Books read, January 2024
Feb. 2nd, 2024 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerArtificial Condition, Martha Wells. Choo-choo, the Murderbot train keeps rolling!
I found the beginning of this one slightly rocky, in terms of trying to orient the reader in a world that basically didn't show up within the constrained space of All Systems Red. I was also unsure how I would feel about the story, given that I enjoyed the character interactions in the first novella, but all of those characters had now left the stage. Fortunately, soon there was ART! And Murderbot's difficulties in figuring out how to navigate the broader world without getting caught or giving away its identity as a rogue SecUnit were engaging enough after those slightly stiff opening pages. I had to tell myself I shouldn't read the next one immediately after, because I know I like series better with a bit of breathing room between installments.
Bartholomew Fair, Ann Swinfen. Since I had a less than enthusiastic reaction to the previous book in this series, I was relieved to find this one much better. It helps that, unlike the passive tour of the failures of the Counter-Armada in The Portuguese Affair, this volume weaves its own, fictional plot around and through the historical event at its core (the protest at Bartholomew Fair by a group of demobbed soldiers demanding some kind of pay for their work and pensions for the many many widows and orphans left behind by the Counter-Armada's failure). Because of that fictional plot, Swinfen has a lot more room here for Kit to protag instead of just watching events go down. I hope later books in the series are more in this vein, because I'll quite enjoy them if they are.
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. So I didn't read it immediately after: I read it a day or two later, however long it took me to get through Bartholomew Fair. :-P
I do wish these novellas had less generic titles; it means I have to work to remember which volume is which, even though I'm enjoying all their plots. This is another one where I think I crave just a bit more context and breathing room; all the stuff about what GreyCris is going for (and willing to kill to hide) feels more Macguffin-y than I think it has to, just because there's no space in the novella to get into why that stuff matters. Possibly Network Effect will satisfy me in that regard; we'll see when I get there. The action, however, is very enjoyable, and it landed squarely on the button of a trope I enjoy when Murderbot had to throw all stealth and caution out the window and reveal its capabilities as a SecUnit because the alternative was letting people die.
Moonwise, Greer Ilene Gilman. It has been a long time since a book made me feel this stupid.
As you can tell by these posts, I read fairly fast, and it's rare for me to feel like I'm having difficulty with anything. (Uninterested, yes; incapable of processing the words on the page, no.) The writing here, however, nearly defeated me. It is intensely poetic; the language is dialed up to 11 basically all the time, except when it goes to 13. There were places where I genuinely had trouble figuring out what was even going on, because I was getting so lost in the weeds of the words.
But, well. I'm stubborn, and I didn't like the idea of conceding defeat, of accepting that I'm just not smart enough to figure out this book that other people have loved so deeply. And I had this feeling that I would adore the story and the world of Cloud if only I could comprehend what I was reading -- I read the interview with Gilman in Uncanny, and everything she was saying there sounded amazing. So, aided by determination and this quasi-dictionary by Michael Swanwick, I persevered.
And it got better, or I did. Or both. I think it was a combination of three things: this assistance of Swanwick's piece, me just getting used to the language over time, and me getting past the part of the novel where Ariane is trying find a way into Cloud. Gilman says in the interview that Ariane attempting all kinds of different rituals to effect passage "simply shadows my frustrations as a novice writer, trying to go on," and I kinda suspect that bleeds through into the writing during that section. It was by far the hardest section for me to parse. Once she met the tinker . . . well, it didn't become easy, but I no longer felt like I was beating my head against a gorgeous and impenetrable wall.
Once past that wall: yes, this is kind of amazing, and mythic in ways I think very few writers achieve. It makes me reflect on the idea that magic systems must have rules, and my conviction that they don't need mechanics so much as an underlying symbolic logic. That logic is absolutely here, just of a sort that defies your rational, "to do X you need Y and Z" approach seen in so much fantasy worldbuilding. Things work when it is right that they should do so, when the key fits the metaphorical lock.
