cahn

October: (aside from finally finishing the Oster Wilhelmine bio for fandom, and Yuletide canon review)

-Le Petit Prince, read in French and (reread in) English to anticipate French-reading-group someday in the near future. If I had stayed at my first high school (with Awesome French Teacher) I would have read it as part of the third-year French curriculum (which is probably why I have my copy at all); as it was, this was the first time I'd read it in French. I have read that book enough times in English that for large portions of it I barely had to consult the translation. (Hmm, maybe I should try this for The Dark Is Rising series; I bet I also have large swathes of those books all but memorized.) ( This book is about love and grief. )

-Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest - Another reread. It struck me on this reread that Dean Priest is really skeevy, which apparently I'd failed to wholly pick up as a kid -- that is, I never liked him much, and I definitely never forgave him for what he said about Emily's book, but I don't remember actually recoiling from the page like I did this time. Like, he meets Emily when she's... thirteen? twelve? He was a FRIEND OF HER FATHER'S. And he says -- this is a literal quote -- "I think I'll wait for you." (And he, of course, does.) AUGH.

The perennial question for Emily's Quest is, who do you ship Emily with? (Which in and of itself tells you why it's my least favorite of the three.) In that elementary-to-high-school-ish period, I shipped a lot of people in various books -- Will/Jane in The Dark is Rising was always my ship, I was firmly on the side of Jo/Bhaer at the time -- I think this may have been my first experience with a book where I never did ship Emily with anyone in the book, really. She ends up with Teddy, but he's pretty... boring and just not that great. Perry isn't boring and I like him rather better than Teddy, but Emily just seems so uninterested in him! (Of course, an AU would be interesting...) Dean is Right Out, of course.

November: my concentration, attention span, and available time are pretty much totally shot until... Christmas :P But I did a lot of rereading, at least. ( Uhura's Song, L.M. Montgomery, Darkspell - mentions of (book-textual) pandemic, depression, severe drug side effects, (possible) suicide, and war. Also mentions of music and doing one's best. )

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.)

When I posted on rereading Severed Wasp recently, rymenhild had some perceptive comments that led to a rabbit hole of finding some more about L'Engle's life, which was... illuminating. (Note that the following makes for some hard reading, especially if one has read her memoirs -- which I have only lightly skimmed parts of, but enough that I had an idea of how they ran.)

I think these should be considered as a set:
The Storyteller [The New Yorker] (Cynthia Zarin)
Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices (Leonard Marcus)
(Here is the review of the above book that got me to buy/read it)
That is to say, Listening for Madeleine (a collection of interviews with people who knew/were touched by Madeleine L'Engle) is, as the review says, in conversation with and is a response and companion piece to Zarin's "Storyteller" article.

In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a sort of half-autobiographical work of fiction not totally unlike Severed Wasp or Meet the Austins, the authorial character, Francie, talks about how one of her teachers told her, " In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story." And the author says, if it weren't for that teacher, Francie might well have grown up to be a terrible liar.

Zarin's article is about how L'Engle got those things mixed up, the way things happened, the way they should have happened, and the way we construct things making sense in our minds, which are often three different things. ( Read more... )

But anyway. L'Engle was a complicated person. She did a lot of good and helped a lot of people. She hurt the people closest to her. She wrote memoirs that didn't have enough truth in them, and novels that had too much. She wrote books that I still remember fondly, and books that I now approach with some (or a lot of) trepidation. And some of those are the same books.

I guess I don't really have a good conclusion here, except that I wish peace to L'Engle's family, and to L'Engle herself, wherever she may or may not be.

I gave it a good try, anyway!

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski (Harper Voyager US) - 4/5. This was very very good. This guy can WRITE and I was riveted the entire time despite not being entirely sure who he was when I started and never having watched B5 or anything else the guy has done. Content note for extremely severe spousal and child abuse. Like, it was so bad that in self-defense my brain was hoping that he'd made some of it up. (I don't think he made any of it up.) Voting this to win. and now I have even more reason to watch B5 (one day!)

