Booklog 1: Unexpected Dunking Edition
I managed to read a bunch this month (that’s what happens when a Katie has no internet for five whole days, folks) and I’m not going to finish my latest book by tomorrow evening, so, here: book log! A whole day earlier than usual!
- The Rubber Band, Some Buried Caesar, and Gambit by Rex Stout
I have been on a little bit of a Rex Stout renaissance lately for some reason, and I really enjoy both Rubber Band and Some Buried Caesar. I remembered liking Clara Fox in Rubber Band and she was still awesome, but I had forgotten most of the ending so it was delightfully fresh.
And Some Buried Caesar has LILY ROWAN, who I adore and singlehandedly basically makes it one of the best Rex Stout books. She’s great. I love that she’s almost exactly, but not quite, a female Archie - and enough of one that she will troll Wolfe by ringing him up at 2am pretending to be Archie’s family, without needing any explanations whatsoever. There is no way in which that isn’t hilarious. And that on top of Archie’s genuine upset at finding a dead body, and getting arrested, and Wolfe trying to bring him stuff in prison and asking for money, and Archie setting up a Prison Union… it’s all just awesome. Wolfe and Archie at their best.
Gambit is one I had not read before! (I may have, um, slightly abused the Amazon one-click ebook download thing. It’s a dangerous power to have, I’m just saying.) I really loved this one too - I love the whole thing of Archie being fired-but-not-really, and I love the twist that allows them to figure out who did it. It’s probably the best of Rex Stout’s plot twists, actually. It makes the otherwise kind of hilarious staged premise justified in retrospect, I feel: the hinge on which it all turns is just so satisfying.
- A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
I knew this one was fantasy, but I didn’t know anything more than that, so I totally believed at first that it was about a girl without magic powers growing up in a house where other people do, and what that would be like. And honestly, that part of the story was my favourite: the absolute creepiness of her mum, the way power relations within the family became literalised, the bond with her dad who didn’t have powers either, was really well done. I especially liked that the heroine is fat, and that her ownership of her own body and what that means was part of it.
I was a little disappointed when it became clear that she would totally have the biggest powers of anyone. But that ended up being really well done. The curses thing was an interesting take on it, and honestly, fat heroine with superpowers? Awesome. Bring it on. I think this would have been really formative if I’d read it early enough: as it is, I am really glad I read it now, and I will be reading more by her.
- Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Sequel to Wolf Hall and is very very like that one. It has almost all the exact same ticks and tricks that I liked and disliked there: it takes a while to get into, starts off very slow, but the build was worth it even as the end makes you sad and thoughtful. It looks clear that Mantel is specifically writing a triptych about Thomas Cromwell in which each book ends with a public execution, and, well, I know whose has to end the next volume. And I don’t want that to happen! I know it DOES, of course, in history, end that way, but I can’t help wanting to jump in and shake some people while explaining some stuff to others.
Also, it is more affecting than I expected to see Henry’s gradual decay - it feels genuinely sad, even as the text serves as a REALLY GOOD illustration of the creepiness inherent in having the body politic so tied to the monarch’s actual literal body. (Dear medievalist friends, I would still love to hear any and all thoughts on these books, omg.)
- Eva by Peter Dickinson
This is a book I loved loved loved loved when I was a tween. Between about seven and about twelve I read this every time I went to visit my grandmother, usually several times. And I hadn’t reread it again since then, so I was a little bit worried that it would suck.
But no! It turns out, it is totally even better than I remembered. I completely get why my younger self loved this so much. Eva is such a great character! I can’t believe I basically forgot about her for so long. It’s all about empathy, and you know what empathy does in this book? It makes Eva a freedom fighter! She’s a political maverick of awesomeness precisely because she cares. It’s hard, and she makes some tough choices, but she decides that empathy is worth that fight. Even if it doesn’t change the whole world, but just a little bit of it. I love it. I especially love that that empathy is explicitly not just a humanity thing - the whole thing is that she’s NOT just human any more, she’s got to be a chimp as well in order to be her new self.