I have Cloud and Ashes on my shelf, and actually tried to read that one before Moonwise, but I bounced straight off "Jack Daw's Pack" because of the language thing. Now that I'm a little better oriented and versed in the language and stylistic mode of this world, I may try it again and see if I have more success.
Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, Marcelin Defourneaux, trans. Newton Branch. This book is from the '60s, so not what you'd call super up to date; however, it's also the only "daily life" kind of book I've found for this place and period -- if you know of others, I would welcome titles!
Age aside, it does something I find fascinating: the first chapter is written as if from the perspective of a contemporary traveler, complete with all the unapologetic prejudice that brings. Defourneaux backs off from that after the opening chapter in favor of your more typical attempt at modern objectivity, but I actually found the fictionalized perspective really interesting when placed alongside the later chapters . . . especially since I wanted those later chapters to go into more depth and detail. This is thin compared to, say, a Liza Picard London book (but then, I'm a Picard fangirl). Still and all, it did what I wanted, which is to give me some sense of how Spain in this era differed from the areas I know better, like England.
A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias Buckell. Novella or short novel, I'm not sure which, in a setting that . . . well, some of what I would say is a spoiler, and some of it is left a bit unresolved even once you reach the end of the book. Let's just say that at multiple points along the way, the story likes to change the game.
Anyway, this has a great tag line: "You shall not suffer a librarian to live." Books and writing are taboo, seen as foul magic and ascribed all kinds of incredible, malevolent power -- so, naturally, the very first thing that happens is that a traveler is caught with a book. This leads to many changes in the life of the protagonist and destabilizes the city she lives in, leading to a journey across a wasteland toward many discoveries. I think the idea here could have supported a longer, more detailed novel; I enjoyed it in its existing form, but there were a couple of emotional beats that would have come through more strongly for me if they'd had a little more space to develop, both in terms of time elapsed and pages spent exploring them.
Bridezilla, Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau. Alyc and I recently did a podcast on collaboration with Kathy and Kurt, so in preparation for that, we swapped novels.
I didn't expect to read the entirety of this, because it's not my usual fare: a fast-paced contemporary fantasy about a town where brides-to-be have started turning into literal kaiju when they snap under the pressure of the wedding-industrial complex. Having aimed to read fifty pages for the podcast, though, I found that zipping by in no time at all, and so I wound up inhaling the whole thing in about a day. It's definitely the type of story that has a "just roll with it" element -- why does nobody outside Appleville seem to be investigating this Bridezilla phenomenon? Don't ask, because that's not the point. If you're in the mood for some commentary on patriarchy by way of kaiju, logistics like that will only slow the story down.
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells. A longer gap this time because I had only ordered #2 and #3 before, and had to wait for the next volumes to arrive!
This is the culmination of an arc within the series, with all the payoff that implies. It's very pleasing to get Mensah and some of the Preservation people back on stage -- Mensah especially, because I really like her interactions with Murderbot. (I also read the Tor.com short story from her perspective, after I finished this novella. It was pleasant, but also admittedly felt more like a nice piece of fanfic than a proper short story.)
This one pulls off something not all such works do, which is to have its back half be nearly non-stop action without making me feel like I just want a breather from it all. I think it benefits from being a novella and part of a series -- novels that try to maintain this pacing for too long tend to exhaust me -- but also, it doesn't neglect character moments along the way, like how Mensah works with Murderbot to get off the station. The recovery period at the end was also interestingly done.
Dust Up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) Second of this series of "what if British boarding school books, but on Mars"; I don't think you need to have read the first to enjoy it, though Three Twins at the Crater School does establish who some of the key players are. As per usual, this is more about episodes in the lives of the characters than a central arc plot.
For me, these fit into a pleasant niche of feeling cozy without becoming completely toothless. There's conflict; it's just not world-ending or generally driven by somebody being a villain. There are no abusive teachers or Mean Girl cliques. Instead, the students want to misbehave, the teachers want to stop them, the students know they'll probably face consequences but are often prepared to accept that as the price of having fun, and the teachers want the girls to show independence of spirit even as they try to prevent that independence from causing problems. Meanwhile, you also have alien encounters and a massive dust storm that pens the members of the Crater School inside for an extended period of time. This is very much not your Scientifically Accurate Mars; it is instead Pulp Mars, and delightful for being so.
Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. I know this was published after Network Effect, but since it takes place before, I decided to read it first. (For those of you who read them in the opposite order, I'm curious what you thought of them being out of sequence.)
Murderbot does a murder mystery! The need to investigate by more mundane routes than just hacking all the systems within reach created a useful and plausible obstacle, and although I suspected the answer to the plot a little before it was revealed, that didn't make the result disappointing. I like reluctant allies, and I loved the mass organization of bots at the climax. The method of rescue was great, too, with the reminder that SecUnits -- for all their combat capability -- aren't actually made to fight; they're made to protect their clients. If they can solve problems without killing people, great, let's do that.
A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Robert Bringhurst. This goes back and forth between segments of Haida literature and discussions of same, with digressions into history, anthropology, and the situation at the time of the collection of these stories and poems, which happened right at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. I really like the fact that Bringhurst never loses sight of the fact that specific people told these stories, and a specific man recorded them; none of this is the timeless, universal product of a culture en masse (which nothing ever is anyway, but you don't always have the evidence to see more clearly than that).
It does make for hard going in places, because Bringhurst repeatedly reminds you that when Swanton went to Haida Gwaii to record these stories -- or rather, to do a lot of anthropological work which he mostly neglected because he went all-in on the stories instead -- the people there were being hit extremely hard by the effects of colonialism, with their population having suffered a catastrophic decline and many of their ways of life being pressured out of existence. I also kind of wanted to rip my hair out when Bringhurst contrasted Swanton's excellent-for-the-time methods with all the ethnologists who only ever published summaries of the texts they had recorded, even when their notes included more detailed transcripts of what the storyteller actually said (and not all of them bothered with that in the first place). It really drives home how much we lost -- and I do mean we, because I do think that the extinction of so many stories is a loss to humanity as a whole, not just the communities who told those tales.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/g7fQ40)
I found the beginning of this one slightly rocky, in terms of trying to orient the reader in a world that basically didn't show up within the constrained space of All Systems Red. I was also unsure how I would feel about the story, given that I enjoyed the character interactions in the first novella, but all of those characters had now left the stage. Fortunately, soon there was ART! And Murderbot's difficulties in figuring out how to navigate the broader world without getting caught or giving away its identity as a rogue SecUnit were engaging enough after those slightly stiff opening pages. I had to tell myself I shouldn't read the next one immediately after, because I know I like series better with a bit of breathing room between installments.
Bartholomew Fair, Ann Swinfen. Since I had a less than enthusiastic reaction to the previous book in this series, I was relieved to find this one much better. It helps that, unlike the passive tour of the failures of the Counter-Armada in The Portuguese Affair, this volume weaves its own, fictional plot around and through the historical event at its core (the protest at Bartholomew Fair by a group of demobbed soldiers demanding some kind of pay for their work and pensions for the many many widows and orphans left behind by the Counter-Armada's failure). Because of that fictional plot, Swinfen has a lot more room here for Kit to protag instead of just watching events go down. I hope later books in the series are more in this vein, because I'll quite enjoy them if they are.
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. So I didn't read it immediately after: I read it a day or two later, however long it took me to get through Bartholomew Fair. :-P
I do wish these novellas had less generic titles; it means I have to work to remember which volume is which, even though I'm enjoying all their plots. This is another one where I think I crave just a bit more context and breathing room; all the stuff about what GreyCris is going for (and willing to kill to hide) feels more Macguffin-y than I think it has to, just because there's no space in the novella to get into why that stuff matters. Possibly Network Effect will satisfy me in that regard; we'll see when I get there. The action, however, is very enjoyable, and it landed squarely on the button of a trope I enjoy when Murderbot had to throw all stealth and caution out the window and reveal its capabilities as a SecUnit because the alternative was letting people die.
Moonwise, Greer Ilene Gilman. It has been a long time since a book made me feel this stupid.
