Booklog 10: Yes she said yes
It has been, as they say, A Bit Of A Month, but here is my booklog! Whoo! Or something!
- Short Stories, by Katherine Mansfield
Short stories by one of the all-time great modernists. I was reading them because the course I'm doing has her an option for my next essay, but they really are good. They are rooted in New Zealand, in a way I really liked, and in experience: Mansfield was one of the great champions of the aestheticist insistence on lived moments, on experiencing life through a succession of immediate impressions. And she does that in fiction absolutely astonishingly well, with a variety and a verve and a sense of humour and an eye to injustice. Love it.
- A Woman's Liberation by Ursula K. Le Guin
This is Ursula LeGuin doing a story about slavery in a sci-fi setting. And it's pretty much exactly as that sounds: a beautifully, gutwrenching account of some really awful things. But also because it's Ursula LeGuin, the focus here is really on what you do when you have broken those shackles - not just the ways that society makes that difficult when it has only seen you as a slave, but also the ways that might influence you mentally. It's very very good.
- Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I love the Vorkosigans, and I KNEW the big spoiler of this one already and had been therefore putting it off, but...
...it was so much less depressing than I thought! I mean, it is a book all about death: it's set in a planetary culture designed around avoiding death, and then ends with the inevitability of it coming anyway, but it still wasn't really depressing. It was sad, but this is a book all about the ways other people's deaths are more to be feared than your own, and about the ways that death and change are also catalysts for growth. That we have to deal with the inevitability of death, but we do that and we move on because we have to and we get shit done. I can deal with that, even while wanting to give basically everybody a hug.
- The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston
I got this from
trialia and enjoyed it! It is a delightfully surreal and creepy yet charming book about a boy who goes on a train through a flood to a house where the spirits of three children live. It is a very oddly 1950s take on what feels like a fairytale, and I found it a delightful way to spend a rainy hour.
- Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
I picked this up from the library pretty much by accident; it happened to be on a table display and looked good. And it ASTONISHED me by how much I enjoyed it.
I had heard of Mary Anning, the real-life early 19th century paleontologist who this book is about, very vaguely. What I did not know was that she had an awesome female friend, who also hunted fossils in Lyme Regis, and that someone had written an awesome fictionalisation of their lives.
And oh I love it. It is delightfully pro-science and pro-ladies and pro-ladies-who-broke-rules-by-doing-science, but without being schmaltzy or overly sentimental. The narration saves it, I think; the actual story frame she puts on their lives is a little overly dramatic, maybe, but the voices ring true. Elizabeth Philpot is a fabulous narrator, and while Mary Anning's voice occasionally strains a little against the weight of sounding intelligent while acknowledging that she was extremely poor and uneducated, her character pulls it through. And it's just a joy. :)
- Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
This is a trans woman's view of her activism and conceptualisations of gender. I found it really valuable - she talks a lot about the way conceptulisations of femininity or masculinity are tied into value systems, and also the biological vs. social elements of sex and gender, in ways I found really worth reading. If you're at all interested in that sort of thing, you should absolutely give this a go.
- Pump 6 and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
These are short stories, mostly set up in the universe of The Wind-Up Girl and/or ones which seem just a blip away from it. The further away from Wind-Up Girl the stories got the better I tended to like them; I loved the book but I didn't think the stories in that universe added much to it, I missed the depth of the novel. But the others here demonstrate exactly the qualities I loved: great worldbuilding and characterisation, a sense of the human amid EPICNESS. And the last story creeped me the hell out.
- Horns by Joe Hill
I think it was wowbagger who told me to read this, and she was very right. This is a really good story about... mmm, I actually don't want to spoil it too much, but I will say that it is a mystery, sort of, but way more it's a story about evil. About what evil might mean, about our perceptions of evil, and about why, if a Devil actually literally existed, that would be a hell of a big deal and something to be legitimately freaked out by. It is also kind of about the ways in which we need to acknowledge bad things in order to stop them. It is, after a sliiightly shakier start, absolutely gripping... although possibly not for anyone who wants something light, cheerful, and breezy.
- Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton/papersky
This is an Anthony Trollope novel where all the conventions of the Victorian sentimental novel actually make sense. And the way Walton does this is, she turns everybody into a dragon.