Oh, and despite what SOME PEOPLE (hum
nny hum) will try to tell you, there isn’t actually any creepy chimp sex in it. In fact, there’s no actual sex involved at all, even though animal biology is mentioned. So ner. :P
- Died In The Wool by Ngaio Marsh
I read this one, even though I have not been 100% sold on the other Ngaio Marsh I’ve read, because of the title. And it does, in fact, involve sheep! But even better, it involves New Zealand, Marsh’s homeland, and I think her love of that country absolutely elevates this one to a higher level even if there are still some fairly significant problems. I love that she has Alleyn say that people couldn’t imagine how beautiful it is, because that rang very true: I think British people, specifically, could not imagine what New Zealand looks like until there were plentiful colour photos and film of it. It’s just nothing at all like anything most British people have ever seen, even now, and I really empathised with the urge to share that.
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
This is a nonfiction book that is anthropological look at money and debt, and how those concepts have changed throughout human history. The very best thing about it is that it’s ACTUALLY a world history: there are examples and discussions about a huge range of peoples and cultures, absolutely awesomely. I have never read anything with such a truly global scale before. It was really refreshing - and kind of hilarious, as he was all “people think the Middle Ages only happened in Europe! WTF, people, Europe was a BACKWATER! Let me tell you about China and India!” It’s just really delightfully open about all its biases, from its views on history to its view that most economics is completely at odds with observed reality. It’s really easily written, too, so even though it’s a doorstopper, it never felt like work. I really enjoyed it.
I also loved that it is never condescending: part of the argument is that shell or feather money or whatever is not at all “simple”, it’s just as complicated as “developed” modern Western systems in every way that means anything. Oh, and that there is no mythical time when everything was done by strict barter. It maybe got a little self-indulgent at the end in terms of the author’s conclusions drawn from these arguments, about debt as guilt and burden and basis for morality, for instance, but I don’t think you need to agree with all of that to really appreciate the awesome of this book.
Also, I will pretty much always appreciate this book for using the phrase “the reader may ask herself” completely unironically. No winks there, no demanding of cookies, just consistent acknowledgement that there are women in every culture he talks about, including his readership, and those women count too.
- Katherine Swynford by Alison Weir
Um, I went for this because I rather liked the idea of something like, but not identical to, the Hilary Mantel book, but preferably about a woman. And I knew Alison Weir was supposed to be quite good at historical fiction.
Uh, I am sorry to anyone who loooooves her, but I did not at all think this was good historical fiction. I litrally couldn’t finish it, actually; I found it literally unreadable. I thought it was really badly written. Probably more so because almost every fault I found with it is one I know I have myself. I kinow I have a tendency to digress and ramble and put in asides where they don’t belong and generally forget about my own arguments in favour of self-indulgent waffle. But still. OMG. It felt really…weird, actually. Like, she’d go from saying “Katherine was a superimportant lady! She was the mother of a whole dynasty!” to “but we know nothing about her at all” to “but we can pretend she is like a Standard Issue Woman of the time” (which: whut) to “BUT SHE IS SO SPECIAL” without any break or explanation or evidence or anything. I entirely believe that she was super important and interesting, but this is not the book to convince me of it. I lasted less than a chapter.
- Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
Mr Stross’ sequel to Saturn’s Children is actually even better in a lot of ways, I think. This is actually what I read that made me want to read Debt: The First 5000 Years, because it might as well be called Bitcoin goes INTERGALACTIC! (NB. This was actually written before Bitcoin became a Thing, according to Stross, but that is what it is in my head.) I really did not think I’d ever like a book where all the drama and plot is based on intergalactic economics, but I really did. It was explained in an easy to understand way, and I loved the heroine of the piece. A banking historian! Who becomes involved in Shenanigans not through choice, but through plot mojo, and then deals with that stuff in the best way she knows how, and on her own terms. Love it.
- A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, and Dead In The Water by Dana Stabenow
Murder mysteries, with an Aleut lady detective! Set in Alaska (where the author is from - and it shows), these are awesome vaguely noir-y books where Kate Shugak goes around being awesome and detecting while navigating the politics of the Park where she lives and her grandmother’s influence over it. Oh, and also her response to the events that took her back there after a career in the Alaskan police. They’re really good fun. Some of it is a little hokey (there’s a kind of lolariously anvillicious avalanche, for instance, and I am not a massive fan of the romance in the first book, although it gets better) but for entertainment these are ace.
And I do love that apparently it’s THE LAW that every murder mystery writer has to have at least one book called Dead In The Water, hahah.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/129159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- The Rubber Band, Some Buried Caesar, and Gambit by Rex Stout
I have been on a little bit of a Rex Stout renaissance lately for some reason, and I really enjoy both Rubber Band and Some Buried Caesar. I remembered liking Clara Fox in Rubber Band and she was still awesome, but I had forgotten most of the ending so it was delightfully fresh.
And Some Buried Caesar has LILY ROWAN, who I adore and singlehandedly basically makes it one of the best Rex Stout books. She’s great. I love that she’s almost exactly, but not quite, a female Archie - and enough of one that she will troll Wolfe by ringing him up at 2am pretending to be Archie’s family, without needing any explanations whatsoever. There is no way in which that isn’t hilarious. And that on top of Archie’s genuine upset at finding a dead body, and getting arrested, and Wolfe trying to bring him stuff in prison and asking for money, and Archie setting up a Prison Union… it’s all just awesome. Wolfe and Archie at their best.
Gambit is one I had not read before! (I may have, um, slightly abused the Amazon one-click ebook download thing. It’s a dangerous power to have, I’m just saying.) I really loved this one too - I love the whole thing of Archie being fired-but-not-really, and I love the twist that allows them to figure out who did it. It’s probably the best of Rex Stout’s plot twists, actually. It makes the otherwise kind of hilarious staged premise justified in retrospect, I feel: the hinge on which it all turns is just so satisfying.
- A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
I knew this one was fantasy, but I didn’t know anything more than that, so I totally believed at first that it was about a girl without magic powers growing up in a house where other people do, and what that would be like. And honestly, that part of the story was my favourite: the absolute creepiness of her mum, the way power relations within the family became literalised, the bond with her dad who didn’t have powers either, was really well done. I especially liked that the heroine is fat, and that her ownership of her own body and what that means was part of it.
I was a little disappointed when it became clear that she would totally have the biggest powers of anyone. But that ended up being really well done. The curses thing was an interesting take on it, and honestly, fat heroine with superpowers? Awesome. Bring it on. I think this would have been really formative if I’d read it early enough: as it is, I am really glad I read it now, and I will be reading more by her.
- Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Sequel to Wolf Hall and is very very like that one. It has almost all the exact same ticks and tricks that I liked and disliked there: it takes a while to get into, starts off very slow, but the build was worth it even as the end makes you sad and thoughtful. It looks clear that Mantel is specifically writing a triptych about Thomas Cromwell in which each book ends with a public execution, and, well, I know whose has to end the next volume. And I don’t want that to happen! I know it DOES, of course, in history, end that way, but I can’t help wanting to jump in and shake some people while explaining some stuff to others.
Also, it is more affecting than I expected to see Henry’s gradual decay - it feels genuinely sad, even as the text serves as a REALLY GOOD illustration of the creepiness inherent in having the body politic so tied to the monarch’s actual literal body. (Dear medievalist friends, I would still love to hear any and all thoughts on these books, omg.)
- Eva by Peter Dickinson
This is a book I loved loved loved loved when I was a tween. Between about seven and about twelve I read this every time I went to visit my grandmother, usually several times. And I hadn’t reread it again since then, so I was a little bit worried that it would suck.
But no! It turns out, it is totally even better than I remembered. I completely get why my younger self loved this so much. Eva is such a great character! I can’t believe I basically forgot about her for so long. It’s all about empathy, and you know what empathy does in this book? It makes Eva a freedom fighter! She’s a political maverick of awesomeness precisely because she cares. It’s hard, and she makes some tough choices, but she decides that empathy is worth that fight. Even if it doesn’t change the whole world, but just a little bit of it. I love it. I especially love that that empathy is explicitly not just a humanity thing - the whole thing is that she’s NOT just human any more, she’s got to be a chimp as well in order to be her new self.
