cahn | Entries tagged with au:mwt

3+/5. Well, that was the end of an era. I was telling

ase that this is possibly the very last series where I've bought the books in hardback right after publication. Partially because it has the distinction of Turner taking a very long time to finish but actually finishing (so on one hand I've still got YA Feels from reading the first books when I was... a YA, and also when I was still reading fantasy series, but on the other hand she actually finished!!) and partially because, well, I had already had five books on my shelf, I thought I should get the set (instead of getting an e-copy).

Anyway. I am really glad I read the previous five volumes before reading this one, because I think if I were approaching it as a book I would have been disappointed, but approaching it as Part 6 of a serial book made it work a lot better for me, I think. I think it has all the strengths and weaknesses of all the other books (with one fairly large weakness that didn't exist in the other books), and because I'd just read them all and had (in particular) the weaknesses in mind, I could enjoy the strengths more. I will say I probably liked it about as much as Conspiracy of Kings -- so, I did quite enjoy reading it, but it wasn't my favorite thing she's ever written either.

The major weakness of the entire sequence of books is that after Thief (which itself had some weakness because of the narrator being Gen) and Queen, Gen is no longer an interesting character. He's a trickster god. So, so, so. Trickster gods' plots are fun to read about, but they're not fun characters because there's no real tension to the character. They will win (unless they lose, in which case that's the story), and that's pretty much all there is to them. It's no surprise that my two favorite books in the series were the two where Gen has very little on-screen time and even less (or zero) POV time.

In this book, Gen & Co. had a lot of screen time, and this made the book rather less interesting than it would have been ( Spoilers. )

Me: Ooh, the new Queen's Thief book is out! Eh, I have a lot of other things to read right now and Yuletide is starting up; maybe I'll wait a bit. But I'll look at the kindle sample just to see.
Me: *reads the first two pages*
Me: *orders it immediately and starts rereading all five previous books*

(This may contain general spoilers for the first three books, although I've spoiler-cut specific spoilers. There are no spoilers for anything past the first two pages of Return of the Thief, as I wrote pretty much all of this entry before reading it. I have now read it, but I haven't finished writing it up yet.)

The Thief I remember not thinking was All That when I first read it, ages and ages ago because it was a Newberry Honor -- I don't think I even made the connection to Queen for a while. I've never reread it until now, and I'd forgotten everything about it but the central plot point. At least for me, it works much better both as a reread and as the first book of six than as a stand-alone and first read. It has a lot of dense politics in it that I'd totally forgotten (and honestly probably skipped the first time).

Hilariously, I had also forgotten ( spoilers through the fourth book )

The Queen of Attolia I also don't think I've ever totally reread since the first time I read it (maybe once, a long time ago?) because of, well, what happens in the opening chapter. I still think this one has some weaknesses, the big one of which is that there is one particular major character-arc that is kept secret from the reader --( ok, fine ), and it just didn't work for me because it wasn't telegraphed at all beforehand and it was kind of this weird kneejerk thing.

Queen also, like Thief, does not fully integrate the personal and political (though it does a better job than Thief, and in my opinion is much better written than Thief in general), and I apparently first read it only for the personal and not at all for the political. Which worked out for me, as there was basically half a novel here that I didn't even remember reading before (and again, may well have skipped the first time).

The King of Attolia was an interesting contrast to the first two because I love that one so much, I've reread it a zillion times, and I remembered the majority of the character beats and the plot beats (though not all) -- but it is still brilliant to read. I think it is definitely true that King was where Turner hit her stride both in terms of her own writing and the story she is trying to tell. I feel like this book, for the first time, manages to seamlessly integrate the political and the personal in a way where reading the personal also meant reading about the political, whereas they were more separate in the previous books (which is how I managed to skip all the political). Costis is also a wonderful character, and I love and have always loved his entire world which is so different from everything else we've seen so far, him and Ari (and the way Ari and he act as foils -- e.g., the discussion of how Ari can't afford to have Costis' ideals because he's not a landowner is fantastic) and Teleus and Legarus the Awesomely Beautiful (which always makes me laugh) -- it's just all so so so so good.

I love also how she cheerfully decided to write this book from the main POV of a character we didn't know at all and had no connection to -- and had no connection to his world either -- and it was so the right choice and she made it work so brilliantly. (Unlike Mockingjay.)

I don't think that King stands alone as well as it does as part of the larger story, mostly because I think if I were coming to it without having read the first two, I'd be sort of annoyed at Gen being this trickster god character (though it's a heck of a reveal if you haven't read the first two, I guess), but as it was we all knew that part, and the joy was in watching it all unfold. But besides that it does work as a standalone, or at least not part of a continuous series, in a way that I'm not sure Thief or Queen do quite as much.

Given the first two pages of Return, I thought it was great that there is a throwaway line all the way back in King alluding to that character's parentage. Man, this woman plans ahead!

A Conspiracy of Kings - hmm! This reread has made me definitely think that King was the high point of the series, although it's not to say that Conspiracy is bad, and I still love it, just that it didn't grab my heart like King did. Here is where the political starts to overshadow the personal, and while that's not a bad thing, it is... not what I loved best about King, where they were integrated so perfectly.