As you can tell by these posts, I read fairly fast, and it's rare for me to feel like I'm having difficulty with anything. (Uninterested, yes; incapable of processing the words on the page, no.) The writing here, however, nearly defeated me. It is intensely poetic; the language is dialed up to 11 basically all the time, except when it goes to 13. There were places where I genuinely had trouble figuring out what was even going on, because I was getting so lost in the weeds of the words.
But, well. I'm stubborn, and I didn't like the idea of conceding defeat, of accepting that I'm just not smart enough to figure out this book that other people have loved so deeply. And I had this feeling that I would adore the story and the world of Cloud if only I could comprehend what I was reading -- I read the interview with Gilman in Uncanny, and everything she was saying there sounded amazing. So, aided by determination and this quasi-dictionary by Michael Swanwick, I persevered.
And it got better, or I did. Or both. I think it was a combination of three things: this assistance of Swanwick's piece, me just getting used to the language over time, and me getting past the part of the novel where Ariane is trying find a way into Cloud. Gilman says in the interview that Ariane attempting all kinds of different rituals to effect passage "simply shadows my frustrations as a novice writer, trying to go on," and I kinda suspect that bleeds through into the writing during that section. It was by far the hardest section for me to parse. Once she met the tinker . . . well, it didn't become easy, but I no longer felt like I was beating my head against a gorgeous and impenetrable wall.
Once past that wall: yes, this is kind of amazing, and mythic in ways I think very few writers achieve. It makes me reflect on the idea that magic systems must have rules, and my conviction that they don't need mechanics so much as an underlying symbolic logic. That logic is absolutely here, just of a sort that defies your rational, "to do X you need Y and Z" approach seen in so much fantasy worldbuilding. Things work when it is right that they should do so, when the key fits the metaphorical lock.
I have Cloud and Ashes on my shelf, and actually tried to read that one before Moonwise, but I bounced straight off "Jack Daw's Pack" because of the language thing. Now that I'm a little better oriented and versed in the language and stylistic mode of this world, I may try it again and see if I have more success.
Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, Marcelin Defourneaux, trans. Newton Branch. This book is from the '60s, so not what you'd call super up to date; however, it's also the only "daily life" kind of book I've found for this place and period -- if you know of others, I would welcome titles!
Age aside, it does something I find fascinating: the first chapter is written as if from the perspective of a contemporary traveler, complete with all the unapologetic prejudice that brings. Defourneaux backs off from that after the opening chapter in favor of your more typical attempt at modern objectivity, but I actually found the fictionalized perspective really interesting when placed alongside the later chapters . . . especially since I wanted those later chapters to go into more depth and detail. This is thin compared to, say, a Liza Picard London book (but then, I'm a Picard fangirl). Still and all, it did what I wanted, which is to give me some sense of how Spain in this era differed from the areas I know better, like England.
A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias Buckell. Novella or short novel, I'm not sure which, in a setting that . . . well, some of what I would say is a spoiler, and some of it is left a bit unresolved even once you reach the end of the book. Let's just say that at multiple points along the way, the story likes to change the game.
Anyway, this has a great tag line: "You shall not suffer a librarian to live." Books and writing are taboo, seen as foul magic and ascribed all kinds of incredible, malevolent power -- so, naturally, the very first thing that happens is that a traveler is caught with a book. This leads to many changes in the life of the protagonist and destabilizes the city she lives in, leading to a journey across a wasteland toward many discoveries. I think the idea here could have supported a longer, more detailed novel; I enjoyed it in its existing form, but there were a couple of emotional beats that would have come through more strongly for me if they'd had a little more space to develop, both in terms of time elapsed and pages spent exploring them.
Bridezilla, Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau. Alyc and I recently did a podcast on collaboration with Kathy and Kurt, so in preparation for that, we swapped novels.
I didn't expect to read the entirety of this, because it's not my usual fare: a fast-paced contemporary fantasy about a town where brides-to-be have started turning into literal kaiju when they snap under the pressure of the wedding-industrial complex. Having aimed to read fifty pages for the podcast, though, I found that zipping by in no time at all, and so I wound up inhaling the whole thing in about a day. It's definitely the type of story that has a "just roll with it" element -- why does nobody outside Appleville seem to be investigating this Bridezilla phenomenon? Don't ask, because that's not the point. If you're in the mood for some commentary on patriarchy by way of kaiju, logistics like that will only slow the story down.
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells. A longer gap this time because I had only ordered #2 and #3 before, and had to wait for the next volumes to arrive!
This is the culmination of an arc within the series, with all the payoff that implies. It's very pleasing to get Mensah and some of the Preservation people back on stage -- Mensah especially, because I really like her interactions with Murderbot. (I also read the Tor.com short story from her perspective, after I finished this novella. It was pleasant, but also admittedly felt more like a nice piece of fanfic than a proper short story.)
This one pulls off something not all such works do, which is to have its back half be nearly non-stop action without making me feel like I just want a breather from it all. I think it benefits from being a novella and part of a series -- novels that try to maintain this pacing for too long tend to exhaust me -- but also, it doesn't neglect character moments along the way, like how Mensah works with Murderbot to get off the station. The recovery period at the end was also interestingly done.
Dust Up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) Second of this series of "what if British boarding school books, but on Mars"; I don't think you need to have read the first to enjoy it, though Three Twins at the Crater School does establish who some of the key players are. As per usual, this is more about episodes in the lives of the characters than a central arc plot.
For me, these fit into a pleasant niche of feeling cozy without becoming completely toothless. There's conflict; it's just not world-ending or generally driven by somebody being a villain. There are no abusive teachers or Mean Girl cliques. Instead, the students want to misbehave, the teachers want to stop them, the students know they'll probably face consequences but are often prepared to accept that as the price of having fun, and the teachers want the girls to show independence of spirit even as they try to prevent that independence from causing problems. Meanwhile, you also have alien encounters and a massive dust storm that pens the members of the Crater School inside for an extended period of time. This is very much not your Scientifically Accurate Mars; it is instead Pulp Mars, and delightful for being so.
Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. I know this was published after Network Effect, but since it takes place before, I decided to read it first. (For those of you who read them in the opposite order, I'm curious what you thought of them being out of sequence.)
Murderbot does a murder mystery! The need to investigate by more mundane routes than just hacking all the systems within reach created a useful and plausible obstacle, and although I suspected the answer to the plot a little before it was revealed, that didn't make the result disappointing. I like reluctant allies, and I loved the mass organization of bots at the climax. The method of rescue was great, too, with the reminder that SecUnits -- for all their combat capability -- aren't actually made to fight; they're made to protect their clients. If they can solve problems without killing people, great, let's do that.
A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Robert Bringhurst. This goes back and forth between segments of Haida literature and discussions of same, with digressions into history, anthropology, and the situation at the time of the collection of these stories and poems, which happened right at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. I really like the fact that Bringhurst never loses sight of the fact that specific people told these stories, and a specific man recorded them; none of this is the timeless, universal product of a culture en masse (which nothing ever is anyway, but you don't always have the evidence to see more clearly than that).
It does make for hard going in places, because Bringhurst repeatedly reminds you that when Swanton went to Haida Gwaii to record these stories -- or rather, to do a lot of anthropological work which he mostly neglected because he went all-in on the stories instead -- the people there were being hit extremely hard by the effects of colonialism, with their population having suffered a catastrophic decline and many of their ways of life being pressured out of existence. I also kind of wanted to rip my hair out when Bringhurst contrasted Swanton's excellent-for-the-time methods with all the ethnologists who only ever published summaries of the texts they had recorded, even when their notes included more detailed transcripts of what the storyteller actually said (and not all of them bothered with that in the first place). It really drives home how much we lost -- and I do mean we, because I do think that the extinction of so many stories is a loss to humanity as a whole, not just the communities who told those tales.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/g7fQ40)
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Date: 2024-02-07 10:03 am (UTC)Oh my god, MADDENING. What a tragedy.