cahn

I have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).

In the reverse order of how much I liked them:

The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.

ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.

Major spoilers

I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.

I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?

The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...

I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)

All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!

Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.

Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.

Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay

Hey heeeey Hugo books are out and although I am feeling kind of unmotivated for most of the categories, I might actually end up reading some of the novels. In the meantime I am researching romance novels for Reasons (beta reasons) and have read some romance or romance-adjacent books, one of which doubles as Hugo reading.

( Romancing the Beat (nonfic), Yours Truly, The Friend-Zone Experiment, A Sorceress Comes to Call )

Onwards!
( Telemachus visits Menelaus, and Odysseus ceases to visit Calypso )

Three people recced this to me after I posted about My Real Children, and the library had it, and then I was dragging my feet posting about it but then hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.

The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.

I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.

I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)

( Spoilers. )

Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!

All the music people around me have been chunking the month in weeks. Get through this week; regroup, learn the music for next week; get through next week. It is December. Last week was the big week; one more week to go, but relatively light. (Which is good, because the Yuletide deadline was Tuesday and this is, uh, the second latest I've ever turned in my draft.)

( Me, grading the music I've had to do in the past month: )

Hiiiii I'm still alive!

4/5. This book was recommended by my kid's high school guidance counselor office in one of the daily mass emails we get from her school. I suppose the subtitle of this one may as well be, "Why your kid won't get into the super-elite school you think they ought to get into," which is the not-so-subtle messaging to parents (and I think has something to do with why the counselor office recommended it). This seems to boil down to the premise that the current incentive system (both in terms of generally how the school is perceived and how specifically ranking lists perceive the school) make it such that colleges have a lot of incentive to be sought-after by as many applicants as possible (they want to be "sellers" -- the ones who decide whether they want the students -- rather than "buyers," in the author's terminology, which are the ones wooing the students), so colleges have arranged things so that in many cases there are a whole lot of kids vying for a relatively very small number of spots. In any case, the book also makes the case that there are enough "buyers" that provide a great education and might also give you merit scholarships that in most cases it's a bit silly to restrict oneself just to the "sellers," especially if you are wanting financial aid -- it's sort of like picking a brand name vs. a non-brand-name. (And, as in the brand name case: though you are rather more likely to get a better deal with the non-brand-name, sometimes there are reasons to pick the brand name, though Selingo doesn't get into that so much.)

The author follows a few kids as well as a couple of admissions committees to see how it all works (and documents how the admissions people have a hard job, as well as how they are trying to craft a class, not just looking at individual students) -- this is really quite interesting, to see how all of this works. Along the way, he also puts in some details I didn't know, like how it got started that kids get overwhelmed with glossy mailers from college (this wasn't always a thing!) and how Northeastern went way up in the rankings in the last 10 years (the bare fact of which I did know, because my cousin once removed is a sophomore at Northeastern, but I did not know that it was a concerted effort). And then there's financial aid, which is this whole problem of inequitable information as the financial aid awards aren't done until after kids have applied.

Along with the buyer/seller college distinction, he also makes a distinction between "drivers" and "passengers" -- the former indicates the kids (and, let's get real, their parents) who are very savvy about what they're looking for and what they want, and for their entire high school career have been driving, so to speak, toward the college goals they're looking towards, and start their applications on a relatively early time frame. These are the kids who know the difference between early action and early decision, and have mapped out where they want to apply early (if they do) and, strategically, why. Then there are the passengers, who just get carried along by the whole process... the good thing is that it seems like they mostly still end up okay, though perhaps not in as optimized a place as the drivers.

There's a bit in the book about sports recruiting, which I knew nothing about when I started the book, but I learned shortly after starting reading it that D's niece (who comes from a very sporty family) was sports-recruited (as a junior!) and is going to attend a rather-elite school year after next :) So it was interesting to read this bit of the book in conjunction with learning this information. Moral of the story, perhaps: if you think you might be good enough to play varsity for your sport in college, and you have pretty good grades (niece has straight A's and what was described to me as a "good enough" SAT for her future school), this might be a relatively "easy" way of getting into college. (I put it in quotes because I honestly think niece, who has been swimming since she was practically an infant, worked as hard or harder than any other high school kid I know. Her swim team had practice Thanksgiving morning!) It is, however, a really good thing for my kids that college is not in fact based on their sporting chops, because early sports training was very much not their thing. Although E is consistently not last place in cross-country, which I'm very pleased about! :)

Anyway, this was an interesting read and worth reading if you want to know more about what goes on with college admissions.

Celebrating 5 years very soon?! :D