascinating, but the way it's presented here is more emotional than factual, more personal than informative, and more scattered than it should be. Which is not a bad thing, to a certain audience! It's just that I'm not that audience.
Human trafficking is a hidden tragedy that takes a terrible toll on many lives, and most Americans are not aware of how many people are essentially slaves, let alone how to spot victims and how to aid them. The statistics in the book are horrifying and informative, and the case stories are heartrending. That said, the book feels disorganized, as the stories are not presented in any coherent grouping (e.g. forced prostitution, forced labor, etc.) and the information on what can be done is both repetitive, as it appears at the end of many chapters, and also seems rather nonspecific, except in the particular case of pornography (more later). There's an awful lot of "I did X" and "I feel Y", reflecting on the author's experiences with trafficking victims, which makes the book sometimes feel like a personal manifesto.
Speaking of personal manifesto, Belles is anti-pornography and anti-legalized-prostitution, stating that the majority of sex workers are coerced and that pornography leads to buying sex from coerced sex workers. She is also clearly religious and approaches much of the material from a religious viewpoint. I disagree with both of these positions.
I would have liked to see more of a systematic overview of human trafficking, with separate sections on forced prostitution, forced industrial/commercial labor, and forced personal labor, with guides at the end of each section on how to spot possible slaves and how to aid them. Belles gave a long list of websites of organizations that will help people overcome "addiction to pornography"; I would have loved a list of websites that list companies which use forced labor, for example, those who exploit agricultural workers or who bring them in under false pretenses. I would like to have seen more about those who fight trafficking in the courts and in the legislature, and in particular interviews with FBI or police personnel who work on bringing those who exploit others to justice. But I can't fault Belles for writing the book she wanted to write, not the one I wanted to read, and I would hope readers find it a sobering eye-opener about things that many of us feel "can't happen here".
A Year in Toussaint by
astolat, Geralt/Emyhr, explicit, 31K. I have only read a few of astolat's previous works in this fandom, and disliked them all, as this pairing baffles me. I really enjoyed the Blood and Wine DLC, though, which takes place in Toussaint, so I gave this one a try and I'm glad I did, because it references many of the people, quests, geographical features, and evident history of the duchy from the game. I enjoyed the plot a lot, and of course her writing's top-notch. (Still don't care for the pairing.)
Routine Maintenance by
pendrecarc, Thomas Nightingale/Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina, explicit, 10K. I don't read a lot of Rivers of London fanfic, but I enjoy gen and unusual pairings in this fandom. The tone and style and language feels very in-tune with canon despite the non-canon-style POV, and I liked it a lot.
i have named you queen (listen) by
Damkianna, original f/f, 20K. I found this through a rec on ffa, and since that's how I found Course of Honor, another marriage of convenience story, I figured I'd check it out. This one is set in a vaguely Tuareg fantasy world, and the cultural worldbuilding is superb. The evocative writing is beautifully descriptive without going over the top. Recommended.
What I'm reading now:
Text: I discovered via
mtl's glowing review that Natasha Pulley's second book, The Bedlam Stacks, will be published next month and is currently available on NetGalley, so I requested it and yay, was approved! (Pulley wrote The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.) I'm just two chapters in but enjoying it greatly, although alas it's a PDF which is annoying to read on my phone, my reading device of choice.
Audio: Another Audiofile Sync offering, Freakling by Lana Krumwiede. So far it's being set up as a classic dystopian sibling rivalry. More middle-grade than YA, a bit simplistic, but I'm a sucker for the collision of modern-industrial and religious-magic worlds.
What I'm reading next:
Still waiting for my library request for Thick as Thieves. And while checking it, I just saw that Assassin's Fate is back on the shelf - I thought I'd requested it, huh. My planned run tomorrow goes by the library, and so I will check on the way home to see if it's still available. Also, I have requested Tarnished City, which is the sequel to Gilded Cage by Vic James, from NetGalley, though I haven't heard back yet. (thistle_chaser, did you know it's coming out? Have you read it yet?)
What I read a while ago, and now you can too:
Those of you who enjoyed
yhlee's Ninefox Gambit will be pleased to know that the second book in the series, Raven Stratagem is now available! I read a prepublished version, and I'm sure the actual published version is a bit different, but I actually liked this one a little more than the first, maybe because with the background of the first already absorbed it was easier to follow, maybe because the necessary prologue-to-action that is the first part of Ninefox Gambit isn't needed here, maybe because it expands the world in interesting ways, and maybe because (in a striking departure from the usual water-treading middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome) the ending is solid bang-up space-opera climax.
What I'm watching now:
We have two episodes to go in S2 of The Man in the High Castle! I have to say, all the Tagomi scenes fill me with joy, not least because I requested Tagomi's adventures in alternate-alternate-America for Yuletide, and it feels as though canon is making me a New Year's Resolution vid! The rest of it is interesting as well; while in S1 there were characters whose arcs interested me less than others, I'm pretty invested in all of them this season. Also, I'm amused that Callum Keith Rennie (who played Leoben Conoy on Battlestar Galactica) has been joined in the Resistance by Michael Hogan (who played Colonel Saul Tigh on Battlestar Galactica). Time for a round of Canadian Actor Bingo!
I have not yet seen Wonder Woman. Maybe this weekend.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth