Return of the books read!, March 2025
Apr. 8th, 2025 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerIt's been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.
As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn't talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.
But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I'll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I'm actually reading some other stuff.
Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it's over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy's writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.
Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer's Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.
Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was "it's like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it"). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won't be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.
Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I'm not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You're fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly's life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled -- in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don't really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea -- I've never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I'm not sure I'm invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I'm curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of "ask a friend" rather than reading the rest of the series myself.
Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she'd like to read my novel about translation.
This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it's making sweeping generalizations about "Eastern" and "Western" storytelling, and that it's deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that's an unexamined default. It's a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it's not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!
As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn't talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.
But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I'll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I'm actually reading some other stuff.
Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it's over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy's writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.
Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer's Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.
Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was "it's like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it"). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won't be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.
Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I'm not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You're fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly's life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled -- in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don't really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea -- I've never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I'm not sure I'm invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I'm curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of "ask a friend" rather than reading the rest of the series myself.
Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she'd like to read my novel about translation.
This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it's making sweeping generalizations about "Eastern" and "Western" storytelling, and that it's deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that's an unexamined default. It's a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it's not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!
no subject
Date: 2025-04-08 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-08 09:09 pm (UTC)But also, yes, music school stories are excellent! Hell, I like any kind of school story!
no subject
Date: 2025-04-09 12:59 am (UTC)But I loved Julie of the Wolves, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Call of the Wild, Hatchet, all of that. :D
no subject
Date: 2025-04-09 04:48 am (UTC)I forgot to list any of those! Island of the Blue Dolphins and/or Hatchet should have been acknowledged. I tried at one point in autummn to make a lean-to in our back yard.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-10 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-14 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-12 09:59 pm (UTC)That Henry Lien book sounds interesting; thanks for recommending it.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-14 07:17 pm (UTC)