Oh, and despite what SOME PEOPLE (hum
nny hum) will try to tell you, there isn’t actually any creepy chimp sex in it. In fact, there’s no actual sex involved at all, even though animal biology is mentioned. So ner. :P
- Died In The Wool by Ngaio Marsh
I read this one, even though I have not been 100% sold on the other Ngaio Marsh I’ve read, because of the title. And it does, in fact, involve sheep! But even better, it involves New Zealand, Marsh’s homeland, and I think her love of that country absolutely elevates this one to a higher level even if there are still some fairly significant problems. I love that she has Alleyn say that people couldn’t imagine how beautiful it is, because that rang very true: I think British people, specifically, could not imagine what New Zealand looks like until there were plentiful colour photos and film of it. It’s just nothing at all like anything most British people have ever seen, even now, and I really empathised with the urge to share that.
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
This is a nonfiction book that is anthropological look at money and debt, and how those concepts have changed throughout human history. The very best thing about it is that it’s ACTUALLY a world history: there are examples and discussions about a huge range of peoples and cultures, absolutely awesomely. I have never read anything with such a truly global scale before. It was really refreshing - and kind of hilarious, as he was all “people think the Middle Ages only happened in Europe! WTF, people, Europe was a BACKWATER! Let me tell you about China and India!” It’s just really delightfully open about all its biases, from its views on history to its view that most economics is completely at odds with observed reality. It’s really easily written, too, so even though it’s a doorstopper, it never felt like work. I really enjoyed it.
I also loved that it is never condescending: part of the argument is that shell or feather money or whatever is not at all “simple”, it’s just as complicated as “developed” modern Western systems in every way that means anything. Oh, and that there is no mythical time when everything was done by strict barter. It maybe got a little self-indulgent at the end in terms of the author’s conclusions drawn from these arguments, about debt as guilt and burden and basis for morality, for instance, but I don’t think you need to agree with all of that to really appreciate the awesome of this book.
Also, I will pretty much always appreciate this book for using the phrase “the reader may ask herself” completely unironically. No winks there, no demanding of cookies, just consistent acknowledgement that there are women in every culture he talks about, including his readership, and those women count too.
- Katherine Swynford by Alison Weir
Um, I went for this because I rather liked the idea of something like, but not identical to, the Hilary Mantel book, but preferably about a woman. And I knew Alison Weir was supposed to be quite good at historical fiction.
Uh, I am sorry to anyone who loooooves her, but I did not at all think this was good historical fiction. I litrally couldn’t finish it, actually; I found it literally unreadable. I thought it was really badly written. Probably more so because almost every fault I found with it is one I know I have myself. I kinow I have a tendency to digress and ramble and put in asides where they don’t belong and generally forget about my own arguments in favour of self-indulgent waffle. But still. OMG. It felt really…weird, actually. Like, she’d go from saying “Katherine was a superimportant lady! She was the mother of a whole dynasty!” to “but we know nothing about her at all” to “but we can pretend she is like a Standard Issue Woman of the time” (which: whut) to “BUT SHE IS SO SPECIAL” without any break or explanation or evidence or anything. I entirely believe that she was super important and interesting, but this is not the book to convince me of it. I lasted less than a chapter.
- Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
Mr Stross’ sequel to Saturn’s Children is actually even better in a lot of ways, I think. This is actually what I read that made me want to read Debt: The First 5000 Years, because it might as well be called Bitcoin goes INTERGALACTIC! (NB. This was actually written before Bitcoin became a Thing, according to Stross, but that is what it is in my head.) I really did not think I’d ever like a book where all the drama and plot is based on intergalactic economics, but I really did. It was explained in an easy to understand way, and I loved the heroine of the piece. A banking historian! Who becomes involved in Shenanigans not through choice, but through plot mojo, and then deals with that stuff in the best way she knows how, and on her own terms. Love it.
- A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, and Dead In The Water by Dana Stabenow
Murder mysteries, with an Aleut lady detective! Set in Alaska (where the author is from - and it shows), these are awesome vaguely noir-y books where Kate Shugak goes around being awesome and detecting while navigating the politics of the Park where she lives and her grandmother’s influence over it. Oh, and also her response to the events that took her back there after a career in the Alaskan police. They’re really good fun. Some of it is a little hokey (there’s a kind of lolariously anvillicious avalanche, for instance, and I am not a massive fan of the romance in the first book, although it gets better) but for entertainment these are ace.
And I do love that apparently it’s THE LAW that every murder mystery writer has to have at least one book called Dead In The Water, hahah.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/129159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.