I should also maybe mention that Harlan Ellison is one of his heroes and shows up several times in the book, and he doesn't treat Ellison being, er, problematic, really at all. This didn't blunt my enjoyment of the book, but if it would bother you just be aware that it's there.

Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones (University of Illinois Press (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)) - excerpt in packet. I don't think I finished the excerpt. This was very dry, and I haven't read much Russ.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara (Hanover Square) - Introduction in packet. I would have tried to read this if the book had been in the packet, but although the introduction was intriguing it didn't wholly convince me I was interested in it (not being really into monsters or movies).

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn (Unbound) - 3+/5. I enjoyed this a lot and it succeeded in what it set out to do, which was remind me how much fun Heinlein's SF can be, and inspired me to reread a bunch of it. I thought Mendlesohn did a great job of being balanced about Heinlein, never casting him as either perfect or perfidious, but a guy who had some interestingly progressive ideas and also had some hidebound ideas of his time, and could often not disconnect the two. And also who wrote some extremely readable stories :)

“2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech”, by Jeannette Ng - I'm not totally sure how I feel about this. I think on the whole I would rather award actual books.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry - did not watch because for whatever reason it's hard for me to watch video on a screen right now. But if someone's watched it and it's good I might try it?

Rating:
1. Becoming Superman
2. Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
...ugh, I don't think I can really rank anything else.

All my June reading was Hugos reading. Besides the below, I also read more Lodestar stuff, which I'll post more about once I've finished them all.

Novelette: I previously posted about novelettes here, where I wrote about the as-yet-unread "Emergency Skin," “my previous experience of Jemisin is that she does relatively well on the scientific and personal and writing craft levels, but often falls down on the societal level because she is too quick to assign bad guys.”

Well done, previous self. Indeed this is exactly what I thought after reading it as well. It is a good story in terms of writing craft! It manages to evoke a plot and personality without actually ever showing the main character, only people's responses to it! it's pretty cool! And it completely falls down on the societal level. Hey kids, know what? if we just let rich overt bigots who wanted to go to space go to space and be bigots there, everything would be shiny and happy and we'd solve global warming and the rich bigots would be miserable and failures in space! Uh-huh. Also I want to know how the main character's society works with only like a thousand people, many of which don't qualify for personhood, almost completely divorced from Earth, and yet they are able to operate at a level of tech where all they need is the occasional stem cell?? How does that even work?? I wanted a story about how they made that work, which… I’m pretty sure was not supposed to be my reaction.

Anyway, just like I thought, I'm ranking it after "Omphalos" and the Jeoffrey story, but above the rest.

Novellas (in the order I read them):

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Chiang) - This is the novella I wanted Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-1" to be -- I mean, Pinsker's story was great in the sense of that image of a conference of selves, but this story, I felt like, actually dug into what a world might be like if you could see what alternate versions of you had chosen. Some people would be like, eh, whatever. Some people would really get messed up mentally. Some people would get addicted to watching their alternate versions. Some people would figure out a way to run scams, because if the internet has taught us anything it is that everything leads to people figuring out to run scams on it :P IDK, I really like this kind of worldbuilding. And I also like the sort of understated but significant character arc that this story had. So I guess it was basically tailor-made for my likes!

This is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone) - DNF. I liked the prose reasonably well in the narrative sections, but the letters just undid me. I couldn’t tell the difference between Blue and Red, and the letters were just too purple, no one writes letters like that to people they haven’t even met yet (well, maybe some people do, but I guess I don’t want to read those either). I just couldn’t take it.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Clark) - Bureaucrats in an alternate Egypt investigate the haunting of a tram car. I like Clark's writing! This was a fun novella with some fun ideas and interesting alternate worldbuilding. I don't really have anything else to say about it? I feel like this was one of those where I admired the worldbuilding but the story itself was pretty straightforward and doesn't keep me up at night :)

