Booklog 4: Shoulda Been Reading On A Jet Plane
I got quite a bit more reading done this month than I expected to: I didn't get to go on a trip I was really, really looking forward to, and so I kind of drowned my sorrows in books a little...
- Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Scott Pilgrim And The Infinite Sadness, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley
This is a light and geeky and delightful series about Scott Pilgrim, a slacker in a band called Sex Bob-omb (lolololol) who discovers that the love of his life has a kind of trans-dimensional superhighway in her brain and also a League of Evil Exes who are out to get him.
I will admit that I read the first Scott Pilgrim and wasn't really sure whether I liked it all that much - I loved that it was dorktastic and Torontonian, but the Scott and Knives thing was just. Um. Am I going to be lynched by the people who love it if I say that I was feeling a bit like it was a bit too White Dude Has Romantic Problems for me in the first book?
And then I read the second book - mostly out of respect for those friends who love it and also my epic, epic missage of Toronto. (HEY T-DOT I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. Seriously, the fact this is all in real places that I know and have often been to is just... it makes me pine.) And then I fell completely in love.
Like, everyone realises that Scott is kind of a major douche about Knives! It's an actual thing! He has, like, a learning curve that is about not being a douche to 17 year olds who don't know better! I think a lot of it was settling into the tone - like, it becomes more and more obvious that it isn't saying Scott's misunderstood or something in the tradition of bad romantic comedies about how lolarious and renegade it is when men refuse to grow the hell up. Nope, this one? Scott is a bit rubbish at being a grown-up, and that's true, and something he has to get over. He has to get a job, and tell his girlfriend he loves her, and while it's certainly sympathetic to him having trouble with those things, it's also never saying that Ramona is unreasonable in wanting Scott to pull his weight more. The battles against her evil exes are hilarious, but the emotional battle is all Scott against his own inherent lethargy.
Also, he LITERALLY GAINS EXPERIENCE POINTS FOR SAYING I LOVE YOU AND THIS GIVES HIM A POWERSWORD TO DEFEAT ROXIE. He headbutts Todd WHO TURNS INTO A PILE OF COINS. I laughed like a particularly amused drain, I swear.
I mean, honestly, any series where being a vegan gives you superpowers and there is a literal Vegan Police who will get you for eating gelato is going to be my thing. Hee. And I love that one of Ramona's exes is a woman and it's not a particularly big deal.
(Well, I mean, Scott's already got lesbians on the brain cause of Knives/Kim Pine, which I also kind of love but would kind of prefer it wasn't quite such a stark contrast with the Very Definitely Just Gay gay dudes. I mean, all hail Kim Pine for the win, but the disparity does feel pretty glaring.)
Oh, have I talked about the awesome of the gay dudes yet? I love that there's more than one, even if only one is a main character and the other's main motivation for the only thing he does in canon is thinking Stephen Stills is hot. But Wallace I adore - he's hilarious, he and Scott share a bed and Scott is still into women and not threatened by Wallace and his flirty awesomeness, and then Wallace gets a boyfriend! Who, um, then traumatises Scott with the accidental viewing of his junk, but it is funny! And then there are twins and robots and I love both those plot points a LOT, even if I kind of wish that Vs. The Universe hadn't had quite as much of Scott being jealous in it.
... on the other hand mostly I am REALLY WANTING FINEST HOUR TO COME OUT ALREADY BECAUSE THAT IS A REALLY UNFAIR CLIFF HANGER ENDING THERE, DUDES. Also the movie, which seems to be lining up to be awesome. Even though I am kind of worried it is going to be a huge disappointment omg, I already love it just for the bit in the trailer where Scott first gets punched in the face, hahaha.
- A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee
This is one of those books that makes me convinced I need to be about 200% smarter. This is the story of a contemporary gay Indian man called Ritwik moving to Britain and doing everything he can to stay there despite the best attempts of the country to be completely inhospitable. It's also the story of an early Edwardian feminist English woman called Maud Gilby moving to India just before the first partition. Said woman is actually a character from a Rabindranath Tagore novel, but her story turns out to be a fanfic written by Ritwik.
(Well, okay, the word fanfic is not used. But that is entirely what it is.)