No really. The central conceit is that all the social stuff and ridiculous Victorian ideas about how people (and especially women) behave is actually just dragon biology and their culture's response to it. And it WORKS. It entirely works. It is believable and charming and engaging and gripping and just plain awesome. I want more in this universe. Victorian melodrama should not be NEARLY this fun.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/72390.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- Short Stories, by Katherine Mansfield
Short stories by one of the all-time great modernists. I was reading them because the course I'm doing has her an option for my next essay, but they really are good. They are rooted in New Zealand, in a way I really liked, and in experience: Mansfield was one of the great champions of the aestheticist insistence on lived moments, on experiencing life through a succession of immediate impressions. And she does that in fiction absolutely astonishingly well, with a variety and a verve and a sense of humour and an eye to injustice. Love it.
- A Woman's Liberation by Ursula K. Le Guin
This is Ursula LeGuin doing a story about slavery in a sci-fi setting. And it's pretty much exactly as that sounds: a beautifully, gutwrenching account of some really awful things. But also because it's Ursula LeGuin, the focus here is really on what you do when you have broken those shackles - not just the ways that society makes that difficult when it has only seen you as a slave, but also the ways that might influence you mentally. It's very very good.
- Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I love the Vorkosigans, and I KNEW the big spoiler of this one already and had been therefore putting it off, but...
...it was so much less depressing than I thought! I mean, it is a book all about death: it's set in a planetary culture designed around avoiding death, and then ends with the inevitability of it coming anyway, but it still wasn't really depressing. It was sad, but this is a book all about the ways other people's deaths are more to be feared than your own, and about the ways that death and change are also catalysts for growth. That we have to deal with the inevitability of death, but we do that and we move on because we have to and we get shit done. I can deal with that, even while wanting to give basically everybody a hug.
- The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston
I got this from
trialia and enjoyed it! It is a delightfully surreal and creepy yet charming book about a boy who goes on a train through a flood to a house where the spirits of three children live. It is a very oddly 1950s take on what feels like a fairytale, and I found it a delightful way to spend a rainy hour.
- Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
I picked this up from the library pretty much by accident; it happened to be on a table display and looked good. And it ASTONISHED me by how much I enjoyed it.
I had heard of Mary Anning, the real-life early 19th century paleontologist who this book is about, very vaguely. What I did not know was that she had an awesome female friend, who also hunted fossils in Lyme Regis, and that someone had written an awesome fictionalisation of their lives.
And oh I love it. It is delightfully pro-science and pro-ladies and pro-ladies-who-broke-rules-by-doing-science, but without being schmaltzy or overly sentimental. The narration saves it, I think; the actual story frame she puts on their lives is a little overly dramatic, maybe, but the voices ring true. Elizabeth Philpot is a fabulous narrator, and while Mary Anning's voice occasionally strains a little against the weight of sounding intelligent while acknowledging that she was extremely poor and uneducated, her character pulls it through. And it's just a joy. :)
- Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
This is a trans woman's view of her activism and conceptualisations of gender. I found it really valuable - she talks a lot about the way conceptulisations of femininity or masculinity are tied into value systems, and also the biological vs. social elements of sex and gender, in ways I found really worth reading. If you're at all interested in that sort of thing, you should absolutely give this a go.
- Pump 6 and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
These are short stories, mostly set up in the universe of The Wind-Up Girl and/or ones which seem just a blip away from it. The further away from Wind-Up Girl the stories got the better I tended to like them; I loved the book but I didn't think the stories in that universe added much to it, I missed the depth of the novel. But the others here demonstrate exactly the qualities I loved: great worldbuilding and characterisation, a sense of the human amid EPICNESS. And the last story creeped me the hell out.
- Horns by Joe Hill
I think it was wowbagger who told me to read this, and she was very right. This is a really good story about... mmm, I actually don't want to spoil it too much, but I will say that it is a mystery, sort of, but way more it's a story about evil. About what evil might mean, about our perceptions of evil, and about why, if a Devil actually literally existed, that would be a hell of a big deal and something to be legitimately freaked out by. It is also kind of about the ways in which we need to acknowledge bad things in order to stop them. It is, after a sliiightly shakier start, absolutely gripping... although possibly not for anyone who wants something light, cheerful, and breezy.
- Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton/papersky
This is an Anthony Trollope novel where all the conventions of the Victorian sentimental novel actually make sense. And the way Walton does this is, she turns everybody into a dragon.
No really. The central conceit is that all the social stuff and ridiculous Victorian ideas about how people (and especially women) behave is actually just dragon biology and their culture's response to it. And it WORKS. It entirely works. It is believable and charming and engaging and gripping and just plain awesome. I want more in this universe. Victorian melodrama should not be NEARLY this fun.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/72390.html. Please comment there using OpenID.