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Books Dec 2020
Jan. 4th, 2021 09:41 pmBook I reread for Yuletide
Parker Pyne, Detective (Christie, reread) - Read earlier than Dec but not written up then for obvious reasons. These stories are really fun and they might actually be my favorite Christie. Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne :D That being said, there's also a certain amount of weird tension given that the things making people happy are often being in step with rather terrible stereotypes, and one of the stories (that first Claude story) acknowledges that tension but subsequent stories never follow up on it. That being said, Claude Luttrell and Madeleine de Sara are a delight and so fun to read about, with all their cliches and over-the-topness!
Book I read for Yuletide and was hoping to treat for, but didn't
Princess Daisy (Krantz) - I think this technically counts as a reread, but since I remembered almost nothing about it, I'm not sure if it should :) Anyway, Judith Krantz is my very very favorite 80's glitz-and-glamour writer, head and shoulders above any other such writer I know of and the only one of these writers I still read/reread. Her heroines are all fabulously beautiful, super competent, and super hard-working; her heroes are also fabulously handsome and super competent (but usually take back seat to the glamorous and competent heroines); there are always rather satisfactory female-female interactions in all of her books; her worldbuilding in terms of describing the glamorous world the characters live in (and the glamorous but hard work the heroines do!) is just unparalleled (apparently she did a ton of research for every book, and it shows).
Books I didn't read for Yuletide
The Dragon Waiting (Ford) - the group (re)read here. Well, I enjoyed it, anyway :) But the reread really pointed out what a niche book this is. Still -- if one knows a bit about Richard III, I think it would be an interesting read. One of the group critiques was that it tried to do the fanfic thing where it assumed you cared about Richard and the historical characters immediately, which I think would be blunted quite a lot if you came in knowing something about them. Also, figuring out the action is rather difficult and much easier if you can compare against already knowing what happened in canon history. Also, I am informed by group reread that apparently Ford really sucked at languages in this book, messing up at least three languages I can remember (maybe four?) which is sort of surprising and sad to me (child!me thought Ford must know alllll the languages).
Sex and Shopping - (Krantz) - Autobiography of Judith Krantz. This is a book that is probably of no interest whatsoever to someone who isn't a big fan of Judith Krantz, and is rather fascinating if one is, just to get an idea of who is behind all those books :) Interestingly enough, she only began writing fiction when her kids got older (she was around 50 when her first book got published), although she had written a lot of magazine articles before that. It was interesting -- especially after the warning examples of L'Engle and L.M. Montgomery -- that she said very little about her two sons, explicitly stating at one point that this was because they deserved their privacy. (She did complain lightly that they never talked to her, but that's the sort of broad complaint that any parent could make.) And they never seem to show up in her books -- her heroines are often only children, or women have daughters -- it all seems very fantasy, which is nice.
Future on Ice (ed. Card) - I saw on meme someone refer to "Press Enter" by John Varley and a particularly gruesome form of (putative) suicide therein, and I thought, huh, I... thought I remembered the overall gestalt of that story but I didn't remember that particular thing at all. So that got me to dig out my Future on Ice anthology, and I ended up reading not just "Press Enter" (which indeed... apparently I had totally blocked the gruesome parts out of my memory?? Which, actually, good job, brain) but also all the rest of the stories. And wow, I guess I'm glad that I bought this book but I had no business reading these stories in college; I just had no idea what any of them were about. I suppose it's nice that twenty years onward I am a good enough reader that the stories actually make sense to me now? Part of me is like, self, why were you even trying to read this kind of stuff twenty years ago??
Most of the stories are still quite powerful (Butler's "Speech Sounds," Cherryh's "Pots," Kessel's "The Pure Product," Card's "The Fringe" -- Nancy Kress's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" is sort of heartbreakingly relevant today), some of them are still good stories but have gotten a bit jossed by the march of 20-30 years' worth of technology (I've posted about John Crowley's "Snow" before and how it's still an awesome story as a story, but the central SF conceit of "not enough room for video files!!" is completely ludicrous now, and "Press Enter" also I felt like reads as rather naive today in terms of the computer stuff, where maybe it wouldn't have in the 80's), and some of them I feel like have maybe not aged well (e.g., David Zindell's "Shanidar" was just kind of... well, I see where he was going with this story about a guy who wanted to live like the "Alaloi," who are kind of like cavemen? and that it's supposed to be about what makes us human and what civilization is about... but in 2020 my response was a bit "no one cares about your manpain.") But the vast majority of these stories were still very good, I thought. And I did appreciate most of Card's intros as well.
Theeeeen there's the preface, which is the part I didn't read, because I was flipping through it and read one paragraph of a super-emo rant and was like, whoa, life is too short. I have many feelings about Card, both good and bad, but gosh, I'd totally forgotten how much he likes to rant. (I used to read his weekly columns maaaaany years ago, and this brought back the memory of boggling at the one where he, in the same column, ranted about people who get upset about inauthentic food AND got upset about how people pronounce "bruschetta" in the US (he didn't say inauthentically, but that's clearly what he meant). Um. Okay.) So, yeah, if you happen to pick this up, most of the stories are great (including Card's own!), it's an anthology which in my opinion has generally aged through 20-30 years as well as one might hope for, buuuuuut don't read the preface.