The Deep (Solomon) - Undersea people formed from pregnant enslaved Africans tossed overboard grapple with their history. I liked it better than Solomon's Murder Pregnancy short story. I suppose it's partially my mental state right now, but although rationally I can see that life was tough for the main character, I just did not want to read pages and pages of how terrible she felt as my fiction reading. Also I am not sure how I felt about Oori, who sometimes felt to me like she was supposed to be spectrum-y, but sometimes her reactions felt off to me (in comparison, for example, Murderbot feels more consistent to me). Also I felt like the magic happy ending was kind of weirdly tacked on after all the pages of angsting… the magic itself never felt very consistent to me, like it was basically there magically to help the author with the plot and not because it followed any sort of internal rules.

In an Absent Dream (McGuire) - my favorite Wayward Children book so far (this is faint praise, but still praise), as it is by and large free of the disturbing subtext that really bothers me about the other ones; the portal world here is not portrayed as the Greatest Good the way it is in the other novellas, but rather more as a sometimes-transcendent, sometimes-awful world that Lundy, the protagonist, loves whether or not it’s good for her. This portal world, the Goblin Market, is built on the concept of “fair exchange,” which -- well, if you think about what that concept might mean for a bright sensitive ten-year-old child, you probably have a reasonable idea of how it works out in the story. After reading it, I would like to say about this, ( Implicit spoiler ) I don't actually think that was supposed to be the moral, but I am choosing to read this as part of the point, which I think makes it a much stronger story :P I didn’t like it as much as Middlegame.

Relatedly, would it kill a McGuire character to actually communicate in reasonable language? Like, I feel like both here and in Middlegame there would be this thing where one character would say, “Please explain X,” and the other character would be all, “Let me tell you a cryptic aphorism.” That is not explaining things! And at least one of the characters should know better -- the one in Middlegame is supposed to be the avatar of Order!

To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Chambers) - Astronauts on a long-term mission to explore life! So this probably won’t bother people who (a) aren’t in science fields and (b) didn’t have morbane for a beta, but, well, morbane betaed for me once upon a time and a lot of her (excellent) critique had to do with how, in a first-person story, one has to think about who the narrator is writing/speaking to and how that interplays with how the story’s told. Here, we’re asked to believe that an engineer is writing to an audience she doesn’t know. While the science itself seemed quite reasonable (which is awesome!!), I could just never believe for a second that it was an engineer writing it or that it was meant as a piece of science persuasive writing. Don’t get me wrong: it is persuasive! It persuaded me! But I just could not buy that it was an engineer writing it; it’s so clearly a writer writing it… I can’t really give you a specific example, but everything about this says to me “person who doesn’t do science for a living who learned all these cool scientific things that she is excited to share with us.” Which is great! But not what it says it is! (If only the narrator had been a writer who somehow ended up as an astronaut, all of this could have been sidestepped.) Also I have this problem with Chambers where all her characters are really nice but also I can’t tell any of them apart. I remember Jack was the annoying one, and that’s about it.

Novella rating:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
3. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
4. In an Absent Dream
5. The Deep
6. This Is How You Lose the Time War

Hey, I've actually looked at all the novel nominees now! (Also I have signed up to attend virtual Worldcon... idk how all of this will work and how much of it I will actually end up attending but maybe let me know if you are going to be there?)

( Light Brigade (redux), Middlegame, City in the Middle of the Night (DNF), no spoilers )

I have now given all the novel nominees a try! (Wow... looking back, last year I finished a whopping ONE nominee. At least I got through half of them this year.) My ranking:

1. Memory Called Empire
2. Light Brigade
3. Middlegame
4. City in the Middle of the Night
5. Gideon the Ninth
6. Ten Thousand Doors of January

Now working on novellas and Lodestone...

