cahn

4/5 (reread) - This was pre-yuletide reading, in the sense that someone's DYW prompt reminded me I wanted to read this again (it's actually been on my to-reread list for ages). Oh, this book. I think it's C.S. Lewis' best work, if only because from time to time he forgets that he's doing Christian apologetics and immerses himself in the story, and because I suspect it speaks to a deep and dark part of his own soul.

Because what I loved so much about it this time around (and what made me dislike it the first time I read it, as a teenager) is that -- I am Orual. All the pettiness and insecurity and jealousies and -- everything that Orual hates about herself -- Well. I like to think a lot of the edges of these things have been smoothed over by time and age and maturity and things like that. But there is a deep and dark part of me that recognizes Orual in a frighteningly immediate way.

(Also, speaking of yuletide, if you would like yuletide recs, I've posted them here. I am listening to Turandot right now, not a coincidence :) :) )

ETA: And here.

This was one of the later L'Engles that I read -- I had the hardest time finding it as a child -- and as a result I had built it up in my head as The Book Where Vicky Meets Unicorns. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to find that there are no literal unicorns. This time around, I liked the book quite a bit better because I didn't have those expectations.

It was interesting to reread this. On one hand, L'Engle does the rapidly shifting POV and it sort of gives me whiplash. Did people do a lot more of this in the 80's? Because if I were reading a book like this now for the first time, I'd probably put it down and go away. I guess I've become a limited-3rd sort of person?

On the other hand, nolly once pointed out to me how completely awesome the families in L'Engle are, and that was kind of borne out for me, and is triply as interesting to me now that I have a kid of my own. In a relevant point, I think the title is awesome, but I also think that in a lot of ways this is not really a YA book, or at least it wasn't a book I was ready to read as a teenager, when the title completely went over my head and just left me with a lingering sense of betrayal that Vicky didn't meet unicorns.

On the third hand (foot), every time I read L'Engle I am reminded that she just really loved science, especially physics, and really just had no clue about it. Here there's very little explicit science and therefore fewer opportunities to get it wrong, but I was rather amused by the idea of a medical doctor being the World Expert on... lasers.

If I Lie (Jackson) - 3+/5 - So this book surprised me over and over again -- it very much exceeded my expectations. On first glance, what with the title and all, and the fairly familiar tone of the first-person teen girl narrator, I figured it was your typical high school book. Then it turned out it was a high school book With a Secret. Then I figured out the secret, which didn't take that long. Then I thought I was going to be bored through the whole book as the author ham-handedly built up to the Big Secret Reveal. Then, a couple of pages later, the author... revealed the secret. Almost casually. Then I thought the book would be about how she was triumphantly vindicated. And then it wasn't. It's about how people are complicated. And then I thought it would be about Teen True Love. And it wasn't. It was about how people can love and hurt each other at the same time.

The one thing that Irks me about this book is how one character decides something is "wrong" or "messed up" with another character because he doesn't ask for sex even after they have dated for two whole years. IN HIGH SCHOOL. Um... I've dated three people for more than two years, two of them atheists, and none of them asked me for sex in the first two years. So there. I mean, yeah, I understand that you're maybe trying to deal with one set of messed-up expectations? But doing this by switching to another set of messed-up expectations, uh, no?

Ready Player One (Cline) - 3+/5 - Someone on my reading list said something along the lines of "This is basically an excuse for the author to talk about his obsessions from the 80's," and that's... just about right, in a way that's surprisingly entertaining, but that is probably more entertaining for those of us who lived through the 80's. The writing, even laying aside the nonsensical premise, is curiously full of flaws -- infodumps, telling-not-showing for large chunks of the action, random deus ex machinas showing up from time to time, somewhat cardboard characters, the usual cardboard dystopia-world-building (no worse, I suppose, than your usual dystopia YA), some totally random rants against religion (what?) in the beginning that seem unrelated to the rest of the book -- and yet the enthusiasm for the random 80's video games and so on is so genuine that I often found myself charmed despite myself. For example, the climactic puzzle of the book is kind of... silly; the way it's presented doesn't make any sense -- but it uses a song that was such an integral part of my geeky childhood that although the absurdity of it totally registered with me, I was still smiling with glee that it had appeared at all. So... the rating here is me trying to assign one number to one aspect I'd rate very high and another I'd rate rather low.

