The Reading Meme
This is all over my friends-list, and I believe originated at Book View Cafe. wild_irises happened to be the first person I saw doing it, and she invited others to play. I would hate to turn down an invitation from her if I didn't have to. I apologize for the very scattered and inward-looking nature of this entry. You will see why I don't ordinarily post book reviews.
What are you currently reading?
Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire)'s Ashes of Honor. I'm not sure it's the most recent October Daye book at this point, but it's the one that I've got to. I am very much enamoured of this series. When I first read Rosemary and Rue, the first book in it, I felt that it had some first-novel qualities -- the pacing seemed jerky; instead of having a man with a gun turn up when inspiration failed, the narrative would hurt the protagonist again; and I kept having to check to make sure this was really the first book in the series, because it was packed with references to past events that would certainly have made more books. I read onward through the series with enormous pleasure as the writer got better and better. I think An Artificial Night is a tour de force, and wondered how Seanan could top it, but then she did, several times. When I went back to reread the series before essaying One Salt Sea, though, I no longer saw as flaws the qualities that I had frowned at at first, except maybe for one or two issues of pacing. It was just Toby, talking the way she talks, and Toby's life, going the way it goes. I am not far enough into the present volume to say much, except that I'm worried about how bad things might get.
What did you recently finish reading?
Kate Elliott's The Law of Becoming, the last novel in the Jaran series. This will take pondering before I have much of an intelligent, coherent set of remarks to make about it -- pondering and probably rereading. I enjoyed the series very much indeed. I had bought the first volume after people I know kept linking to the smart things kateelliott says about writing on her LJ. I figured I'd just start at the beginning and see what happened. Then she made a post about a current project that has a first-person narrator, and I probably misunderstood what she said. What I thought she said was that she had never written a book with humor in it before. Oh, no, I thought; I have this enormous fat fantasy novel (it's science fiction, but the cover of the tenth-anniversary edition of Jaran looks fantastical) WITH NO HUMOR. At last, trepidatiously, I began to read it. It was fine. The narrator is quite sardonic at times; people have running jokes with one another; family members tease one another; there is inherent humor in the culture clash, as well as far more serious aspects; some characters, like Sonia, can be quite funny, as can Tess, the main viewpoint character. Because of my original misconception, I may have focussed more on the intimate family aspects of the book than on the broader political and military ones. But I might have been intended to do that, too. Romance gets as much attention as battles do, and it's just as important to what develops later.
Now we delve into more introspection than may be interesting to anybody except me, so I'll put it in its own paragraph that you may skip it if you like.
About fifteen years ago, coincidentally or not during perimenopause, I developed a profound aversion to physical violence in any medium. I was unable to reread, for some years, old favorites like many of Mary Renault's historical novels, and I eschewed large swathes of contemporary work if I thought it would be too violent. I have been gradually coming out of the deepest part of this aversion, though I will probably not again be able to face some of the stuff I read as a teenager (Harlan Ellison, I am looking at you, among others). Recently mrissa gave me a copy of Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love and then lent me the rest of the series. I fell for it madly and got lydy to read it. She liked it too, though perhaps not as much, but expressed huge surprise that I did, because such terrible things happened to people in it. This made me think about how much I love Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths, even though it, too, is full of terrible things. I wondered if my tolerance for terrible things in art was going back up, but it isn't, or only selectively. I have not done an extensive study or tried everything I was formerly avoiding, so my conclusions are suspect. However. Except for John M. Ford, all the writers whose books I love even though they use more violence than I ordinarily can take are women, and most of them are (and Mike was) younger than I am. (I am not considering short fiction here, or I would have more complicated remarks to make.) In the case of the Jaran books, I think the reason is actually in the text, not just in the basic thought processes of the authors, so it is easier to see. The jaran have gender roles, but women have immense power and receive enormous amounts of respect. It is, in some respects, kind of the polar opposite of a rape culture. This arrangement percolates outwards. It's certainly not one whit better to have your city burned to the ground by the jaran than by a bunch of misogynist posturing idiots. But if you survive, the jaran are better to live with. And their view of the universe, full of horrible things as the universe can be, is, while flawed (as all human views of the universe must be) infinitely preferable to that of anybody in most of the books that I can't read any more.
Mary Renault is an interesting edge case here. I can reread most of her books now, but not Funeral Games, and I think it is primarily her treatment of Eurydice that makes that impossible, and the attitudes that treatment comes from.
