bookish
I met Joan Walsh, editor in chief of Salon! Cue fangirling. Anybody else a Salon reader? I enjoy them a lot.
George R.R. Martin, Armageddon Rag: This is a novel of a sixties refugee in the early eighties, when all the hopes of peace and love and change have been turned into Yuppiedom, real estate agents and ad executives. A journalist-turned-novelist, called in to investigate the death of a music promoter, journeys into his past and finds, in the attempted resurrection of a Doors-like rock band (the Nazgûl, with tons of Tolkien references), both a window into his own history and perhaps a dangerous door into another world. Very much of its time, and not just because people can only find information by making phone calls and driving across the country. It’s a cry of sadness that the sixties ended from someone who did very well thereafter; make of that what you will.
Steven Brust, Iorich: Is there really a point to reviewing a novel like this one? If you like Vlad, you should read and probably have read this. He spends some time with Cawti and his son, but mostly he investigates a political prosecution tangled up with a botched suppression of a Teckla rebellion, snarks to his friends, attempts to avoid assassination, and otherwise is Vlad. The outtakes at the end, done in the style of other works of fantasy (including The Phoenix Guards) are pretty funny.
Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief: A young thief, thrown in jail after bragging too much about his latest success, is forced to become part of an expedition to find a legendary stone that will allow the country’s kingdom to unite with another. The thief is charming and his companions are nicely annoying and sympathetic by turns, recognizable as people. There are a couple of twists, at least one of which is pretty obvious, but overall it’s a charming adventure. I’m hoping for more palace intrigue in the next one.
Swati Avasthi, Split: Wow, this was great. I actually bought a copy before my ARC arrived from
deepad, and I’m glad I did. The action begins with just the right amount of tension: Jace shows up at his older brother Christian’s, still bleeding. As you find out why, Jace is both sympathetic and legitimately dangerous. Both Jace and Christian have secrets and occasionally behave badly despite their attempts to take care of each other, and as Jace struggles to fit in to his brother’s new life and a new school, he has to deal with what he couldn’t leave behind: himself, and his connections to his mother and father. When is it okay to get out of a terrible situation, knowing that you’re leaving others you love behind to suffer, and knowing that if you reach out to them you’re much more likely to get pulled back in than you are to help? Is forgiveness for terrible acts ever justified, and how does that relate to change in the person who did them? There are no easy answers here; the story was powerful and ultimately hopeful.
Robin Sloan, Annabel Scheme: Free download. Next-gen cyberpunk, where technology is indistinguishable from magic: Grail (super-Google) runs our searches despite an ill-fated adventure in quantum computing that left a section of San Francisco … altered. Annabel Scheme is a PI; her Watson is an AI that was a Grail server in a former life. It’s a quick, fun read, sort of Charles Stross-lite.
Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds. David Suisman & Susan Strasser: Collection of essays about various aspects of sound, mostly radio. Pieces cover, among other things, the morality assigned to “distracted” listening in the 1930s, gender and voices on the radio, unauthorized copies of early jazz records, race and CB radio in the 1970s, and the early relations between radio and newspapers (who often owned radio stations). Nothing really grabbed me the way Suisman’s own book did.
Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. Maté, a Canadian physician, treats addicts; which is to say that he gives them health care and tries to help them manage the damage drugs are doing to them, since many of them can’t make themselves stay off and he’s quite sympathetic to the reasons why, the pain inside that is most easily (or only) suppressed by drug use. Addiction is a response to damage, and he draws (sometimes unconvincing) analogies between his patients and his own habit of buying classical music in obsessive, excessive, and financially unsustainable quantities. Though he does believe that individuals can stop using drugs, he doesn’t think that’s a plausible solution for many, given their lack of other opportunities to not feel so bad; to end drug abuse, we’d have to stop hurting children in all the ways we find to hurt them. The stories are powerful and his advice, in the end, is compassion-which means that there’s not necessarily much that’s active in his proscriptions.
David Sandler, Fundamental Weight Training: Another free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. I found myself uncertain how to evaluate this. On the one hand, it’s clearly written, informative, well-balanced and open about where the research is clear and where it’s not, such as for the benefits of stretching. If you want a basic idea about why you get different results training on a stability ball v. training on a bench, Sandler can explain it. On the other hand, I’m fundamentally skeptical that one can learn weight training from a book, and this presents itself as a basic primer. The exercises assume good form, and while Sandler occasionally explains what that is, I wouldn’t have understood no matter how good the description was if I hadn’t already had a basic sense, developed by several years of working with a trainer. Now, I am particularly detached from my body, so it is certainly possible that other people more in tune with their physicality could benefit from the book. So while I recognized most of the exercises and thought some of the more advanced ones looked interesting, I would have trouble saying that you could use a book instead of a trainer who can actually tell you whether you’re doing an exercise right.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
George R.R. Martin, Armageddon Rag: This is a novel of a sixties refugee in the early eighties, when all the hopes of peace and love and change have been turned into Yuppiedom, real estate agents and ad executives. A journalist-turned-novelist, called in to investigate the death of a music promoter, journeys into his past and finds, in the attempted resurrection of a Doors-like rock band (the Nazgûl, with tons of Tolkien references), both a window into his own history and perhaps a dangerous door into another world. Very much of its time, and not just because people can only find information by making phone calls and driving across the country. It’s a cry of sadness that the sixties ended from someone who did very well thereafter; make of that what you will.