And it's awesome! I really enjoyed it - it's fun and gripping and heartwrenching in excellently balanced amounts. And the contrasts and links between the two different experiences of emigration, their lives and feelings and the ways they fail to understand things the other does understand... they're seriously stunning. I just don't feel like I could do it justice without, um, well first having read a lot of Tagore, and probably lots more Indian literature that I didn't even recognise references to.
It's pretty impressive that I didn't particularly feel that way reading it - it's compelling and readable and genuinely good fun in a way a lot of Very Smart Books aren't. But thinking about it afterwards made me feel like you could probably write most of a dissertation about this.
- Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
I re-read this to make me feel better after having volcano-related holiday fail, and oh, it is still one of my favourites. Freddy and Kitty are ADORABLE: they have an actual functional relationship going before they realise they are in love, which I enjoy a lot, and also the Typical Heyer Hero guy basically gets kicked in the nuts MORE THAN ONCE. It's awesome. And hilarious.
- Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer
I then jumped on a Heyer I hadn't read. This is kind of weird... it's both a Heyer romance and a sort of quasi-Gothic, and I didn't feel like the two sides of it meshed very well.
Kate herself I liked a lot - she's very practical and fun in a Heyery way I love. I was happy she got the right man at the end, even if some more stuff about said right man and how come they realised that about each other would have been nice. But, um, Tarquin and his crazy and his crazy mother? Is just WEIRD. I mean, it's genuinely creepy, and it's clearly supposed to be. But it just seems to be in a different book entirely from the lol-he-thought-she-was-a-golddigger-and-she's-not plot. And it's sort of both sympathetic to Tarquin in that it says he's ill, but then his mother is also clearly mentally messed up too and she's shown as evil... and then Tarquin's death is just, like, oh that's that then, at least that's better than him being alive all crazy!
- Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer
I had never read a non-Regency Heyer before! I enjoyed this one: it was still super-Heyery while also being an Agatha Christie type murder mystery, and I enjoyed both sides. I totally guessed it was Joe, because he kept hitting the cues while apparently being Too Nice To Be A Killer. I still like the Regencies best, but this was fun.
- Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer
This suffered by being read immediately after Envious Casca. It's basically the same book: the plot is different (and, I think, inferior because it's less satisfying at the conclusion: there's no confrontation or bringing to justice) but the people have very, very similar family dynamics and setup. A family who all hate each other come together, and there's one who is particularly known for being rude, and then everyone wants The Rude One to have committed the murder, but they haven't, and also then they get to be with the awesome girl.
I will say, though, that I thought the dude in Behold was rather funnier than Stephen from Envious Casca, because I didn't feel Stephen was really all that rude at all, just brusque, but Randall is totally mean while being really hilarious.
- Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan
This one is available legally and for free on the internets, ftw!
This is described as being a cyberpunk Sherlock Holmes where Holmes is a woman and Watson is a computer programme and most of the interesting crimes are on the internet, and it is, and it's awesome. And I say that as someone who is not particularly bewitched by cyberpunk.
Hu, the Watson analogue, is a genderbending AI of fabulousness, and if that doesn't make you want to read this then you are not me. The world of future-San Franscico is very real, even though some of it is not, in fact, supposed to be what would today be considered 'real'. The integration of the internet, the virtual world and its importance, into everything is one of the highlights, and it's really, really awesome. Hu is one of my favourite narrators in a long time - vying with Archie Goodwin at the moment, actually! Which is high praise, cause wow, do I love Archie.
And Annabel Scheme herself is awesome. Her past and the total weirdness that is her life and the way she deals with it adds up to fabulousness in my opinion. (There's a bit set in a future version of Second Life which made me go HI ANNABEL OMG OMG LOVE in particular.) But I didn't really feel she was Holmes so much... she is filling the Holmes role, but in a very, very different way. Which I like, don't get me wrong, but I didn't want to write a dissertation comparing her to Holmes in the way I do with Nero Wolfe.
I kind of feel like this should win at least one dorky award, because it deserves to. Especially cause Robin Sloan is, in fact, a dude, which I feel makes the gender-stereotype breaking here... not more worthy of praise, because the messing with the gender binary would be awesome from a woman too, but less expected, and the causal way it's done especially so.
- Unsuitable For Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellrs edited by Jane Robinson
This is exactly what it says on the tin - an anthology of travel writing by women.
I mean, you do have to like travel writing anyway to enjoy it, but seriously, this is so brilliant. The diversity here is wonderful and staggaring: there's a disabled traveller, at least one who isn't white, and all these women having hugely different and interesting and worthwhile lives! I went ♥ a lot!
I'd have liked a couple of queer ladies - most of these were written before gayness was mentioned much, and I guess gayness impacts on travel less than being black or disabled or a woman, but the lack is pretty noticable. But generally, this is really awesome. It's organised by place visited, rather than time period, and that really works: the different views of the same place over the years is exactly the right way to go about this. You get one woman talking about the natives as scary and weird, and another going "Oh my god, how can people be so awful to these people who are also human beings?" and others are just caught up in the wars that result and don't think about the politics at all. Some love travelling, some hate it, some give birth miles away from anywhere on the Siberian steppe because they went into labour early, which is one of the most striking bits and deserves italics because OH MY GOD.
Also this book helped me while camping out in train stations and airports by reminding me that at least I wasn't having to deal with leeches. Ew.
I also read a bunch of Rex Stout, for the
milk_and_orchids re-read: The Red Box, The League of Frightened Men, and The Rubber Band. And one new one...
- Three At Wolfe's Door by Rex Stout
Three At Wolfe's Door is fairly standard short-story Wolfe, but on the cracky end. I mean, Lily having a rodeo contest! Archie chatting up a whole plethora of hot girls in togas, just to prove a point! Archie nearly getting shot and Wolfe TALKING THROUGH THE WALL to stop his death, despite the fact that gives up the secret of the painting! Love!
As for the others, I still love them all but my favourite things were 1. Archie blowing a raspberry at a policeman and 2. the fact that after the crying and fainting and heartbreak of Archie thinking Wolfe's dead in League of Frightened Men, Archie gets to Wolfe and then collapses and gets driven home ON WOLFE'S LAP. Oh, honey. Oh and 3. Clara Fox basically totally agreeing that Wolfe and Archie are married, hee.
I still don't know what I think of Paul Chapin: he's both Scary Cripple and also kind of implied to be a victim of Archie's imagination, which built him up into this inhuman evil which he never actually was. I don't know, and I doubt there's going to be an actual settling of that unease.
Also, I think I may have to do a loooooong post about Stout and Sherlock Holmes and how it's basically slash fanfic...
- Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Scott Pilgrim And The Infinite Sadness, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley
This is a light and geeky and delightful series about Scott Pilgrim, a slacker in a band called Sex Bob-omb (lolololol) who discovers that the love of his life has a kind of trans-dimensional superhighway in her brain and also a League of Evil Exes who are out to get him.
I will admit that I read the first Scott Pilgrim and wasn't really sure whether I liked it all that much - I loved that it was dorktastic and Torontonian, but the Scott and Knives thing was just. Um. Am I going to be lynched by the people who love it if I say that I was feeling a bit like it was a bit too White Dude Has Romantic Problems for me in the first book?
And then I read the second book - mostly out of respect for those friends who love it and also my epic, epic missage of Toronto. (HEY T-DOT I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. Seriously, the fact this is all in real places that I know and have often been to is just... it makes me pine.) And then I fell completely in love.
Like, everyone realises that Scott is kind of a major douche about Knives! It's an actual thing! He has, like, a learning curve that is about not being a douche to 17 year olds who don't know better! I think a lot of it was settling into the tone - like, it becomes more and more obvious that it isn't saying Scott's misunderstood or something in the tradition of bad romantic comedies about how lolarious and renegade it is when men refuse to grow the hell up. Nope, this one? Scott is a bit rubbish at being a grown-up, and that's true, and something he has to get over. He has to get a job, and tell his girlfriend he loves her, and while it's certainly sympathetic to him having trouble with those things, it's also never saying that Ramona is unreasonable in wanting Scott to pull his weight more. The battles against her evil exes are hilarious, but the emotional battle is all Scott against his own inherent lethargy.
Also, he LITERALLY GAINS EXPERIENCE POINTS FOR SAYING I LOVE YOU AND THIS GIVES HIM A POWERSWORD TO DEFEAT ROXIE. He headbutts Todd WHO TURNS INTO A PILE OF COINS. I laughed like a particularly amused drain, I swear.
I mean, honestly, any series where being a vegan gives you superpowers and there is a literal Vegan Police who will get you for eating gelato is going to be my thing. Hee. And I love that one of Ramona's exes is a woman and it's not a particularly big deal.
(Well, I mean, Scott's already got lesbians on the brain cause of Knives/Kim Pine, which I also kind of love but would kind of prefer it wasn't quite such a stark contrast with the Very Definitely Just Gay gay dudes. I mean, all hail Kim Pine for the win, but the disparity does feel pretty glaring.)
Oh, have I talked about the awesome of the gay dudes yet? I love that there's more than one, even if only one is a main character and the other's main motivation for the only thing he does in canon is thinking Stephen Stills is hot. But Wallace I adore - he's hilarious, he and Scott share a bed and Scott is still into women and not threatened by Wallace and his flirty awesomeness, and then Wallace gets a boyfriend! Who, um, then traumatises Scott with the accidental viewing of his junk, but it is funny! And then there are twins and robots and I love both those plot points a LOT, even if I kind of wish that Vs. The Universe hadn't had quite as much of Scott being jealous in it.
... on the other hand mostly I am REALLY WANTING FINEST HOUR TO COME OUT ALREADY BECAUSE THAT IS A REALLY UNFAIR CLIFF HANGER ENDING THERE, DUDES. Also the movie, which seems to be lining up to be awesome. Even though I am kind of worried it is going to be a huge disappointment omg, I already love it just for the bit in the trailer where Scott first gets punched in the face, hahaha.
- A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee
This is one of those books that makes me convinced I need to be about 200% smarter. This is the story of a contemporary gay Indian man called Ritwik moving to Britain and doing everything he can to stay there despite the best attempts of the country to be completely inhospitable. It's also the story of an early Edwardian feminist English woman called Maud Gilby moving to India just before the first partition. Said woman is actually a character from a Rabindranath Tagore novel, but her story turns out to be a fanfic written by Ritwik.
(Well, okay, the word fanfic is not used. But that is entirely what it is.)
And it's awesome! I really enjoyed it - it's fun and gripping and heartwrenching in excellently balanced amounts. And the contrasts and links between the two different experiences of emigration, their lives and feelings and the ways they fail to understand things the other does understand... they're seriously stunning. I just don't feel like I could do it justice without, um, well first having read a lot of Tagore, and probably lots more Indian literature that I didn't even recognise references to.
It's pretty impressive that I didn't particularly feel that way reading it - it's compelling and readable and genuinely good fun in a way a lot of Very Smart Books aren't. But thinking about it afterwards made me feel like you could probably write most of a dissertation about this.
- Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
I re-read this to make me feel better after having volcano-related holiday fail, and oh, it is still one of my favourites. Freddy and Kitty are ADORABLE: they have an actual functional relationship going before they realise they are in love, which I enjoy a lot, and also the Typical Heyer Hero guy basically gets kicked in the nuts MORE THAN ONCE. It's awesome. And hilarious.
- Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer
I then jumped on a Heyer I hadn't read. This is kind of weird... it's both a Heyer romance and a sort of quasi-Gothic, and I didn't feel like the two sides of it meshed very well.
Kate herself I liked a lot - she's very practical and fun in a Heyery way I love. I was happy she got the right man at the end, even if some more stuff about said right man and how come they realised that about each other would have been nice. But, um, Tarquin and his crazy and his crazy mother? Is just WEIRD. I mean, it's genuinely creepy, and it's clearly supposed to be. But it just seems to be in a different book entirely from the lol-he-thought-she-was-a-golddigger-and-she's-not plot. And it's sort of both sympathetic to Tarquin in that it says he's ill, but then his mother is also clearly mentally messed up too and she's shown as evil... and then Tarquin's death is just, like, oh that's that then, at least that's better than him being alive all crazy!
- Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer
I had never read a non-Regency Heyer before! I enjoyed this one: it was still super-Heyery while also being an Agatha Christie type murder mystery, and I enjoyed both sides. I totally guessed it was Joe, because he kept hitting the cues while apparently being Too Nice To Be A Killer. I still like the Regencies best, but this was fun.
- Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer
This suffered by being read immediately after Envious Casca. It's basically the same book: the plot is different (and, I think, inferior because it's less satisfying at the conclusion: there's no confrontation or bringing to justice) but the people have very, very similar family dynamics and setup. A family who all hate each other come together, and there's one who is particularly known for being rude, and then everyone wants The Rude One to have committed the murder, but they haven't, and also then they get to be with the awesome girl.