The Fault in Our Stars (Green) - 3+/5 - So apparently there was this whole thing where copies were released early and Green was terrified that people would GET SPOILERS OH NOES. Which strikes me as kind of hilarious, because around a third of the way in I refused to read any further UNTIL I got spoilers. Since I was reading a kindle version, I looked online, but if I had been reading a print book I would have flipped right to the end (and the middle). Anyway. I frequently have this problem with Green's books where I feel slightly, I dunno, detached from the characters, and I felt a little this way about this book too, but I found it much more moving than An Abundance of Katherines. I liked it a lot, although I definitely was glad I'd looked up the spoilers.

Incarnate (Meadows) - 3/5. Eh. I suppose it's not the book's fault, not totally, that its central conceit (a fantasy, or possibly a SF-fantasy-feel, that people get reincarnated and remember their past lives -- although how this is physically possible is not entirely clear to me -- and that there is a romance between an 18-year-old and a 5000-year-old. REALLY. Hey, you just hit my squick issue! (It's rather more the book's fault that the 5000-year-old came across as, maybe, a thirty-year-old at oldest.)

I first read The Winter Prince yeeears ago because sarahtales told me about it, and I loved it, and I crashed hard on Coalition of Lions.* (I blame sarahtales for not warning me!) But I really wanted to reread all the books in this series because Code Name Verity was so awesome, and I'm now going through all five of them. The first three:

The Winter Prince (reread) - 4/5. I had completely forgotten about this book before rereading it except for one detail which does not actually show up in this book at all.* And this book about Medraut (Mordred), King Arthur's son, is totally and completely awesome. Can we say intense?

* I will now do all of you a huge favor and tell you that there are NO SEQUELS to this book and under NO CONDITION should you read A Coalition of Lions right after reading this one. (Although you should read it, and the other books in the series too, because they're really good, just not right after this one.) Yes, it says it is a sequel. It is not. It takes place in an alternate universe that happens to be very similar to but IS NOT THIS ONE. DARN IT. THIS IS MY POSITION AND I'M STICKING TO IT.

A Coalition of Lions - 3+/5. This is not a reread, because the first time I tried, I gave up on it about two chapters through because OH MEDRAUT. Because, as I mentioned, NOT A SEQUEL to Winter Prince. Except, you know, that it has the same characters and backstory and stuff. And Goewin's the POV character, which is totally cool.

Anyway, the second time through I knew the punchline of the first chapter (hint: remember what actually happened in Arthurian myth?) and it allowed me to get through without dropping the book in despair. And it's a really good book! I JUST. OH MEDRAUT.

The Sunbird - 3+/5. This one's from the POV of Telemakos. OH TELEMAKOS. Are you sensing a theme?

Stay tuned for the other two books in the Telemakos series. I have a feeling that there will be more OH TELEMAKOS to come.

Guys and Dolls (Damon Runyon): 3+/5. Not much to say about this. If you like Guys and Dolls, the musical, and you like O. Henry, you'll like these stories. I very much like all three. I'd counsel against reading them all at once, like I did, because they do get a little wearisome one right after another (much like O. Henry, which I overdosed on in middle school and have not really gone back to since).

After the Apocalypse (Maureen McHugh): 3- to 3+/5. I dunno. I really, really liked the other collection of McHugh that I read, and this one I just... didn't. I don't know whether I was the one to blame or not; I suspect partially I'm to blame, as I think I read this when I wasn't in the mood for depressing. And, wow, these stories are depressing. And also involving characters who just give up, which I am not, I guess, that interested in reading about.

3+/5. I... didn't dislike this as much as I was prepared to. Which, um, is better than it sounds? I did like it! It's got a bunch of things going for it -- a not-quite-your-typical-whitewashed-medieval-Europe-vaguely-Spanish-based society. The writing seems good -- less clunky, more polished, than a lot of first books I've been seeing lately. Elisa, the heroine, gets to win through bravery and interesting plotting, which is kind of nice. I also liked that religion is treated as a Thing, even with different sects, though I suppose I've been forever spoiled for in-depth religion world-building by The Curse of Chalion.

And yet... I don't know... a lot of things rubbed me just a little the wrong way, culminating in a feeling of restless annoyance. The big thing, I think, was the narrator Elisa's whininess. Oh, no one likes me. Oh, my sister hates me. Oh, I'm fat. (I'll get to that one in a moment.) I mean -- I'm all for family conflict and insecurities, I enjoy reading it, but I have to have more to work with than "So my sister's mean!" (which is basically all we're told about her, until we're then told that she isn't in fact mean -- I have no idea what their relationship entails, no idea of what lies between them). And I prefer not to get the anvils to the face. Like, in The Perilous Gard, Kate has a whole boatload of insecurity with respect to her sister, but she doesn't say so very much explicitly, and I don't think she ever thinks that Alicia is mean -- the issues come across more in the way the two of them are treated and the way she responds to things, not because she whines about it constantly, like Elisa does.

Okay, so, the fat thing. Elisa is fat, and therefore ugly, I guess, at the start of the book. I don't know, this rubbed me the wrong way too. In general I didn't really understand why she had to whine about it so very much. I mean, she's a Chosen One, she's always known she has to make a dynastic marriage, she is taking classes in lots of things (oh, another thing that annoyed me... apparently she's smart? Smarter than her sister, whom Elisa thinks is the smartest person Ever? But we aren't shown examples of this, or how this might have come to take place, or how this is a natural outgrowth of how she grew up, we're just told so, by fiat, when Elisa does smart things) -- doesn't she, like Kate, have other things to worry about? And then we find that walking miles in the desert handily gets rid of this "problem." I don't even... I mean, I knew about this before I read it, and I was prepared to dislike this more than I did; I appreciated that it was a fairly minor subplot (the main plot is about how Elisa makes interesting plans and is brave and so on), and I did like how it was making a point at the end about how people respond to looks, but I don't really see why it needed to be as big a part of her personality as it was, and that irked me.

I really, really wish that the ending had been different. ( Fairly major spoilers: )

3/5. And this is a pity 3. So remember how I was talking about how really good writers try new things? Card used to do this, but now he has become ... the antithesis of this; apparently he now has nothing better to do than to write increasingly irrelevant (and what's worse, boring) fanfic about minor characters from a spinoff of his most popular work. It's frankly quite surprising to me that the same man who wrote the brilliantly disturbing Ender's Game and the incredibly moving, thoughtful, and subtle Folk of the Fringe, not to mention the layered Memory of Earth series, is putting out this kind of shallow garbage.

I mean, I was expecting the terrible dialogue where all the characters come across as OSC clones. That's par for the course. (Although even there, you don't find this kind of dialogue in Fringe.) But this tale of Bean in space with his genius mutant kids fails not only on a tired-tropes-are-we-still-talking-about-this-why level but also on a basic writing level, which is really surprising to me because I've always relied on him to at least get that right. ( Mild spoilers, but really, do you care? Mostly cut for rantiness: in which I make fun of various things, solve the characters' problem for them, and am angry at retconning. ) So, I mean, I think this was a book he needed to write, and that maybe he didn't think he had time to really do it justice, and I get that. I understand that things come to writers and they have to put them down. But I do not think this is a book you necessarily have to read, unless like me you are an OSC addict.

And even then, I swear to you, if he writes a book about Bean's grandchildren, I am not going to read it. Even I have my limits.