Steven Brust, Iorich: Is there really a point to reviewing a novel like this one? If you like Vlad, you should read and probably have read this. He spends some time with Cawti and his son, but mostly he investigates a political prosecution tangled up with a botched suppression of a Teckla rebellion, snarks to his friends, attempts to avoid assassination, and otherwise is Vlad. The outtakes at the end, done in the style of other works of fantasy (including The Phoenix Guards) are pretty funny.
Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief: A young thief, thrown in jail after bragging too much about his latest success, is forced to become part of an expedition to find a legendary stone that will allow the country’s kingdom to unite with another. The thief is charming and his companions are nicely annoying and sympathetic by turns, recognizable as people. There are a couple of twists, at least one of which is pretty obvious, but overall it’s a charming adventure. I’m hoping for more palace intrigue in the next one.
Swati Avasthi, Split: Wow, this was great. I actually bought a copy before my ARC arrived from
deepad, and I’m glad I did. The action begins with just the right amount of tension: Jace shows up at his older brother Christian’s, still bleeding. As you find out why, Jace is both sympathetic and legitimately dangerous. Both Jace and Christian have secrets and occasionally behave badly despite their attempts to take care of each other, and as Jace struggles to fit in to his brother’s new life and a new school, he has to deal with what he couldn’t leave behind: himself, and his connections to his mother and father. When is it okay to get out of a terrible situation, knowing that you’re leaving others you love behind to suffer, and knowing that if you reach out to them you’re much more likely to get pulled back in than you are to help? Is forgiveness for terrible acts ever justified, and how does that relate to change in the person who did them? There are no easy answers here; the story was powerful and ultimately hopeful.
Robin Sloan, Annabel Scheme: Free download. Next-gen cyberpunk, where technology is indistinguishable from magic: Grail (super-Google) runs our searches despite an ill-fated adventure in quantum computing that left a section of San Francisco … altered. Annabel Scheme is a PI; her Watson is an AI that was a Grail server in a former life. It’s a quick, fun read, sort of Charles Stross-lite.
Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds. David Suisman & Susan Strasser: Collection of essays about various aspects of sound, mostly radio. Pieces cover, among other things, the morality assigned to “distracted” listening in the 1930s, gender and voices on the radio, unauthorized copies of early jazz records, race and CB radio in the 1970s, and the early relations between radio and newspapers (who often owned radio stations). Nothing really grabbed me the way Suisman’s own book did.
Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. Maté, a Canadian physician, treats addicts; which is to say that he gives them health care and tries to help them manage the damage drugs are doing to them, since many of them can’t make themselves stay off and he’s quite sympathetic to the reasons why, the pain inside that is most easily (or only) suppressed by drug use. Addiction is a response to damage, and he draws (sometimes unconvincing) analogies between his patients and his own habit of buying classical music in obsessive, excessive, and financially unsustainable quantities. Though he does believe that individuals can stop using drugs, he doesn’t think that’s a plausible solution for many, given their lack of other opportunities to not feel so bad; to end drug abuse, we’d have to stop hurting children in all the ways we find to hurt them. The stories are powerful and his advice, in the end, is compassion-which means that there’s not necessarily much that’s active in his proscriptions.
David Sandler, Fundamental Weight Training: Another free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. I found myself uncertain how to evaluate this. On the one hand, it’s clearly written, informative, well-balanced and open about where the research is clear and where it’s not, such as for the benefits of stretching. If you want a basic idea about why you get different results training on a stability ball v. training on a bench, Sandler can explain it. On the other hand, I’m fundamentally skeptical that one can learn weight training from a book, and this presents itself as a basic primer. The exercises assume good form, and while Sandler occasionally explains what that is, I wouldn’t have understood no matter how good the description was if I hadn’t already had a basic sense, developed by several years of working with a trainer. Now, I am particularly detached from my body, so it is certainly possible that other people more in tune with their physicality could benefit from the book. So while I recognized most of the exercises and thought some of the more advanced ones looked interesting, I would have trouble saying that you could use a book instead of a trainer who can actually tell you whether you’re doing an exercise right.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.