Books read, March 2024
Apr. 6th, 2024 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerTemporarily redacting some of what I read in March, so this is a shorter post than usual.
Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do -- which connects it a bit with Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don't have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other's behavior.
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn't all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia's "Spear Carrier" -- certainly not the only one I liked, but I'm writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that's the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.
The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter -- humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the '50s -- means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it's less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I've read in quite some time.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I've been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length -- and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!
An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I've mentioned before, I've largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there's a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she's feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there's one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/DMewpA)
Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do -- which connects it a bit with Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don't have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other's behavior.
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn't all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia's "Spear Carrier" -- certainly not the only one I liked, but I'm writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that's the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.
The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter -- humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the '50s -- means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it's less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I've read in quite some time.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I've been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length -- and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!
An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I've mentioned before, I've largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there's a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she's feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there's one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/DMewpA)
no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 10:30 pm (UTC)"humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable"
/me twitches at the premise
"Let's all move from a less-habitable world to a completely inhabitable world, rather than using the habitat tech right here on Earth..."
no subject
Date: 2024-04-08 04:29 pm (UTC)It's kinda the buy-in for the story, yeah, because if you can build habitat domes to grow food etc. on the Moon or Mars, surely you could build domes to do the same thing on Earth, with a much smaller outlay of resources. I know the next book in the series (The Relentless Moon) focuses more on what's going on back on Earth while the astronauts are making the first trip to Mars; I don't know yet to what extent it addresses the question of survival in place rather than space colonization. There are definitely protestors objecting to the space approach, but it's unclear what percentage of them are denying the long-term gravity of the situation, and what percentage are saying, let's pour all this effort into mitigating the problem here.
One way or another, it's certainly true that the space colonization plan ain't gonna save everybody. The story has a heavy focus on the inequalities of who will be included in this effort, but even if you waved a magic wand and made racism go away, there's still no way they could evacuate the entire population of the planet, even for 1960s values of that number.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-08 04:42 pm (UTC)I'm reminded of how I liked the series Firefly overall, but really wondered about this terraforming tech that could gussy up all these planets and moons, but not fix Earth-that-was. I joked once that the system had been settled by the equivalent of the Hitchhiker B Ark, and that's why there were no actual Chinese people seen: they were all living happily on Earth, having gotten rid of some of the more gullible Westerners. This made an IU prof laugh alarmingly for 5 solid minutes.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 11:24 pm (UTC)I'm really curious what it is!
Have you read any of her other works? I love all of them but Vespertine is my favourite.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-08 04:32 pm (UTC)Well, boo. Her contract shouldn't block her from making that available by other means; usually the setup is, they get right of first refusal, but if they're not interested, you can sell it elsewhere or publish it yourself. Though possibly Rogerson isn't keen to go to that effort.
I'm really curious what [the detail] is!
Rot-13: Gur eriryngvba gung Vfbory, univat fynva gur Nyqre Xvat, vf grpuavpnyyl abj gur dhrra. It wasn't terrible or anything; I just think a different approach could have been a little bit punchier.
Have you read any of her other works?
Not yet! I may well check them out.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 10:04 pm (UTC)I hope you enjoy them if you read them!
no subject
Date: 2024-04-15 08:53 pm (UTC)