Druid's Blood (Friesner), 3+/5 - There is a lot going on on this Sherlock Holmes With Magic! alternate universe pastiche, complete with cameos by almost everyone you can imagine of interest in Victorian England (Arthur Conan Doyle, of course; Lord Byron; Ada Lovelace; Victoria herself). Written before racefail was even dreamt of, so, you know, complete culture!fail where brown people = Kali-who-eats-humans! Yey! I think, though, that from an entertainment standpoint, the big problem is that there's too much going on; there are some nice moments, but it sort of falls under its own weight.

The Hall of the Mountain King (Tarr), 4/5 - Another of those I might feel differently about if I read it for the first time today, but my principal feeling on reading it this time was holy cow how did I not realize that The King of Attolia has the exact same plot? Because the emotional plot is the same: peon that everyone else respects is called to be the reluctant servant to royalty who must prove himself to the world but also forge a beautiful friendship with the peon. Except with more magic and sex and plot and death than in Attolia. (And I really liked Moranden this time through.) And I really like that emotional plot, as it turns out. Although I like Attolia better. But I was pretty excited to reread the next book in the series after rereading this one.

Also, cool that everyone in this book is dark-skinned and it's not really a thing, but it's rather more descriptive about it than the Earthsea books (in the sense of, I didn't actually realize the Earthsea residents were not pale-skinned until the third book or so, whereas I was pretty clear on it in these; the covers helped).

The Lady of Han-Gilen (Tarr), 3/5 - Heroine hair color: red. I really liked this one as a kid, and I don't think it's bad now -- but I'm so over the bratty teenage kid thing and the love triangle thing. I mean, yes, it's nice that she gets called out for being bratty, I can't fault Tarr for her handling of it, I just don't particularly want to read it any more. I also kind of lost my momentum for wanting to read the third book, despite the big plot twist in A Fall of Princes blowing my mind as a naive teenager.

4/5 - My parents came to visit and brought me a whole buncha books from my room, thus starting me on an orgy of rereading... starting with all the Star Trek books, for some reason. Note that I totally revert back to my 12-year-old self when reading these books, so the fact that I seriously and unconditionally love them all does not actually mean they're any good, necessarily. I mean, they might be! But I cannot tell.

ST:TNG Strike Zone (Peter David) - Still the best ST:TNG novel I've ever read, although honestly that doesn't mean a whole lot (I think I read the first ten or so, as well as David's other work). It's better, I think, than David's other ST:TNG work, which veers into the maudlin; this is still simply funny with only an edge of seriousness, which is more his forte, and with an awesomely hilarious climax that, well, is kind of something I wish the show itself had done. Also, my family is really into the "if you prepare hard enough bad things will never happen to you" philosophy, and rereading, I suddenly remembered this was the first book I ever read that just came out and said, "No, that's a dumb philosophy," and that stayed with me even though I had completely forgotten that this was the book it came from. As a result, when I read it now, I give it a pass on Bechdel test failure, a general fail on portraying Troi, and what I imagine are probably a whole host of other things were I able to actually look at this book with a rational eye instead of a twelve-year-old eye.

ST:TOS Ishmael (Barbara Hambly) - Spock gets thrown back to 1800's Here Come the Brides. Hambly is a good writer, and I like this book very much, and the overall writing is probably stronger than the other two books here, but the only bit that really imprinted on me was the part where the woman doctor calls out everyone else (except Spock, who thinks it's normal) for thinking it's weird that a woman is a doctor.

ST:TOS The Pandora Principle (Carolyn Clowes) - Spock, for all practical purposes, adopts Saavik. I've seen people who both love this book (the camp I'm in) and people who think it's totally awful. I can see the awful side, I guess. The main plotline is sort of hilariously Rube-Goldberg (it hinges on the assumption that a starship, finding a strange box, will then... take it back to Earth before opening it? What?) and rather iffy-science at that; Spock is a total Gary Stu who's smart and patient and understanding and kind and a really great dad, all-around; Saavik, although I haven't watched the films in years, is I suspect out of character for the person portrayed in the film. And yet the writing is crisp and with that lovely edge of humor to it that livens the whole thing; and Saavik is, if not the actual character in the movies, personable and interesting both as a child and a woman (my favorite bit is where child-Saavik informs another little kid that it isn't logical to eat its own fingers, it would be more logical to eat someone else's!), and I can't help it, as an adolescent I totally imprinted, like a little bird, on Spock as the ideal dad who never gets mad or impatient. And it passes Bechdel easily. And it's got some lovely original characters. One of my favorite Star Trek books ever, and I wish I knew what had happened to Carolyn Clowes, because I'd surely buy any other book she wrote.

