cahn | Entries tagged with books: sff

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 )

Argh, I meant to post about this weeks ago but... yeah, my whole life right now is about procrastination and the associated panic of "now I must do this because it's at the very last minute."

landingtree is involved in a Kickstarter with Jo Walton where they propose for him to narrate a audiobook of Lifelode. I honestly usually hate audiobooks, but I clicked on it just out of curiosity, and... he's really good! I actually enjoyed listening to him! And it also seems like Lifelode does well with being read aloud, which is cool because not all books do.

(I then went and listened to a few other audiobook samples to see whether I'd somehow gotten over my hatred of audiobooks, but no, mostly I still don't like them :P )

Anyway, my not actually having posted about this when I meant to means that there's only 33 hours to go as of this post, whoops. And it's 92% funded!

ETA: The rewards include Walton e-books (including Lifelode) as well as at least one hardback in an upper tier, so might well be worth it to support even if you aren't particularly interested in the audiobook :)

Winter's Orbit (Maxwell) - 3+/5. I read this when it was a SF prince's-arranged-marriage-to-a-widower origfic on AO3, and I liked it a lot, but I also remember it primarily as being being a lot of angst by one of the arranged-marriage couple about how his new husband couldn't possibly love him because his dead former husband was so much more awesome, and thinking it was a bit, well, too much relationship angst (especially since given the genre, obviously this was not quite right because they were going to get together...). But I liked it well enough that when I saw this at the library I snagged it.

I'm happy to say that in being turned into a novel, the angst got tamped down to what I thought were totally reasonable levels, and the book grew a plot and politics (this helped a lot with tamping down the angst, as often the characters were too busy dealing with the plot and politics to angst too much) and I am just very pleased :D I really liked it and I'll totally read more by this author in the future. I will say that I didn't find it particularly deep -- Maxwell isn't necessarily trying to Say Profound Things about the Universe -- I'd characterize it as more like an In N Out burger than like, idk, filet mignon with a fancy sauce. But sometimes an In N Out burger is exactly what one wants :D

Together We Will Go (Straczynski) - 3+/5. Before I read this book I had not watched anything by JMS (between reading this book and now, I've now watched one episode of B5 :D ), but I did read his memoir and came away thinking, "that guy can WRITE, whoa." And that's what I thought about this book too. It was super compelling and I blazed through it in a day or two; he really just has the craft mastered of how to write compelling characters and prose and also things like pacing; every time I started wondering how he could sustain the level it was at and think that it might get boring if it went on like this for a while, he would notch it up another level. Just very well done.

I do not recommend the kindle version of this, as a couple of times it wouldn't let me zoom in on graphics (there are little graphics of things like text conversations).

If you trust JMS, like I do, and don't mind a content note for, well, substantial content related to suicide, I think it's worth going in knowing zero about the book. But if you'd like to know more,

selenak has an excellent review, no spoilers, that convinced me to read it :)

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence (Cooper) - 3-/5. - I saw a rec for this when reading random blogs for reasons I don't remember now, and the library had it, so. It was... kind of an odd book. It's a true crime book, but it's also trying to be about Harvard and power, but it's also trying to be sort of a memoir about what it says about her that this case captivated her. I think that the sheer size of what she was trying to do kind of made it not work so well for me -- but also I think I picked it up because I was curious about the Harvard-and-power aspects (which were indeed the most interesting part of the book to me) and not the true crime aspects (which are, of course, most of the book). It made me realize that I have a hard time with true crime books because a) I like things in my media to wrap up neatly, and real life isn't known for that b) I kind of feel like I'm a voyeur deriving entertainment from someone's pain? Not that this should stop anyone else from reading true crime, of course; I'm in fact totally inconsistent about this (it doesn't seem to stop me at all from asking for stories about the 18th Century... idk, apparently if it happened more than a hundred years ago it doesn't trip this particular circuit?), it's just my reaction to this particular thing.

The Man in the Brown Suit (Christie) - 3/5 - I always enjoy Christie, and when

skygiants posted about it I realized I hadn't read this one, so I got hold of it :D Skygiants' review ( a couple of implicit spoilers, mostly at the end) is really great and I think really gets across both the hilarious breeziness of it and the rampant racism.

But I do not want to talk about either of those! I want, of course, to talk about shipping! One of the characters in this novel I'd met before, in Death on the Nile, which I suppose partially spoiled this book for me (as I therefore knew he was not the villain). The main character, Anne Beddingfield, has a love interest, but there's a definite draw towards this character as well before she meets the love interest. At the end, all three are in a room together and I'm like, idk, I think there is a case to be made for UST in all directions there! That is to say, I would totally OT3 them :P

5/5. Follows a small-time-con-artist street kid living in a harbor town bordering a sea where gods used to live but have all died off and have left only scattered magical pieces of themselves behind to be found as flotsam and sold.

Whoa. This book knocked my socks off, and I wasn't expecting that -- my previous experience with Hardinge (only two books, I think?) had been that her books were quite well written but unsettling and maybe not quite for me?