4/5. Not-a-Hugo YA homework. I loved this book so so so so much. SO much. And I wasn't expecting to, as I only vaguely liked the short story it was based on. Partially it is clearly that it is just absolutely what I wanted and needed to read right now -- a cute book about people (teenagers, but who's counting) who form a deep friendship online that they tap into as Events Happen. And one of the characters in the book happens to be an AI, which is of course very important and relevant to the plot etc., but although perhaps that's the cerebral center of the book, so to speak, it's not actually the heart of the book, which for me very much was the online and real-life friendships (including the AI) and how they help and support the characters as they go through some tough things. Um. Not used to YA books being relevant to me any more, but this one... maybe kind of was :)

It reminded me of reading Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl and liking it but being a little dissatisfied with the way that fandom/online interactions were portrayed, or rather not portrayed -- this book gets it, where I felt like Fangirl didn't really.

The first... third?... of the book is fairly slow, which I didn't mind as to be honest I would totally love to read an entire book that was solely about regular high school shenanigans in a near-future -- there is an awesome and hilarious subplot about a robot that teaches sex ed (badly), for instance, and I'd definitely be up for the book that was only about How Steph And Rachel And Their Online Friends Get Better Sex Ed -- but then at some point the tension just starts ramping up and up and I was glued to the page.

I also thought the discussion of ( Implicit (fairly minor) spoilers. )

It's a YA book; none of the plot twists were very twisty to an adult reader. But the plot is not really the point, in the end.

I may have to vote for this to win, just because I loved it so much. But I guess I should read all the other Lodestar nominees first.

(Content note for abusive relationships. Really abusive relationships, not exclusively but including extreme physical abuse. I don't think any physical abuse is shown onscreen, and indeed much of the abuse is talked about second-hand, but there is at least one (short) scene of emotional abuse on-screen.)

I read books in April!

( Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghost, Westing Game, Princess Curse, Light Brigae (DNF), Starship Troopers )

I read a couple of books in the first half of March. I'm also working on the Blanning biography of Frederick the Great (and a couple of other things of that sort) but I keep getting distracted by opera and news articles :P

Crooked Kingdom (Bardugo) - 3+. Sequel to Six of Crows. More of the same: fantasy heists and plots, and the unresolved romantic tension is resolved. I liked Six, so I liked this, as you can see by the fact I finished it (I have a very very low finish rate for sequels these days). Still, I am not entirely sure I would read a third book, so I guess it's good it's not a trilogy.

Spoon River Anthology (Masters, reread) - [note that I wrote this early in March] - I don't really know why I picked this up, but I found it even richer than I did when I first read it as a teenager. I still liked the bit where one tries to tease out all the connections between different town inhabitants, but now that I guess I'm middle-aged it spoke to me as it didn't when I was a teenager: when one has come to the end of one's life, what would be the one thing that one's dead spirit would remember or want to pass back on to the living? What would define oneself?

Homeward Bounders (Jones, reread) - One of the kids asked me for something and I said, "Well, as to that --" and that reminded me that, even though I'd picked up a whole phrase from this book, I hadn't reread this... ever. I'd read it, wow, fifteen years ago now, and bought it because I thought it was so good, but also that ending tied me up in so many knots that I hadn't ever dared to reread it. Well, I reread it, and I'd forgotten just how chock-full that book is of Stuff Happening. One of my favorite DWJ's, except for that ending :P (Which I think is a really good and inevitable ending, it's just...)

(I thought I'd totally remembered a major event that didn't happen. Turns out it was in this marvelous (though also depressing) fic. Also highly recommended is this fix-it fic.)

Chainmail Made Easy: 8 Wicked Weaves with 8 Practical Projects (Baker) - I got this just to learn how to make the dragon chainmail pouch shown on the cover. (Almost everything else in the book I already know how to do.) The instructions are very clear, and the great thing is that he includes two sets of instructions for the difficult part (the dragon inlay), one of which is visual and the other of which is algorithmic, for those who may like one kind more than another. I put in an order for rings at the very beginning of March, as it turns out, so I have something to keep my hands busy after I'm done with the kids' helmets :P

4/5. OK let's give Bardugo a Hugo nomination, can we?? (2 more weeks for nominations!) I don't think this book necessarily ought to win a Hugo, but it's doing some very interesting things that I don't think anyone else in the field is really doing in the same way.

