Booklog 9: Not Necessarily From Outer Space
I think this is the latest my booklog has EVER BEEN. Which does tell you pretty much all you need to know about the last little while. So.
- A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones
This is a fun universe-swapping magical adventure story with brown skinned people. I really enjoyed it, even though it has a really, really creepy use of the Conga. Like, to the point where I suspect Diana Wynne Jones personally had a bit of a phobia about the Conga and then wrote this story to explain why it could be scary. I also really liked the way it's about recognising even very different people as being worthy of respect, and of being conscious of how you treat others.
- The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chiamunda Ngozi Adichie
This is a collection of short stories that sort of blend together to tell a story about a section of modern middle-class Nigerians and their complicated relationship with both Nigeria and America. It's very experiential, very... engrossing, I think is the best word, it feels like seeing into someone else's life for a while. And that's very clearly deliberate: there's a whole story here about the value of slice-of-life, experiential fiction and how important it is not to demand that your fiction Say Something beyond just, these are people and this is how they are. It's very good.
- The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
This read very much like a more modern, international, more scientific, more genre-aware Oryx and Crake. And some of that is because this is way more recent, but oh, it was actually kind of weird how much this is absolutely the book I wished Oryx and Crake had been. I enjoyed that all right, don't get me wrong, but this might have been written with a tick list:
- the main female character with more actual screen time
- much better sci-fi stuff, the perspective on our incredible genepool was really cool, and I thought the wind-ups themselves were a really good concept, even if I think the title makes it sound like steampunk.
- better science all round
- more action (and very good action: written from the perspective of someone experiencing them, not the list of things exploding or weapons that a lot of - especially dude - writers fall into)
I feel a bit bad thinking that the horror of what the main female character experiences is better done here than in Oryx and Crake, but I also kind of thought that, too. Definitely a trigger warning required on this book.
- Nerd Do Well, by Simon Pegg
This is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a Pegg autobiography. (Well, except the bonus Pegg-as-superhero/James Bond-with-robot-butler snippets, but I actually didn't enjoy those that much.) It's affable, reasonably entertaining, fairly interesting stuff on the culture of comedy and the way that comedy ends up being produced. I was especially amused by the idea of several well-known comics, baked out of their minds, standing in the sea. If you like Pegg at all, it's not a bad use of a lazy hour or so.
- Frederica by Georgette Heyer
I just realised I hadn't read this one!
It is good fun in the very typical Heyer style. I like Frederica herself, and Alverstoke is one of the better Heyer heroes. (I like the note that he took his style from Brummell, but none of the youngun's know who Brummell was so they think he's a real original.) It's entirely predictable from begining to end, really, but in a reassuring kind of way, and the courtship-through-being-nice-to-ones-dependents thing is quite well done. Charming.
- Jeeves in the Offing by PG Wodehouse
(Yes I have been on some comfort reading lately! This will become readily apparent and I have no shame. :P)
It turns out, I hadn't read this one! That boggles me: Jeeves and Wooster, and I hadn't read it? And yet, dear readers, I promise you that it was so.
And it's cute! It does suffer from Not Enough Jeeves, but made up for it with especially adorable Bertie. He imagines Jeeves under a tree, smoking a cigarette and reading the book Bertie bought him! Aw! And he also bonds with Roderick Glossop! In a weirdly adorable way! Very charming and funny, as Wodehouse pretty much invairably is. ♥
- Too Many Women by Rex Stout
...for similar comfort reading reasons, and I was pleased to discover this one really IS as weird as I remember it. ARCHIE GOODWIN, you loveable nutter, what the hell!
The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim Of The Dragon by Pamela Dean
My main thought while reading this series was "omg this is so much more fun than Tam Lin!
I liked Tam Lin fine, but this feels far more modern and believable, to me, even though the actual premise (kids end up magically going to a land they had previously been playing make-believe games about) is not at all less ridiculous. It's good fun - it's meta, but without the implication that the fact it's using its own status as fiction to add to the fun makes the story less imporant, which I found fascinatingly different.
It then uses all that as a way of having a rolicking yarn that also involves a lot of philosophical stuff about what makes things real, a lot of personal development stuff about becoming the roles you create for yourself and taking your responsibilities seriously, and then ends with a bit of a fizzle, as the inevitable happens. The reveal of Claudia is pretty cool, but I did feel like the rest of it needed something other than a really obvious tacked on and weirdly vaguely creepy heterosexual romance to make it sing. I think I also find the ultimate choice made eveeeeer so slightly creepy itself... like, yes their Secret Country lives matter, but is that what you really want to say about their 'real' ones? I don't know.
- The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
I read this for a course I'm doing, and don't really feel very qualified to say anything much about it yet. As with all plays, I don't think I'm much good at reading drama: so much depends on setting and staging and direction, and I don't think I extrapolate that well. I had heard previously that this could be seen as a black comedy or a tragedy, or both, and I found that very very very Russian... although possibly it was just the mentions of kvass making me think of
alpheratz and being in Moscow. *g*
- Fledgling by Octavia Butler
This is really good, in a very odd way. It is like Butler sat herself down and said, "You know, world? What you need is a vampire story with brown people in it. And also, is there a way of making vampirism morally acceptable? Hmm." And this is what she came up with. The result is extremely good fun, and thought-provoking - most geeks I know would easily be able to spend an afternoon debating the okayness or otherwise of the vampiric behaviour shown here. It's very clearly supposed to be that way, though, and there is maybe a bit of a putting out at the end as the plot gets wrapped once once all the cool world-building is done. Which is a bit of a shame, I thought, as I liked the plot a lot up til then... but it would probably have taken five or six more novels to do any other ending properly. So.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/69910.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones
This is a fun universe-swapping magical adventure story with brown skinned people. I really enjoyed it, even though it has a really, really creepy use of the Conga. Like, to the point where I suspect Diana Wynne Jones personally had a bit of a phobia about the Conga and then wrote this story to explain why it could be scary. I also really liked the way it's about recognising even very different people as being worthy of respect, and of being conscious of how you treat others.