Thirteen Reasons Why (Asher)
3-/5. Hannah, who committed suicide, leaves cassette tapes behind for the thirteen people who affected her decision.

Look. I generally think books on suicide are useful. And I generally find books about how, especially as a teen, one's actions have an impact on other people not just useful but also really interesting and valuable. I love Chris Crutcher and Sarah Dessen and Melina Marchetta and Cynthia Voigt and all those authors who are tackling these kinds of questions.

So I thought I would like this book, but I bounced hard off of it instead.

I think it might have been the near-complete lack of characterization. The only thing I learned about the narrator (Clay, the kid listening to the tapes) during the entire book is that he thinks he is very shy. Oh, also, he has a mom. Hannah herself comes across as whiny and entitled, and although we're clearly supposed to feel sorry for her that all these horrible things happened to her, it was kind of hard for me to care. I kept wanting to be all "Just stop complaining and get a grip, Hannah, geez!" which is exactly the sort of attitude the author was trying to lambast. It obviously just didn't work for me.

I actually think this is a natural problem of the way the story is told (the narrator listening to the tapes interspersed with the contents of the tapes themselves) -- I see how it's a narrative hook (and an effective one; after reading the description I did want to read the book) -- but it's very hard for a character to consciously tell her story (that is, not just first-person narration, but actually being conscious of writing it down (or speaking it) for an audience) without coming across as a little solipsistic (heh, see also In Spite of Everything, this might also have been my problem with that book) and very hard to complain in a conscious narration without coming across as whiny. I think this is because in such a conscious story, it's really hard to show rather than tell. You can't show by showing other people's reactions, because the story is being told by you, and you can't show by showing your own reactions without coming across as seriously over-self-analytical. So you just have to describe what you felt. "I felt like everyone was ignoring my pain." And that is not writing that's going to resonate.

Oh, and also, everyone gets to be very two-dimensional. There's Nice!Guy and NiceVeneerButActuallyCatty!Girl and Doesn'tRespectWomen!Guy and so on. Again, problem with the narrative structure. Of course from Hannah's perspective they're only going to be 2D, and she, of course, dies, so she never figures out if there's anything more to them. (Contrast, say, To Kill a Mockingird, which is consciously told as an older woman looking back on her childhood, and so she can see things that she wasn't able to see as a child.) Indeed, there is no character development in this book by anybody. Everyone's pretty much the same throughout the entire book.

(Hm, on second thought, I can see how this could have been helped. Since there are effectively two narrators, Clay could have been used to give another dimension to all the characters. But he wasn't used that way.)

And I think this is a problem. The whole point of a book dealing with suicide is to humanize both those who have committed (or are thinking about committing) suicide and those who may unknowing have contributed to that person's problems. It is to elicit compassion in the reader as well as thoughtfulness about our own actions, a sense of empathy that hopefully we will take out into the world. (In addition to the authors I mentioned above, Before I Fall, though I do not particularly recommend it, did a far better job in these respects.) If what you're instead eliciting is a sense of "Stop whining," you have failed.

Also, my pedagogical rant-o-meter going off: the English classes at this school seriously read a (bad) anonymous poem by one of their own high schoolers in class? And it was seriously compared to reading a poem by a famous dead person? I... don't even know where to start. The utter wrongness of this is never addressed, perhaps because Hannah had so many other things to complain about.

No idea why this book has been so recced around. I suppose they haven't read Chris Crutcher.