I also still had the same problem with it that I did the first time I read it, where, Gen? That joke at the end is not as funny as you think it is. In fact it's not funny at all. ( Spoilers, of course )

Thick as Thieves - Kamet! This is probably my second-favorite book, and not just because of Costis :P Also because I really liked how it opened up the world to the Mede Empire, and how Kamet's worldview is Mede and it's a struggle for him to think any other way. And how eventually he starts basically thinking through how to simulate non-slave behavior. (But also, okay, Costis as a mercenary protecting his guy -- and the mutual hurt-comfort, come to think of it -- is pretty great.)

-Why did no-one tell me that the voice of Quasimodo in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is Tom Hulce, who played Mozart in Amadeus? Did everyone else know this but me? It's... a weird mental image in my mind, now.

-The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie) is, I think, not one of the better Christies, but the one thing that made it hilarious to me was that one of the characters is a mysterious "Mrs. Lestrange." I spent the entire book, whenever she showed up, inventing ways to reconcile the character with Bellatrix Lestrange. (Alas, she did not, in fact, turn out to be a sociopath Death Eater. But that would have been awesome!)

-Tangled is a much more entertaining movie if you watch it thinking of a sort-of alternate Eugenides (from the Megan Whalen Turner books) as the main male character. (I know i'm not the first to think this. Still.)

-I was rereading Tam Lin, which I adore (I blame it for leading me to believe everyone in college spouted random Greek and Shakespeare -- turns out, not so much for physics majors), for various nefarious reasons. I think when I first read it, in high school, I might have found the college sex hijinks vaguely titillating. This time around, I was all "OMG ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUSLY NOT USING CONDOMS AND USING HERBAL TEA BIRTH CONTROL WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?" Okay, yes, it's set in the 1970's when people didn't worry about HIV, but still! I was rather amused by my change in reaction over the last twenty years (as well as slightly appalled that it wasn't my reaction as a teenager :) )

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/55598.html

Because

julianyap wanted to know! Unfortunately it's hard for me to categorize things based on when they were published rather than when I read them, so... here we are. Books actually published in 2000-2010 are indicated by asterisks.

( Cut for length )Well. I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out, but this is a beginning, anyway. Are there books published in the last ten years that didn't make it on this list and a) you know I've read it and are interested in discussing why it's not on, or b) you think I should read, because if I had read it, it would be on this list, or c) why is this sentence so atrociously convoluted?

Read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet. It's a fantasy set in a vaguely Japanese-ish setting, so gets meta points right away for that. I want to call it an epic fantasy -- epic things happen: there's a war that consumes, well, maybe not the entire world, but all the parts of the world we know about, and enormously powerful magical beings, and a hero... but to call it epic fantasy brings up visions of Robert Jordan, and it's just about as far from that as possible. For example, the enormously powerful magical beings, the andat, are also slaves to poets, who capture them by crafting very specific descriptions, and have (as one might deduce from the preceding clause) extremely specific powers: Stone-Made-Soft can do exactly what his name implies with any sort of stone, but can't do anything else.

It reminds me a bit of KJ Parker or Joe Abercrombie, but with actually likeable characters. (The relationships between the characters are the most important and interesting part, to me.) And, while Parker's Engineer trilogy might be summed up in the word "engineer" or perhaps the phrase "Rube Goldberg machine," I would describe these books as... elegant? The overall impression I get is one of elegance, anyway.

I liked the first two books in the quartet much more than the latter two. The first two are more about people, and the latter two are more about the epic (though both have aspects of the other). The latter two suffer a lot, I thought, from the plot arcs being driven by (large) actions of the andat, which to me smacks a little of deus ex machina. (I also had a fairly severe problem with one of the motivations for a key plot point in the fourth book.) The first two books, of course, have andat actions as major plot points, but the actions themselves are quite a bit smaller and therefore seem less like authorial manipulation. However, that caveat aside, I think this is the best epic fantasy series I've read since... since Attolia? (Though I do not love and adore it like I do Attolia; that would be entirely too much to ask.)

Speaking of which, though, I have also read A Conspiracy of Kings, which I love to little bits and pieces, although my favorite is still King of Attolia.

We have been married four years today! We aren't really big into celebrating that sort of thing (unless we change this habit soon, the little food machine is going to tell her therapist one day that we never gave her a birthday party and that is the root of all her psychoses)... but last night when I went to bed I found A Conspiracy of Kings on my pillow. D knew I was annoyed about it and had secretly gone to the independent bookstore and picked it up on his way home from work... *sigh of happiness*

So I went to Borders Saturday. Did they have thank-you notes, which I was planning to get from the Hallmarks next door? Why yes they did. Ones that were, in fact, nicer, and competitively priced, compared to the Hallmarks.

Did they have A Conspiracy of Kings? Why, no they did not. So, no, I have not read it yet. Grr. (I have a Borders gift card -- best shower gift card present ever!! -- and have promised to use it before buying any more books from other sources, otherwise I would have ordered it from Amazon already, or got the ebook version.)

Okay, on to borders.com. Free shipping over $25, cool. Okay. ...Does it sell Creative Stonesetting, which is the other book I've been meaning to buy? No, it does not.

I thought borders was supposed to be a bookstore?

(So, the answer is no, I haven't read aCoK yet. Though I am dying to, and presumably to talk about it once I have.)