- The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chiamunda Ngozi Adichie
This is a collection of short stories that sort of blend together to tell a story about a section of modern middle-class Nigerians and their complicated relationship with both Nigeria and America. It's very experiential, very... engrossing, I think is the best word, it feels like seeing into someone else's life for a while. And that's very clearly deliberate: there's a whole story here about the value of slice-of-life, experiential fiction and how important it is not to demand that your fiction Say Something beyond just, these are people and this is how they are. It's very good.
- The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
This read very much like a more modern, international, more scientific, more genre-aware Oryx and Crake. And some of that is because this is way more recent, but oh, it was actually kind of weird how much this is absolutely the book I wished Oryx and Crake had been. I enjoyed that all right, don't get me wrong, but this might have been written with a tick list:
- the main female character with more actual screen time
- much better sci-fi stuff, the perspective on our incredible genepool was really cool, and I thought the wind-ups themselves were a really good concept, even if I think the title makes it sound like steampunk.
- better science all round
- more action (and very good action: written from the perspective of someone experiencing them, not the list of things exploding or weapons that a lot of - especially dude - writers fall into)
I feel a bit bad thinking that the horror of what the main female character experiences is better done here than in Oryx and Crake, but I also kind of thought that, too. Definitely a trigger warning required on this book.
- Nerd Do Well, by Simon Pegg
This is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a Pegg autobiography. (Well, except the bonus Pegg-as-superhero/James Bond-with-robot-butler snippets, but I actually didn't enjoy those that much.) It's affable, reasonably entertaining, fairly interesting stuff on the culture of comedy and the way that comedy ends up being produced. I was especially amused by the idea of several well-known comics, baked out of their minds, standing in the sea. If you like Pegg at all, it's not a bad use of a lazy hour or so.
- Frederica by Georgette Heyer
I just realised I hadn't read this one!
It is good fun in the very typical Heyer style. I like Frederica herself, and Alverstoke is one of the better Heyer heroes. (I like the note that he took his style from Brummell, but none of the youngun's know who Brummell was so they think he's a real original.) It's entirely predictable from begining to end, really, but in a reassuring kind of way, and the courtship-through-being-nice-to-ones-dependents thing is quite well done. Charming.
- Jeeves in the Offing by PG Wodehouse
(Yes I have been on some comfort reading lately! This will become readily apparent and I have no shame. :P)
It turns out, I hadn't read this one! That boggles me: Jeeves and Wooster, and I hadn't read it? And yet, dear readers, I promise you that it was so.
And it's cute! It does suffer from Not Enough Jeeves, but made up for it with especially adorable Bertie. He imagines Jeeves under a tree, smoking a cigarette and reading the book Bertie bought him! Aw! And he also bonds with Roderick Glossop! In a weirdly adorable way! Very charming and funny, as Wodehouse pretty much invairably is. ♥
- Too Many Women by Rex Stout
...for similar comfort reading reasons, and I was pleased to discover this one really IS as weird as I remember it. ARCHIE GOODWIN, you loveable nutter, what the hell!
The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim Of The Dragon by Pamela Dean
My main thought while reading this series was "omg this is so much more fun than Tam Lin!
I liked Tam Lin fine, but this feels far more modern and believable, to me, even though the actual premise (kids end up magically going to a land they had previously been playing make-believe games about) is not at all less ridiculous. It's good fun - it's meta, but without the implication that the fact it's using its own status as fiction to add to the fun makes the story less imporant, which I found fascinatingly different.
It then uses all that as a way of having a rolicking yarn that also involves a lot of philosophical stuff about what makes things real, a lot of personal development stuff about becoming the roles you create for yourself and taking your responsibilities seriously, and then ends with a bit of a fizzle, as the inevitable happens. The reveal of Claudia is pretty cool, but I did feel like the rest of it needed something other than a really obvious tacked on and weirdly vaguely creepy heterosexual romance to make it sing. I think I also find the ultimate choice made eveeeeer so slightly creepy itself... like, yes their Secret Country lives matter, but is that what you really want to say about their 'real' ones? I don't know.
- The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
I read this for a course I'm doing, and don't really feel very qualified to say anything much about it yet. As with all plays, I don't think I'm much good at reading drama: so much depends on setting and staging and direction, and I don't think I extrapolate that well. I had heard previously that this could be seen as a black comedy or a tragedy, or both, and I found that very very very Russian... although possibly it was just the mentions of kvass making me think of
alpheratz and being in Moscow. *g*
- Fledgling by Octavia Butler
This is really good, in a very odd way. It is like Butler sat herself down and said, "You know, world? What you need is a vampire story with brown people in it. And also, is there a way of making vampirism morally acceptable? Hmm." And this is what she came up with. The result is extremely good fun, and thought-provoking - most geeks I know would easily be able to spend an afternoon debating the okayness or otherwise of the vampiric behaviour shown here. It's very clearly supposed to be that way, though, and there is maybe a bit of a putting out at the end as the plot gets wrapped once once all the cool world-building is done. Which is a bit of a shame, I thought, as I liked the plot a lot up til then... but it would probably have taken five or six more novels to do any other ending properly. So.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/69910.html. Please comment there using OpenID.