I will say, though, that I thought the dude in Behold was rather funnier than Stephen from Envious Casca, because I didn't feel Stephen was really all that rude at all, just brusque, but Randall is totally mean while being really hilarious.
- Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan
This one is available legally and for free on the internets, ftw!
This is described as being a cyberpunk Sherlock Holmes where Holmes is a woman and Watson is a computer programme and most of the interesting crimes are on the internet, and it is, and it's awesome. And I say that as someone who is not particularly bewitched by cyberpunk.
Hu, the Watson analogue, is a genderbending AI of fabulousness, and if that doesn't make you want to read this then you are not me. The world of future-San Franscico is very real, even though some of it is not, in fact, supposed to be what would today be considered 'real'. The integration of the internet, the virtual world and its importance, into everything is one of the highlights, and it's really, really awesome. Hu is one of my favourite narrators in a long time - vying with Archie Goodwin at the moment, actually! Which is high praise, cause wow, do I love Archie.
And Annabel Scheme herself is awesome. Her past and the total weirdness that is her life and the way she deals with it adds up to fabulousness in my opinion. (There's a bit set in a future version of Second Life which made me go HI ANNABEL OMG OMG LOVE in particular.) But I didn't really feel she was Holmes so much... she is filling the Holmes role, but in a very, very different way. Which I like, don't get me wrong, but I didn't want to write a dissertation comparing her to Holmes in the way I do with Nero Wolfe.
I kind of feel like this should win at least one dorky award, because it deserves to. Especially cause Robin Sloan is, in fact, a dude, which I feel makes the gender-stereotype breaking here... not more worthy of praise, because the messing with the gender binary would be awesome from a woman too, but less expected, and the causal way it's done especially so.
- Unsuitable For Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellrs edited by Jane Robinson
This is exactly what it says on the tin - an anthology of travel writing by women.
I mean, you do have to like travel writing anyway to enjoy it, but seriously, this is so brilliant. The diversity here is wonderful and staggaring: there's a disabled traveller, at least one who isn't white, and all these women having hugely different and interesting and worthwhile lives! I went ♥ a lot!
I'd have liked a couple of queer ladies - most of these were written before gayness was mentioned much, and I guess gayness impacts on travel less than being black or disabled or a woman, but the lack is pretty noticable. But generally, this is really awesome. It's organised by place visited, rather than time period, and that really works: the different views of the same place over the years is exactly the right way to go about this. You get one woman talking about the natives as scary and weird, and another going "Oh my god, how can people be so awful to these people who are also human beings?" and others are just caught up in the wars that result and don't think about the politics at all. Some love travelling, some hate it, some give birth miles away from anywhere on the Siberian steppe because they went into labour early, which is one of the most striking bits and deserves italics because OH MY GOD.
Also this book helped me while camping out in train stations and airports by reminding me that at least I wasn't having to deal with leeches. Ew.
I also read a bunch of Rex Stout, for the
milk_and_orchids re-read: The Red Box, The League of Frightened Men, and The Rubber Band. And one new one...
- Three At Wolfe's Door by Rex Stout
Three At Wolfe's Door is fairly standard short-story Wolfe, but on the cracky end. I mean, Lily having a rodeo contest! Archie chatting up a whole plethora of hot girls in togas, just to prove a point! Archie nearly getting shot and Wolfe TALKING THROUGH THE WALL to stop his death, despite the fact that gives up the secret of the painting! Love!
As for the others, I still love them all but my favourite things were 1. Archie blowing a raspberry at a policeman and 2. the fact that after the crying and fainting and heartbreak of Archie thinking Wolfe's dead in League of Frightened Men, Archie gets to Wolfe and then collapses and gets driven home ON WOLFE'S LAP. Oh, honey. Oh and 3. Clara Fox basically totally agreeing that Wolfe and Archie are married, hee.
I still don't know what I think of Paul Chapin: he's both Scary Cripple and also kind of implied to be a victim of Archie's imagination, which built him up into this inhuman evil which he never actually was. I don't know, and I doubt there's going to be an actual settling of that unease.
Also, I think I may have to do a loooooong post about Stout and Sherlock Holmes and how it's basically slash fanfic...