cahn | Entries tagged with books:2014

I saw on some thread on FFA that there were sequels to Oryx and Crake, which I remember vaguely liking (Atwood in general is an author I vaguely like) and had had no idea there were sequels for. So I went looking for the entire trilogy.

Oryx and Crake (reread) - 3+/5 - I remembered nothing of my previous read of this book except that I read it on a plane flight (why do I remember this? no idea) and that there was a climactic scene that took place in an airlock. (I actually extrapolated from the airlock that they were in a spaceship, and it really confused me on reread that there were no spaceships to be seen.) On reread, it was entertaining. Atwood is a good writer and I enjoy reading her prose. On the other hand, I realized that I often don't really like her characters or her worldview very much (I mean, it's dystopia! But still), and it's not surprising to me that I didn't remember the book very well (or indeed any of her books). It also surprised me that Oryx herself was as small a part of the book as she was. Anyway, this one was good.

The Year of the Flood - 3+/5 - Retcon of Oryx and Crake. It was a good thing I read O&C right before, because otherwise there's no way I would have remembered details, like that Glenn was Crake's original name. More women, who are more interesting.

The thing about this book is that pretty much every character in it survived the plague, whereas pretty much no one else did -- and completely coincidentally. I kept waiting for a reveal that they were all being shot up with vaccine somehow, but no, it was all just a coincidence. Well, okay then.

MaddAddam - DNF. I read some of this and fairly early on went looking for spoilers to see if anything actually happened, as everything I was reading so far seemed to be on the order of adolescent boyfriend squabbling. Spoiler: in fact, as far as I can tell, nothing actually happens in this book except adolescent boyfriend squabbling. You'd expect that in the concluding volume of a trilogy there'd be some revelation, something that changes the way we think about everything that happened, some relationship between MaddAddam and the plague, some light shed on why Crake did what he did... nope. Which, okay, she's making a point about human nature and how even after the end of the world squabbling is pretty much what you can expect from humans, but really, if I wanted to read about that I'd read Sweet Valley High or something.

The other thing that bugged me about this book is that humans are trying to explain things / tell stories to the Crakers, and Atwood writes down their attempts, which usually involve a lot of frustration on the parts of the humans, trying to gloss over concepts that the Crakers don't have (usually involving negative human emotions). Ha ha. Okay, so, here's the thing: THIS IS MY LIFE. I spend a nontrivial amount of every day explaining things to a four-year-old. Some of them involve things I by necessity have to gloss over, or am uncomfortable with and punt. Some of them I explain in small words and then regret it. (See also: the discussion of burial techniques, including cremation, that we had the other day(*), which has led to E occasionally blurting out questions like "Mommy, do you know anyone who was burnt up?") The thing is, Atwood seems to think we should think this is special and specially hard to do. Nope. Well, yes, hard to do, but not special.

(*) You might well ask, why were we discussing burial techniques? Well, so, I had to teach this lesson at church on how we should all be doing family scripture study, and so I felt like I could not really teach this lesson without being a huge hypocrite if we weren't at least trying to do this. I won't read the Book of Mormon as our scripture time on general principle, and I figured the New Testament would be a little better than the Old Testament in terms of general R-rated-ness. Well. Perhaps it should have occurred to me that a brutal, torture-filled death is the centerpiece of the Gospels? In addition to having to explain why they covered Jesus' body with sweet spices (which is how we got into the burial techniques), I have also had to explain (for instance) why, in the parable of the vineyard, they "took [the vineyard owner's son], killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard" (Mark 12:8), which E was fascinated by. ("Because they were mean and they wanted things that weren't theirs. These are very, very not-nice things to do.")

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/111339.html

3/5. Third book of a trilogy of Assassin Nuns, Literal Daughters of the God of Death. The first third was rather boring. It mostly consisted of the main character, Annith, repeating several variations of "Abbess, I don't wanna be Seer for the assassin nuns! I wanna be an assassin! I really don't wanna be Seer!" Every chapter, we'd check in again and she would still be angry at the Abbess and still wouldn't want to be Seer. Finally, she ran away (...and this took her so much of the book why?) and met up with Love Interest Balthazaar. The fact that he is the Love Interest is not really a spoiler, given that as soon as he shows up it is clear: he is described as "breathtakingly handsome in a dark, almost broken way. He wears his hair long, and his jaw and nose are strong and sharp, as if chiseled of the finest marble by a master stonemason." Uh. Okay, guess we're in a Harlequin romance, who knew?

The second third was fun -- lots of action and intrigue, and we got to see Ismae and Sybella, the heroines of the first two books, which was nice. Except I would constantly get slammed out of the story every time anyone mentioned "Rennes" or "Quimper" because all the characters acted like twenty-first-century Americans instead of medieval Bretons. Whyyyyy was this book not written in vague fantasy-world where I could be somewhat impressed at it vaguely following history instead of frustrated all the time? Ahem. Anyhow. This is a pet peeve of mine. Also, Annith continued to get sucked in to the Abbess' emotional manipulation and it was never really clear why she didn't just break off with her like Ismae and Sybella did.

And then I read the last third.

( OH ROBIN LAFEVERS NO. Love interest spoilers and at least one fairly major plot spoiler. Five-year-old souls do not equal twenty-year-old souls, sorry! )

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/110851.html

3+/5: In which Breq becomes a Social Justice Warrior tackling such issues as abusive relationships, labor rights, and underprivileged groups.

( Some (hopefully nonspecific) spoilers for Ancillary Justice; general discussion for Sword, no specific spoilers. )

So, I mean, I liked it! And you will probably really like it too! Because tropey goodness and the triumph of social justice (except when it is satisfyingly grim because it would be unrealistic for SJ to win it all) are very satisfying! But I feel like it doesn't attain the deeper level of thoughtfulness and engaging with tough questions that I wanted it to (for example, I thought Le Guin thought much more interestingly about the anarchy she depicts in The Dispossessed -- which is also rather lower on the satisfying smackdowns for the same reason), and it cleanly misses the jump from entertaining to classic that Justice was struggling with and that I hoped this book would help with. But it's definitely very enjoyable.

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/110509.html

4/5. Oh FINE. Everyone who told me what an awesome book this was -- you were right. I loved it very much. It reminds me a lot of old-school 60's-70's SF, you know, the LeGuin-Delany-Brunner-etc. era where half of the fun is being thrown into an alien (sometimes literally, sometimes not) environment and trying to figure out the rules of the culture and environment (in addition to the normal-book rules of trying to figure out the plot and/or the characters). Gosh, I love that kind of book. It's no wonder it won the Hugo. I would have voted for it too. (Especially given the alternatives... I think Stross can be an entertaining writer, but please. And Wheel of Time? Really??) It doesn't attain John M. Ford levels of obscurity through occasional helpful explanatory infodumps by the narrator, which I was rather grateful for, as I don't feel up to Ford-level puzzling at this point (but which I could imagine wishing for did I feel more up to it). I also did not find the writing especially pyrotechnic (as opposed to Le Guin, Delany, or Brunner, for example) -- this is a good, solid book, but I don't know that it'll come out as one of the field's classics. We'll have to see how the sequels turn out. But it did squarely hit a lot of my buttons of AI/sentience/identity/hard-SF.

The interesting thing was that I kept thinking about Fullmetal Alchemist while reading it, for rather obvious reasons -- AJ and FMA both deal with empire and genocide as major themes. I think I would have liked this book more had I read it before FMA, because FMA's treatment is so powerful. I was also about to say that AJ falls neatly into many of the holes that FMA avoids, but I think it's not quite as simple as that -- Breq is a murkier, less human (intentionally) character than Roy Mustang, and her motivations are not as clear, even to herself, which changes the calculus of reaction a lot. In fact, culturally -- given that Amestris has been a military dictatorship since forever -- should Mustang and the Elric brothers even be able to think about the kinds of ideas that they do? (I suppose the answer is that the Amestris dictatorship doesn't bother to culturally suppress the people in the way the Radch culture naturally limits them.) So... yeah. Very interesting to think about.

Another interesting reaction I had was to the famous gender-indiscrimination of the main character. I found that it bothered me that she thought of / referred to everyone as female, whereas I don't think I would have noticed or been bothered nearly as much if she'd referred to everyone as male. This... disturbs me. So for that alone it was worth reading!

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/110036.html

3+/5. Godwin is a very good writer, and this is a very good book which I didn't like all that much. It's about a friendship between a misunderstood teenage girl and a woman in her 40's. The friendship helps the teenager blossom and opens up her world, until it explodes into catastrophe.

...This is the exact plot of (the first two-thirds) Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like a Lotus, a book I have lots of good child-memories of and thus love very much (though as I've said before I usually skip the last third because of embarrassment squick), and I kept thinking about it while reading this one.

The difference between the two books is the relationship between the teenager and the older woman. Even though they could both be described by the above description, they're very different. Poly and Max, in Lotus, have a relationship that is, overall, healthy. The boundaries are clear; Max is not her mother, she is not her sister, she is not her owner; she is Polly's mentor and friend.

Justin and Ursula, in School... have a relationship that squicks me out. Ursula seems to get a kick out of baiting Justin, out of manipulating her, out of setting her up to show that she's the superior one. Ursula then tops it off by professing that Justin is like her own child (which... I mean... one can say that without it beings squicky, I've heard adults say that and thought it was lovely instead of weird, but Justin and Ursula have known each other for ONE summer, have seen each other maybe a couple of times a week, and the context of wish-fulfillment and Justin's hero-worship of Ursula just does make it squicky, trust me) and even worse, asking Justin to judge Ursula's actions when she was about Justin's age, which JUST NO. If you feel like you are in a parental or mentor-like role to someone, you do not ask that person to pass judgment on your actions! I mean, she probably will anyway, but you don't put that weight of responsibility on her!

I am convinced Godwin did this completely on purpose -- it really is a nuanced and interesting portrayal of an unbalanced relationship between two finely-drawn characters -- although it is weird that grown-up Justin, from whose point of view the novel is written, doesn't call her on all of this. Because it's really quite... in-your-face. And also, I didn't like the book very much because of this dynamic. (What can I say, I generally like likeable characters and likeable relationships!)

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/109181.html

seekingferret posted about Beggars in Spain, which I hadn't reread for just about forever, and I went and found our copy the other day and narfed it up. The novel (which is what we own) is basically the novella with several other parts tacked on. Beggars in Spain is nominally about a bioengineered trait to go without sleep (the "Sleepless"), which creates a superclass of those people, who then have to deal with bigotry and fear from the rest of the populace (the "beggars"). One of the tacked-on parts deals with the further-bioengineered SuperSleepless, who are much more intelligent than the Sleepless, and how the Sleepless deal with that.

I had some interesting reactions to this reread, most of which weren't actually relevant to the philosophical questions being asked in the book.

( 'Howard Roark has a baby'; nerd camp; 1%; twenty years' hindsight; siblings and family community; ecology vs. trade )

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/108489.html

I reread Hall of the Mountain King and Lady of Han-Gilen here. The next two books:

A Fall of Princes - 3+/5. Oh man this book. Um, yeah, let's just say that this was the only book I read as a teenager/young-adult that at all tackled anything even vaguely related to trans issues, and as such it blew my tiny little mind. Of course, being written in the 90's, it didn't do it at all perfectly (for just one example, even with my complete lack of knowledge about these issues, I rather side-eye the way it magically resulted in magical gender-attraction-flip, but on the other hand... well, it was, literally, magic, so), but really, one has to admire that it was done at all, and certainly it was teenager!me's only exposure to this kind of thing at the time, which I think should be worth a lot of points.

Speaking of sexuality, the world in these books is also one of those worlds where people have sex with whatever gender they feel like (most people appear to be bisexual with a preference for one gender), and it's not particularly a big deal for anyone -- this was a good thing for me to be reading as a teenager. Now I will say that on reread, it does rather seem like everyone thinks about sex rather a lot -- and it did not escape me on this reread that the one asexual in this book turns out to be rather creepy. Birth control is also never discussed in this book, although we know from other books that some magical variant of the same exists. Eh, so it goes. It certainly held up better than other books I've reread from this same time period.

( Book-destroying spoilers. )

Arrows of the Sun - 3+/5. I hated this book when I first read it in high school in the 90's. On this reread, I rather liked it -- and for the same reason. This was written about the time when gritty was starting to make its way into the fantasy scene, and the sense of betrayal I had in the 90's when I found that Sarevadin and Hirel hadn't, in fact, lived happily ever after, or at least not forever, and that their grandkids were really rather spoiled brats, and that one of the big conflicts for the protagonist was getting over his equality-based, monogamous love affair and entering into an arranged marriage with a harem -- well. Now that we're in the era of Game of Thrones and Joe Abercrombie, all these things are almost quaint as an exercise of grittiness. (Although I'm now even more whaaaa? about the harem thing. Tarr only barely gets a pass on that because she's a woman; if she were a man I would have rolled my eyes rather more.)

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/108225.html

3+/5. I think this is a very good book and worth reading, and I'm definitely going to pick up the rest of the series! I do think that it may have suffered from my reading it at maybe not quite the ideal time. For example, I kept mixing up a lot of the minor characters who don't get much screen time, which really isn't ideal when there's a mystery to be solved (or, well, really in general but particularly for a mystery). I also found the last third a lot more compelling than the rest of it.

However.

Augustus Mayerling is made of awesome. I have a total crush on Mayerling. (I also quite admire, after the fact, the part where Hambly keeps referring to Mayerling as "the Prussian." The fact that this helped to blindside me, I feel, is making Hambly's point for her.)

Also: Barbara Hambly was one of the authors (along with Diane Duane and John M. Ford) that I originally found, as a kid, through her Star Trek novel. Apropos of nothing, really, but it always makes me smile when I see a book by her, remembering that.

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/107638.html

3+/5 - Usual SRB disclaimer: will read anything by her, and love it!

That is the lead-in to say I loved this book a lot! I now have two data points that suggest I really go for second books of SRB's trilogies (this being the sequel to Unspoken, and I think there's a reason for that: we've gotten over the hump of introducing the characters, so the second book can actually concentrate on the relationships between the characters, especially the familial relationships and friendships. (Demon's Lexicon got over this to a degree by the most important relationship in Lexicon being a familial one.) SRB does familial relationships and friendships really well, and I really enjoy reading them -- we get more thumbnail sketches of not only Kami's family and the Lynburns, but also Holly's and Angela's families, and Kami-Holly-Angela-Rusty-Jared-Ash worked much better when I could take the relationships between them for granted and just enjoy watching them interact.

I really loved that we got to see real consequences between Kami's parents. Because, I mean, yeah, systematic lying... over years... affecting one's children... that's going to be a really hard thing to deal with, and I loved that we got to see that, in an understated way (since it's only through Kami's eyes). This is the kind of thoughtfulness I LOVE from SRB.

I loved that Angela's revelation in the first book was neither ignored, but neither was it a super huge deal (well, except to the one character whose reaction, it later becomes clear, is less about that than it is about her own personal issues). I could have done without Rusty's Friendly Diversity Lecture, but that was only a paragraph and the rest of it was great.

I totally laughed when Angela's like, yeah, I was just gonna find someone at university, because it's so my reaction to YA romances in general and SRB heroines in particular. I know that SRB most probably did not put that in there for my benefit, but I totally loved it as if she had. (Still jonesing for Angela/university-person! Even though I rather like the ship SRB seems to be setting up here. I also liked that Angela/Kami was not a thing, not because of Kami's predilections one way or another but because they would honestly make a really, really terrible couple, what with Angela's sloth and Kami's energy, speaking as a slothful person myself who absolutely knows where Angela is coming from!)

Speaking of shipping, I found Kami/Jared shockingly hot and I do not even know what to do with this because the way that he feels about her is incredibly unhealthy and anyone else I would tell to run away. Except that... maybe unhealthy isn't really relevant when their particular circumstances apply...

One vague objection: For someone who has been soulbonded to someone since birth, she seems to be rather bad at reading Jared. Jared seems much better at reading her!

I was really shocked by the ending (which I loved), that she (I meant SRB, but really Lillian) went there. Wow. How is that even going to work in the third book, with all the people in Sorry-in-the-Vale knowing what happened there?? I am super excited for it!

(Also, Turn of the Story has finished, but due to the aforementioned withdrawal from life I haven't actually read it yet... but I am really looking forward to it!)

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/107033.html

4/5. I really, really liked this book. It's about a biracial (elvin/goblin) boy, Maia, who becomes emperor of a somewhat complicated court and then has to deal with it.

I would never have read it if not for

rymenhild's review (general, unspecific spoilers), because I hated Felix so much in Monette's other books.

D saw me snarfing it up and asked if he should read it. I told him I didn't know. He decided to read it and stayed up until 2am the next two nights... I can't remember the last time he did that reading a book.

So yeah. And it's the kind of thing I just want to talk about, because I have lots of thoughts about it!

I think one of the things I loved most about it is that it's such a hopeful book. Not a happy book -- lots of unhappy things happen -- but it's awfully hopeful, and I am a sucker for hopeful. I read an essay Monette wrote where she points out her Labyrinth books are much more noir, and... yeah. This one, while not light fluffiness for sure, is not noir.

Various other things I loved about the book: ( Very mild unspecific spoilers, if that )

Other things (I don't mean these to be negative, precisely; this is the kind of book where it's good enough that I want to talk about and dissect all the parts I didn't love, if that makes any sense?): ( Mild and general spoilers; nothing plot-destroying. )

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/106285.html

...And visiting my sister means more exposure to wacky YA-dystopia hijinks!

Mind Games 3/5. Two sisters, a blind seer and an assassin, are forced to go to Evil!School to learn villainy. I am a sucker for assassin-school stories. And this one had some great ideas and it had an entertaining ending, and of course I always love sister stories. I liked a lot of things about it, but I could not get past the point where the blind sister was as dumb as rocks. Basically, her lack of learning from her mistakes, thinking things through at all, and steadfast lack of communication were the plot drivers for the entire book, and that annoyed me.

Vicious (Schwab): 3+/5. Okay, this one I liked. It's a dark take on superheroes (called EOs -- ExtraOrdinaries -- in the book). It suffers from the same problems I had with Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is that when your characters are a bit on the cartoonish side, even a grim cartoon, it's hard to be all that sympathetic. But the writing is good, the action ramps up well, and some of the sly tropes really amused me (such as how all the characters are centered around One Town even though they clearly had the whole world to play around in). One minor note: I found their university extraordinarily unconvincing. Everyone -- of different disciplines -- has to take a thesis prep class where each person announces the proposed thesis subject? Is this a thing in other universities that I don't know about? Or a superhero trope I don't know about?

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/106199.html

4/5. I... have curiously little to say about this book, except that I am glad I read it after Cyteen, because Cyteen drew me in with its genetic speculation and gave me a primer on how Cherryh works: the book goes on until she's finished writing it, with one major plot-line maybe resolved and a bunch of minor ones dangling; also, people will act like people and it will generally be grim and people will get grim comeuppances. So I was prepared! And actually I was unprepared for the awesomeness that is Elene Quen and the accompanying awesomeness that is Elene/Damon and Josh Talley. Although I was slightly more prepared for the grim sort of awesomeness that is Signy Mallory.

I don't like it as well as Cyteen; it doesn't have the interesting genetic Big Questions or the heartstopping moments when you realize you've just taken a dagger to the heart (except, okay, that last scene). But I liked it very much. Recommended if you like careful, methodical worldbuilding and history (apparently Cherryh herself said her books should read like that, and it does -- detailed and messy and without clean endings) and don't mind Cherryh's quirks, and very much not recommended if you want your plots wrapped up nicely or are not in the mood for grim...

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/105490.html

3+/5.

sarahtales recently updated Turn of the Story, which reminded me that I hadn't read her Lynburn Legacy books. Now, I pretty much read and love anything that SRB writes, but it took me a while to get to these because they were described as Gothics, and I don't really like Gothics that much. I blame getting to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre entirely too late in my life and thinking, "Why are all these people so dysfunctional??" And… yup, I think I still am not a major fan of Gothics. The brooding and the inbreeding and the spookiness and the dysfunctional relationships and the bad-boy angst and the cast of characters who all look the same so as to provide maximum difficulty in my telling them apart… it's not all taken seriously in Unspoken, obviously, but it's just not my thing.

However, SRB likes subverting tropes a lot, and this I am totally on board with. The biggest part of this is that the main character, Kami, has a ~~soulbond~~ mindlink with another person. This turns out to be… really kind of awful and creepy, actually! As it would actually be if you had someone peeping at your thoughts all the time! And the terrible thing is that you really can describe it with all the cliches that moony teenagers use to describe their love affairs! He is part of her! They are so much more than friends! She's never had a connection with anyone the way she does with him! And it is super creepy and I love it.

I also found the ending somewhat lacking in emotional heft, partially I think because the relationships between the Lynburns weren't laid out solidly for me. Or possibly because I don't find love triangles (even between grownups) particularly compelling? Contrast the climax of Demon's Lexicon, which gets its power partially from the solidness of the development of the relationship between Nick and Alan. (That lovely lying liar! But I digress.) Family relationships get me every time.

Speaking of love triangles, as usual with SRB heroines, I am firmly on the shipping side of Kami/NO ONE IN THESE BOOKS. I think Kami should move away from Sorry-in-the-Vale, have lots of relationships, and eventually partner with someone who has never heard of the Lynburns!

Anyway. I would not have read it had it been an author I didn't know. And I think I would have liked it better if it wasn't Gothic (which I think drives a lot of the things I didn't particularly think were that interesting). But that's just me. And I'll be picking up the next one.

(Also, Turn of the Story is Lynburn Legacy for high fantasy rather than Gothic. I find this kind of fantastic, and like it in a much more uncomplicated way. But I could see, if you didn't like high fantasy, it not being compelling in much the same way.)

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/105075.html

3+/5. I never read genderified books like this. The only reason I even checked this out of the library is because E noticed it on the "new books" shelf, picked it up, and begged me to check it out. I think it is mostly because she liked the colored pencils on the cover. I asked her what she thought was about before writing this, and she looked at me as though I were an idiot and said, "Pink and blue!" I suspect she was hoping that it would provide me with craft activities for her.

Anyway, it actually taught me some things, I think, or at the very least forced me to confront my own prejudices. I'd always sort of assumed that girls were "more verbal" than boys (except for my kid, who talked early but is now the second least verbal kid in both her social groups), and this turns out to not be true for the things they've measured (e.g., vocabulary), except that girls are a little advanced in verbal ability for the first several years of life. And once I thought about it, I realized it is true in my anecdotal sample: although there was a big difference when E was 2 or so, even at age 4.5, I can see that the boys and girls in E's class are fairly close in verbal ability.

And she did a good job in explaining in layman's terms statistical concepts like variance, and overlapping probability distributions, and the idea that just because the two means of a population might differ, you have to look at by how much they differ and how that compares to the variance. So I was reluctantly impressed by her taking the time to do that.

I had the same problem with this book that I do with all pop-sciency books I read, which is that she will cite a study and then act very smug that she has made her case, even though there might be an alternate hypothesis that would explain the data, so what did you do to control for that, or did you do another study to study that… argh. Some of this may be that she's not trying to write that sort of book; she cites Pink Brain, Blue Brain (Eliot) as a book to read for a more academic approach, so perhaps I shouldn't ding her for that.

It also annoyed me that she quoted a study that showed that there was a "0.21" difference between infant boys' and girls' activity level. According to her this is small! I have no idea what units she is in, what the standard deviation is supposed to be… WHAT. Also this difference gets larger over time, which she blithely attributes to cultural programming… but I don't see any studies on this… so I have no idea where she's pulling that out of.

Another irritating part was that the actual "parenting" part was mostly her saying, "Hey, these are some things that I did as I parented my own kids, so you should do them too!" Occasionally she would have studies that kind of really didn't back up the specific things she had recommended.

The most annoying part was when she acted all smug, which she often did. This bit was my second least favorite part:

Stereotypes about gender have affected you, just as much as they affect your kids. Think for a second about yourself. Are you good at math? If you are a woman, I would bet money — if I knew you and could actually collect — that you say either (1) you are not very good at math or (2) you do not like math.

…You just lost your bet. Don't you go down laying gender stereotypes on me, please and thank you! I am willing to believe the average woman reading your book might not like math, but you just wrote a whole book about how the mean does not describe an entire population, what is your problem?

(My least favorite part was the story she told about a friend who refused to believe her nonverbal kid had autism because she clung to the stereotype that boys were less verbal than girls, thus showing that stereotypes can be harmful! JUST. NO. Look, coming to the conclusion that something is wrong with your kid is very difficult, and some people have a really hard time with it, and will cling to anything they can. If it weren't gender stereotyping it would have been something else. I just… had a violent reaction to her using this as support for her point. Granted, she did present it as a fairly minor point. BUT STILL.)

Oh, here's another good one!

A meta-analysis shows that boys remember boy-labeled pictures, words, and toys better than girls do, and girls remember girl-labeled pictures, words, and toys better than boys do... How does this play out in real life?... If your daughter is given an erector set, she will first notice the boys playing with it on the box. It might as well be labeled "Not for you" because that is how she will interpret it. She will automatically be less interested in it... She will never really figure the set out, never fully realize all she can build with it. It simply won't keep her attention long enough. Mechanical skills stay a boy thing, strengthening the stereotype even though you tried to fight it.

So this is another good example of how she takes an idea/study that I think is interesting and which I believe (that humans tend to filter by group association) as well as an action that I actually agree with and think is a good idea (toys shouldn't be labeled by gender association), and wraps it in language that is so smug and irritating that it makes me want to stop reading even though I actually agree with all the points she's making! I want to say, "Hey, my daughter has never in her entire life noticed any kid on a box of any gender... and she doesn't like dolls even though all the girls she knows play with them... so... just stop making assumptions about her!" (All right, fine, it is true that she has become an Anna and Elsa fan for no other reason than that all the girls she knows are singing Frozen songs incessantly. But still.)

In conclusion, this book made me so irritated, but I did learn stuff from it and it had some good points, so... yeah. I don't recommend it exactly, but it might be interesting to flip through it a little if you see it at the library or something and see if it annoys you :)

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/104735.html

The Rosie Project (Simsion)

3+/5. This book was charming and hilarious!

It is told from the POV of a professor, Don Tillman, who pretty clearly has (undiagnosed) Asperger's. Whether the author does this well/believably I can't judge (though would love someone else to weigh in), but I didn't find anything that pinged me the wrong way, at least. It's a very good-natured book, which I liked a lot.

I should mention that the narrative is constructed to be in the style of a romantic comedy movie. It's not obvious (at least to me) in the beginning, but as the book progresses it becomes more obvious and signposted, complete with misunderstandings (though these misunderstandings, naturally arising as they do from two very different worldviews, bother me much less than most rom-com misunderstandings), situations that become more and more absurd (it did not trip my embarrassment squick, which is more sensitive than average -- although there was at least one scene where I did have to fast-forward to make sure it wouldn't get tripped -- but it probably would for someone whose squick was more sensitive than mine) and a proposal at the end. (I don't consider this a spoiler because I already said it was a rom-com.) In a normal book the proposal would bother me a little (it seems to come a little out of left field)... but it's a rom-com, so.

There's a mystery, and the solution to the mystery is, I think, a slyly pointed critique at writers like Agatha Christie, or maybe I only think so because I read so many Christies as a child where she used the exact same McGuffin that's being critiqued.

My sister did a character interview with Don Tillman on her blog which is super hilarious and you should all go check it out.

Can you tell us a story about your most memorable student?
No. I am forbidden by the Dean and the University legal department from discussing the Gender Misidentification Disaster.

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/102946.html

I reread (most of) these in the last couple of months for (as usual) Reasons. There are thirteen books in the original series about the Baudelaire orpans, and a couple of side books that go along with it: I reread all of the original thirteen except the first four (more on that omission later), as well as rereading Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. (I wanted to also reread The Beatrice Letters, but we don't own that one and I failed in obtaining it before the deadline.)

They're deeply strange and strangely hilarious and over-the-top books, sort of if you mixed Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, and added in a large scoop of secret organizations and another large dollop of meta. Lemony Snicket himself never explicitly shows up in the plot as a character, but the best parts of the books are where we learn things about him and his own personal secret-organization-filled unfortunate series of events. (I must confess that The Unauthorized Biography may actually be my favorite of the entire series, although it would make zero sense had you not read at least half the series beforehand.)

( Rambling. Cut for length. These are the kinds of books where I really don't feel spoilers are a concern, but in any case there are no overt ones. )

Crossposts: http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/101720.html

Yeah, this book is that good that I just wanted to TALK about it!

5/5. I adored this book. It basically hit all my buttons it possibly could: seventh-century Britain; a carefully researched milieu that felt real; prose that felt real (sorry, Guy Gavriel Kay, I like your books but I cannot take your prose seriously); politics and more politics; three-dimensional characters, all of whom are political beings and none of whom are one-dimensional heroes or villains; consideration of the webs of power with both women and men; a powerful woman protagonist whose power is intertwined and rooted in being female while the fact that she is still in primarily a man's world is not ignored; women friendships; friendships (of all gender-flavors, whee!) complicated by sex and friendships explicitly not complicated by sex; thoughtfulness about religion and how it is complicated by power; a way of looking at the world that shifted from the old religion to Christianity that rang true to me (in particular, the way that Hild thinks is not at all the way that Paulinus, for example, thinks); the twisting relationship between observation/deduction and prophecy/religion; even a number of shiny things! So, you know.

( Minor general spoilers; tried not to be specific. Comparison to Cherryh and Mantel whom I haven't read; formal lifelong platonic female bonds and authors making up stuff; shiny things; warnings. )

Anyway. It's the kind of thing that I would super-recommend to many people, and would not recommend at all to others. I don't think my sister, for example, would like it at all (she doesn't really go in for Cherryh or Byatt).

I need to go back and read Bede again!