Something too much of this.
What do you think you'll read next?
Probably one of the books by Martha Wells or Sherwood Smith that I got as presents for Christmas.
Pamela
What are you currently reading?
Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire)'s Ashes of Honor. I'm not sure it's the most recent October Daye book at this point, but it's the one that I've got to. I am very much enamoured of this series. When I first read Rosemary and Rue, the first book in it, I felt that it had some first-novel qualities -- the pacing seemed jerky; instead of having a man with a gun turn up when inspiration failed, the narrative would hurt the protagonist again; and I kept having to check to make sure this was really the first book in the series, because it was packed with references to past events that would certainly have made more books. I read onward through the series with enormous pleasure as the writer got better and better. I think An Artificial Night is a tour de force, and wondered how Seanan could top it, but then she did, several times. When I went back to reread the series before essaying One Salt Sea, though, I no longer saw as flaws the qualities that I had frowned at at first, except maybe for one or two issues of pacing. It was just Toby, talking the way she talks, and Toby's life, going the way it goes. I am not far enough into the present volume to say much, except that I'm worried about how bad things might get.
What did you recently finish reading?
Kate Elliott's The Law of Becoming, the last novel in the Jaran series. This will take pondering before I have much of an intelligent, coherent set of remarks to make about it -- pondering and probably rereading. I enjoyed the series very much indeed. I had bought the first volume after people I know kept linking to the smart things kateelliott says about writing on her LJ. I figured I'd just start at the beginning and see what happened. Then she made a post about a current project that has a first-person narrator, and I probably misunderstood what she said. What I thought she said was that she had never written a book with humor in it before. Oh, no, I thought; I have this enormous fat fantasy novel (it's science fiction, but the cover of the tenth-anniversary edition of Jaran looks fantastical) WITH NO HUMOR. At last, trepidatiously, I began to read it. It was fine. The narrator is quite sardonic at times; people have running jokes with one another; family members tease one another; there is inherent humor in the culture clash, as well as far more serious aspects; some characters, like Sonia, can be quite funny, as can Tess, the main viewpoint character. Because of my original misconception, I may have focussed more on the intimate family aspects of the book than on the broader political and military ones. But I might have been intended to do that, too. Romance gets as much attention as battles do, and it's just as important to what develops later.
Now we delve into more introspection than may be interesting to anybody except me, so I'll put it in its own paragraph that you may skip it if you like.
About fifteen years ago, coincidentally or not during perimenopause, I developed a profound aversion to physical violence in any medium. I was unable to reread, for some years, old favorites like many of Mary Renault's historical novels, and I eschewed large swathes of contemporary work if I thought it would be too violent. I have been gradually coming out of the deepest part of this aversion, though I will probably not again be able to face some of the stuff I read as a teenager (Harlan Ellison, I am looking at you, among others). Recently mrissa gave me a copy of Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love and then lent me the rest of the series. I fell for it madly and got lydy to read it. She liked it too, though perhaps not as much, but expressed huge surprise that I did, because such terrible things happened to people in it. This made me think about how much I love Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths, even though it, too, is full of terrible things. I wondered if my tolerance for terrible things in art was going back up, but it isn't, or only selectively. I have not done an extensive study or tried everything I was formerly avoiding, so my conclusions are suspect. However. Except for John M. Ford, all the writers whose books I love even though they use more violence than I ordinarily can take are women, and most of them are (and Mike was) younger than I am. (I am not considering short fiction here, or I would have more complicated remarks to make.) In the case of the Jaran books, I think the reason is actually in the text, not just in the basic thought processes of the authors, so it is easier to see. The jaran have gender roles, but women have immense power and receive enormous amounts of respect. It is, in some respects, kind of the polar opposite of a rape culture. This arrangement percolates outwards. It's certainly not one whit better to have your city burned to the ground by the jaran than by a bunch of misogynist posturing idiots. But if you survive, the jaran are better to live with. And their view of the universe, full of horrible things as the universe can be, is, while flawed (as all human views of the universe must be) infinitely preferable to that of anybody in most of the books that I can't read any more.
Mary Renault is an interesting edge case here. I can reread most of her books now, but not Funeral Games, and I think it is primarily her treatment of Eurydice that makes that impossible, and the attitudes that treatment comes from.
Something too much of this.
What do you think you'll read next?
Probably one of the books by Martha Wells or Sherwood Smith that I got as presents for Christmas.
Pamela