This is a book about Alex, a teen dropout/street kid who can see ghosts (these two things are very related), which gets her a scholarship to Yale under the auspices of the Yale secret society Lethe, which exists to watch over the other secret societies as they do their various magic rituals, all of which basically boil down to "use magic to consolidate money and/or power." And the book leans hard into that, and -- oh, here, have a quote from skygiants's review which you should all read anyway because it's much more coherent and awesome than this rambly review is going to be (and indeed ensured that not only did I decide I was going to read it, but I downloaded the Kindle sample that day):

Lethe House, the secret society that watches over all of Yale's other secret societies, which all specialize in different mildly horrific and unethical varieties of magic to ... boost the careers of their alumni! That's it, that's all they want to do. It's one hundred percent plausible and one hundred percent gross and a perfect literalized metaphor for the way systems of institutionalized privilege and Yale's actual real-world secret societies work in the real, non-magical world. Literally nothing about this worldbuilding required suspension of disbelief in any way.

It's horror/dark fantasy, but apparently the kind of horror that doesn't squick me out? There's a lot that could squick someone -- it gets pretty graphic at times -- but it's usually heavily telegraphed and has so much plot surrounding it that I think there was only one place where I started flipping to get through it quickly. Also I think part of it is because the real horror of it is not the rape or the violence (both of which are present in this book), but the institutionalized horror, the horror that seems on the surface pretty and nice.

I also thought it was really interesting how Bardugo talked about power and the ways that power corrupts, all of which is very much woven into the worldbuilding and the plot. I mean, there's the whole institutionalized privilege that skygiants talks about, and then in sort of the personal version of that, there's how individual people react to having power (often in an institutionalized fashion, but not always): almost always badly, often very badly. But not always. (And in that "not always" is what hope there is, in the book.)

I also found the parallel between Alex's ability and mental disorders quite interesting. Because Alex can see ghosts and no one else can (and sometimes the ghosts are violent towards her -- but others can see her reaction and not the ghosts, of course), she gets into all kinds of trouble, primarily socially. And eventually she starts self-medicating with alcohol and weed. And of course her mother doesn't know what to do about it...

One review I saw compared it to The Magicians in the sense of talking about how magic isn't like Narnia, it isn't an escape, it isn't numinous. The way magic can be misused is an explicit theme in the book -- and yet I liked Ninth House rather more than I liked The Magicians. ase wondered if this was because it didn't have terrible Quentin POV, which... yeah, is probably a large part of it. (Alex is a great POV!) I think also that Bardugo gives it more ambiguity; magic is usually awful and because people are usually awful, people usually use it in awful ways. But occasionally... yes, it can be numinous; occasionally there is grace. But it's a kind of grace that is dependent upon people, really; not as intrinsic to the magic itself as we might like to think.

It also, like Six of Crows, ends on a cliffhanger, so be aware of that. I mean, the main storyline is wrapped up well, but there's one significant loose end that is dangling out there the whole time, and that is the cliffhanger to jumpstart the (presumed) next book.

But what I really want to talk about is that I had a... rather visceral reaction to this book in a lot of ways, not least because my alma mater was... more like than unlike the university in this book. (This is a big reason why I was so interested in reading it.)

Some of the things I thought about while reading it:

( Cut for length and (even more!) rambling. )

Anyway. So yeah, this made me think a lot. I liked The Magicians despite all the really obnoxious things about it because it made me think; Ninth House made me think, and think about deeper things than Magicians, without that particular brand of obnoxiousness. But yeah, all the content notes for this one, and curiously, although I loved it, like Magicians I will probably never reread the whole thing. (Not because of the graphic content; I can't articulate exactly why.)