Parker Pyne, Detective (Christie, reread) - Read earlier than Dec but not written up then for obvious reasons. These stories are really fun and they might actually be my favorite Christie. Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne :D That being said, there's also a certain amount of weird tension given that the things making people happy are often being in step with rather terrible stereotypes, and one of the stories (that first Claude story) acknowledges that tension but subsequent stories never follow up on it. That being said, Claude Luttrell and Madeleine de Sara are a delight and so fun to read about, with all their cliches and over-the-topness!
Book I read for Yuletide and was hoping to treat for, but didn't
Princess Daisy (Krantz) - I think this technically counts as a reread, but since I remembered almost nothing about it, I'm not sure if it should :) Anyway, Judith Krantz is my very very favorite 80's glitz-and-glamour writer, head and shoulders above any other such writer I know of and the only one of these writers I still read/reread. Her heroines are all fabulously beautiful, super competent, and super hard-working; her heroes are also fabulously handsome and super competent (but usually take back seat to the glamorous and competent heroines); there are always rather satisfactory female-female interactions in all of her books; her worldbuilding in terms of describing the glamorous world the characters live in (and the glamorous but hard work the heroines do!) is just unparalleled (apparently she did a ton of research for every book, and it shows).
Books I didn't read for Yuletide
The Dragon Waiting (Ford) - the group (re)read here. Well, I enjoyed it, anyway :) But the reread really pointed out what a niche book this is. Still -- if one knows a bit about Richard III, I think it would be an interesting read. One of the group critiques was that it tried to do the fanfic thing where it assumed you cared about Richard and the historical characters immediately, which I think would be blunted quite a lot if you came in knowing something about them. Also, figuring out the action is rather difficult and much easier if you can compare against already knowing what happened in canon history. Also, I am informed by group reread that apparently Ford really sucked at languages in this book, messing up at least three languages I can remember (maybe four?) which is sort of surprising and sad to me (child!me thought Ford must know alllll the languages).
Sex and Shopping - (Krantz) - Autobiography of Judith Krantz. This is a book that is probably of no interest whatsoever to someone who isn't a big fan of Judith Krantz, and is rather fascinating if one is, just to get an idea of who is behind all those books :) Interestingly enough, she only began writing fiction when her kids got older (she was around 50 when her first book got published), although she had written a lot of magazine articles before that. It was interesting -- especially after the warning examples of L'Engle and L.M. Montgomery -- that she said very little about her two sons, explicitly stating at one point that this was because they deserved their privacy. (She did complain lightly that they never talked to her, but that's the sort of broad complaint that any parent could make.) And they never seem to show up in her books -- her heroines are often only children, or women have daughters -- it all seems very fantasy, which is nice.
Future on Ice (ed. Card) - I saw on meme someone refer to "Press Enter" by John Varley and a particularly gruesome form of (putative) suicide therein, and I thought, huh, I... thought I remembered the overall gestalt of that story but I didn't remember that particular thing at all. So that got me to dig out my Future on Ice anthology, and I ended up reading not just "Press Enter" (which indeed... apparently I had totally blocked the gruesome parts out of my memory?? Which, actually, good job, brain) but also all the rest of the stories. And wow, I guess I'm glad that I bought this book but I had no business reading these stories in college; I just had no idea what any of them were about. I suppose it's nice that twenty years onward I am a good enough reader that the stories actually make sense to me now? Part of me is like, self, why were you even trying to read this kind of stuff twenty years ago??
Most of the stories are still quite powerful (Butler's "Speech Sounds," Cherryh's "Pots," Kessel's "The Pure Product," Card's "The Fringe" -- Nancy Kress's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" is sort of heartbreakingly relevant today), some of them are still good stories but have gotten a bit jossed by the march of 20-30 years' worth of technology (I've posted about John Crowley's "Snow" before and how it's still an awesome story as a story, but the central SF conceit of "not enough room for video files!!" is completely ludicrous now, and "Press Enter" also I felt like reads as rather naive today in terms of the computer stuff, where maybe it wouldn't have in the 80's), and some of them I feel like have maybe not aged well (e.g., David Zindell's "Shanidar" was just kind of... well, I see where he was going with this story about a guy who wanted to live like the "Alaloi," who are kind of like cavemen? and that it's supposed to be about what makes us human and what civilization is about... but in 2020 my response was a bit "no one cares about your manpain.") But the vast majority of these stories were still very good, I thought. And I did appreciate most of Card's intros as well.
Theeeeen there's the preface, which is the part I didn't read, because I was flipping through it and read one paragraph of a super-emo rant and was like, whoa, life is too short. I have many feelings about Card, both good and bad, but gosh, I'd totally forgotten how much he likes to rant. (I used to read his weekly columns maaaaany years ago, and this brought back the memory of boggling at the one where he, in the same column, ranted about people who get upset about inauthentic food AND got upset about how people pronounce "bruschetta" in the US (he didn't say inauthentically, but that's clearly what he meant). Um. Okay.) So, yeah, if you happen to pick this up, most of the stories are great (including Card's own!), it's an anthology which in my opinion has generally aged through 20-30 years as well as one might hope for, buuuuuut don't read the preface.