This book is also unsettling and maybe not quite for me -- there were large swathes that I kind of skimmed because they were too intense -- but I was super impressed by it anyway. The worldbuilding is quite excellent, as you can maybe see even from the one-line synopsis; I'd never seen anything exactly like it before. And the unsettling quality of her writing really works with the world quite well, in a way I never quite got it to gel when reading her previous books. And the characters really worked for me too. Quest, especially, actually reminds me a lot of someone I know, a woman in her 80's who has that same quality of clear-eyed-ness. And the plot! There was a major reveal that I didn't see coming at all, and partially it's because I think Hardinge is playing a lot with the way we usually think about these kinds of fantasy worlds and our expectations for them.

I did find it a bit oddly paced occasionally (including the end); I'm not sure if that was on purpose or not. But even with all these caveats, I'm gonna have to vote this to win the Lodestar, unless the Kingfisher ends up being even better. Heck, I would vote for it to win the Hugos over everything but Memory if it had been nominated for Best Novel.

SPOILERS fair game in comments!

4/5 - I spent the first third of this book wondering why it wasn't on the Lodestar nominee list, because it's better written and deeper and possessing more narrative drive than any of the Lodestars this year. ~~Also not in first person present, although still with spunky rebellious teen heroine~~ The first bit talks about the heroine, Rin, studying for her important entrance exam, and surprise not surprise that is a way to keep my interest up. It then turns into something that's a bit reminiscent of a Chinese-inflected Ender's Game, which takes up about the first third. To be honest, I didn't have that sort of scary complete immersion and identification that I did with Ender's Game (which to be fair I read as an adolescent, but I suspect it wouldn't have happened with Poppy War as an adolescent either) -- but it was very readable, and clearly in dialogue with Ender's Game and that type of SF battle-school novel, and examining some of the assumptions and baggage of that kind of novel.

Then the last 2/3 of the book happened, and I was like, "Oh. Hmm. That's not YA, is it?"

It's a fantasy retelling of the second Sino-Japanese War, and let's face it I know basically zero history about anything ~~unless you make a musical or a fantasy novel about it~~. But, I mean, I knew enough from vague osmosis to know that all the things that were most over-the-top about this book (it's grim. And dark. Lots of horrible things happen. War sucks.) are indeed historical facts. She definitely got me to sit up and pay attention (and get more interested in the history, for that matter!). It's really interested in examining war and genocide and how these things propagate themselves.

It's a first book, and to be perfectly honest sometimes the first-book-ness is there; I think it got a little unwieldy in places, and maybe a little too much in other places. The thing is, though: I thought it was wildly ambitious, and as such I want to give Kuang the Campbell. Perhaps not always sticking the landing 100%, but I feel like the Campbells should be about authors that try to push what they do :)

Content note for... umm... the second Sino-Japanese war. Genocide(s). Medical experimentation. Rape (though not onscreen/of POV character). Violence. You know. That kind of thing.

Although I still have City of Brass / Kingdom of Copper to go, so I guess I shouldn't make sweeping pronouncements about how I want to vote in the Campbells yet...

Someone (

julianyap, perhaps?) recced this book to me five years ago and I bought it while it was on sale, and read the first, maybe, five percent, and around that time a bunch of life stuff happened and I got away from it, and I didn't feel strongly enough about the characters to come back and read the rest of it.

Then I saw K and B this spring (yes, in fact, this is how behind I am in my reading) and B asked me if I'd read it. I said no, I'd just read the very beginning, and he told me about this whole -- I guess these are spoilers, but only for the first twenty percent of the book, and I'm not putting it under spoiler cut because this is in fact what convinced me to read the book -- this whole worldbuilding where the idea of a god is that it lends out power to people who need it, and later the god gets it back with some, oh, let's call it interest, tacked on, and all of this is mediated by Craft, which is this world's equivalent of magic and is expressed through contracts. And then the bright idea was had to lend out more power than the god actually possessed -- yes! fractional reserve, er, theology -- and it is possible to become defunct because a small drain in power triggers others to drain power too, and before you know it you have a run on the b -- god!

"That is amazing," I said, and I resolved to read it, which I have now done. And I enjoyed it a lot because of this worldbuilding, and it's very plotty and I enjoyed that a lot too. And I liked all the characters, especially the female ones -- Tara was great, Elayne was great, Cat was great, and I loved that they were also so different and had such different stories and motivations.

I still will confess that while I liked the worldbuilding a very great deal, I felt a little like both characters and worldbuilding were sort of shoehorned into the particular format that the author wanted? Like, I'm not sure Craft makes total sense to me -- sometimes it's portrayed as being able to do these super powerful things, and sometimes as the laws binding and putting limits on power, and I never got a good sense of what those limits were from scene to scene. (I mean, obviously it's going to be a bit inconsistent, that's why it's a magic drama and not a courtroom drama, but, say, in the Earthsea books I felt like I at least could pretend like I had a sense of when you could and couldn't unleash a whole boatload of magic, and why.) I also thought it was a little unbelievable that Tara made the choice she did in the middle/second-half of the book, regarding how to pursue her case, because nothing in the way she'd been presented up to that time made it sound to me that she had any inclination to make that choice.

But I am still really interested in reading the next one :D

3/5. I was too unenthused to buy it or even to put it on hold at the library, but interested enough to check it out once it appeared on the New Books shelf at the library. And, I mean, it was fine? I had been thoroughly warned about the Babieeeees theme and the Bujold Thinks She Can Do Romance theme and the This Has No Plot property, so those didn't bother me overmuch.

( Cut for mild spoilers, although, I mean, this book has no real plot, so… )