Books read, December 2013

A bit belated — I didn’t want to post anything in the first days of the year because I was busy getting my WordPress setup functional.

Mother of the Believers, Kamran Pasha. A novel about the founding and early days of Islam, from the perspective of Muhammad’s wife Aisha.

It’s always tough, reading a fictionalized account of something like this: I find myself going “oh look, another enemy has converted to their side, geez, this ‘Messenger of God’ guy is such a Gary Stu.” Which, you know, missing the point. At the same time, though, it gestures in the direction of an actual problem, which is that it’s Pasha’s responsibility to sell me on the events he’s describing, and he didn’t always succeed. He could have done it one of two ways — either by emphasizing the numinous and miraculous, or by digging into the motivations of the people involved to help me understand why they acted that way. I would have been fine with either. Sadly, Pasha didn’t quite manage to do that consistently. Couple that with the fact that I really disagree with his handling of Aisha’s age (I think his reasoning is flawed and he failed to follow through on it anyway), and it’s surprising that I found this as engaging and readable as I did. But: engaging and readable, so recommended if you want to read a novel about the founding and early days of Islam.

A Tale of Time City, Diana Wynne Jones. Re-read for Yuletide (look for a post about that soon). It is still a lovely book. And I have even more fondness for Elio than I did before — writing fanfic will do that to you.

Ancient Hawai’i, Herb Kawainui Kane. Read for research, on the recommendation of Kate Elliott. It’s a brief and abundantly illustrated book about pre-contact Hawaiian society, ergo useful to me.

Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch. Once again, I feel like the two plots in here were just happening to share a book, rather than tying together very well. I was also deeply uninterested in Peter’s romantic relationship — or rather, his sexual relationship, since I got very little sense of any substance to it other than bedplay. (In fact, that skew had me convinced for a while that his fixation was going to prove to be a Significant Thing, to a much greater degree than turned out to be the case.) Having said that, I still enjoy the general feel of this series, and I very much liked the way the consequences of the previous book played out. To some extent, this is the denouement I felt was lacking before — though I still would have liked more at the end of Book One.

Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch. Better plotting! In part, I think, because the B plot here is actually just a continuation of what got set up in #2, and isn’t looking to be resolved any time soon, so it tooled happily along being its own thing and I didn’t expect it to interlock with the A plot the way I kept wanting before. Mind you, I found the thing they uncovered at the end to be a little O_o . . . but I may be okay with that, if the series follows through on what it’s been hinting about for a while now. There’s a point at which you really start questioning how much longer the world can go on failing to notice all the weird shit going on — I’m just sayin’.

(Ten points from Ravenclaw, though, for atrociously misleading cover copy. I expected this book to heavily feature Peter working with Agent Reynolds and having to dodge around her evangelical faith. Instead Reynolds just shows up sporadically and shows virtually no signs of being the “born-again Christian” she was billed as. I’m not sure the former would have actually been good, but it’s what I was led to expect, so the lack was annoying.)

Also: more Quicksilver. Because I have always been reading Quicksilver. And I will always be reading Quicksilver.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – Lion in Snow

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The first day we were in Krakow, we wandered around the Stare Miasto taking pictures of everything there. My last day in Krakow, I wandered around the Stare Miasto taking pictures of everything again . . . because this time it had snowed, just enough to frost everything in a bit of fluffy whiteness. I had liked this lion (at the base of the Town Hall Tower) the first time I saw him, but he was even more charming in the snow.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Yuletide reveals

My assignment this year was for Diana Wynne Jones’ A Tale of Time City. My recipient wanted something worldbuildy, but also had requested fic about Elio in several previous Yuletides, so I wrote Elio-centric fic with some worldbuilding crammed in around the edges: “Historical Curiosity,” which looks at his hundred years in the city.

I also picked up two pinch-hits. The first, “Wisdom and Power,” is another Wheel of Time story; the requester asked for several things, so I went with backstory expanding on the first time Nynaeve channeled the One Power without knowing it. The other one I grabbed because I was already halfway through a treat for the recipient: “The Life and Times of a Crusader King,” for the historical strategy game Crusader Kings 2. I don’t think you need to have played the game to read that fic; just know that it’s kind of like Risk, if Risk involved you playing a dynasty as your character and focused on things like marrying off your unattached relatives, hatching espionage plots, persuading the Pope to declare somebody a heretic so you can annex their territory, and tearing your hair out because (to quote the request) “your heir is an inbred bastard with no diplomatic or military prowess to speak of while your daughter is a grey eminence with claims on half the titles in Europe, yet you can’t switch the succession laws because you aren’t Basque”. It’s kind of absurd fun to play, and I tried to show some of that in the story.

The last full-length piece was a pure treat, based on a cracktastic request for Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet: “Nothing But One of Your Nine Lives.” The fic itself is less cracky, since I didn’t actually go so far as to make Tybalt a werecat, but, well.

Then there were four stocking stuffers, because at one point I was feeling grumpy and Grinch-ish and not at all in the holiday spirit, so I decided that I was going to write random things for people, dammit. They are, in order, “The Faces of Halloweentown” (Nightmare Before Christmas), “No Man Needs Nothing” (Lawrence of Arabia), “One Spark” (Banlieue 13 | District 13), and “Clearbrook vs. the Strangleweed” (Elfquest). That last one is pure silliness: teleidoplex always says I am Clearbrook, so when I saw a request for a story about her learning to braid her hair, I couldn’t resist.

As always, much fun. I look forward to next year. (And if you’re looking to dip your toes in the water, not only is there New Year’s Resolutions — an ongoing collection for people who want to write to a Yuletide prompt after Yuletide is over — but this year I’m helping to organize Some Day My Fic Will Come, which is a challenge for prompts that have gone unfilled for at least three years. You could make somebody very happy . . . .)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

For Your Consideration

‘Tis the season — the season in which every writer-blog you read features a list of what that writer published in the previous year, in case you’re looking to nominate things for awards.

I had a book. You may have noticed me talking about it once or twice. A Natural History of Dragons feels like forever ago, since I’m nearing the end of a draft of #3 in that series, but it was in fact just last year.

I also had two short stories, both courtesy of Mike Allen’s editorial efforts:

“The Wives of Paris,” which was in Mythic Delirium and can be read in its entirety at that link, and

“What Still Abides,” which was in Clockwork Phoenix 4 and has gotten a surprising amount of praise. (I guess there’s a bigger audience for stories written in Anglish than I expected.)

Not a vast quantity, but I’m quite pleased with all three.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.