Books Read, July 2014

[swan_tower]

Most of these were read on the Okinawa trip.

Jhereg, Steven Brust. I had tried to read this once before, several years ago; did better this time. There’s a noticeable resemblance in the tone of this and Nine Princes in Amber, so I wonder if it’s a thing of the time period — a kind of modern edge to dialogue and narration in a setting that is mostly or entirely secondary-world. I find it somewhat jarring, but not enough so to put me off reading more.

The Duchess War, Courtney Milan. I’ve heard enough about Milan to want to give her books a try, and started with this one on recommendation. It was enjoyable, though not quite as engaging to me as Bourne’s series; I especially liked the way things went with the hero’s mother, including her in-character acknowledgment that she was in a position to play the role of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in their particular story. (It so often seems that characters in historical novels live in worlds where the literature of their periods doesn’t exist.) Also, points for the obstacles between the romantic pair feeling real, rather than contrived: Minnie’s agoraphobia felt overdramatic, but Robert genuinely screws up dealing with her concerns, and has to make up for it later.

Goliath, Scott Westerfeld. Last book of the Leviathan trilogy, an alternate WWI with bioengineering and dieselpunk. I wanted to smack Alek for his whole “destiny” thing, and the perspicacious lorises came verrrry close to being Plot Help Ex Machina, but in general this was a fun conclusion, where the characters had to make some actual choices with actual costs. My main real complaint is that Goliath was too much of a macguffin.

Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, Richard Bowes. When I found out I was up for a Best Novel WFA, I decided I should read the other nominees, and started with this one. As I suspected, it was not really my cup of tea: a semi-fictionalized autobiography, and a story of the sort where most of the fantastical content is on that border where maybe it’s real or maybe it’s symbolic or maybe the characters are just imagining things. I have never been a fan of that mode, and am not likely ever to be. But if you are a fan, your mileage may well differ.

Dragon Age: Asunder, David Gaider. Either Gaider got a ghostwriter to help him out, or he learned MASSIVE amounts from writing The Stolen Throne and The Calling. I picked this one up solely because I know the stuff that happens in it is going to be highly relevant to the third DA game (one of the characters from here will be a companion in Inquisition), and expected to do as I did with the first two, mostly skimming through it for content without really engaging. But from the very first page, this one is obviously different, and better. Worlds better. I won’t say Asunder is brilliant, but I actually enjoyed reading it. I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t already know and care about the DA setting — among other things, it suffers from the setting’s perennial problem, which is a failure to really balance the mage/templar conflict — but if you’re a fan of the games, it isn’t a bad read.

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

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There’s a noticeable resemblance in the tone of this and Nine Princes in Amber, so I wonder if it’s a thing of the time period

Thirteen years is a huge gap in genre terms, so I think I'd call that influence rather than commonality of time period.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I misremembered, then; I thought Nine Princes in Amber was late '70s, rather than 1970. My error.

BTW, I meant to note that if you find yourself hankering for a romance novel, The Duchess War features a fair bit of Victorian labor politics (nascent unions, etc). Not that you read a lot of romance, but it had more Mrissish content than most of the ones I've seen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh sigh. I never hanker for a romance novel. Really never. But I do hanker for novels with nascent unions etc., so now I have to decide whether it's worth dealing with romance novels doing perfectly well at what they do (which they ought to! it is a cromulent thing for them to do!) to get at that content.

Thanks for telling me, though. Is useful information.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Eheheh. That's kind of me, espionage, and the Joanna Bourne books. I like espionage! I like the Napoleonic period! I will put up with romance to get these things! And then I ended up liking the romance much more than usual. Which will not necessarily happen with you and Milan, but hey, at least you know it's there. (Not as much as it could be. But the hero is a duke who secretly writes agitprop for workers' collectives, and the heroine scrapes by as borderline gentry while papering the town with flyers encouraging people to get smallpox vaccinations and protect themselves against cholera. So that's something.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

There's a related novella, A Kiss for Midwinter, that deals with reproductive health. The prologue is among the most horrifying I've read, not because of gore or physical assault but because it's all words, words that matter.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That Richard Bowes book sounds very interesting.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's got lots of very vivid real-life detail about the gay and theatre scenes in New York through the decades -- the sort of thing you generally only get from writers who actually lived through it. (Research can work many wonders, but it still has its limit.)

[carbonel]

Back around the time Steven Brust was writing Jhereg, he used to say that the three best writers ever were Shakespeare, Twain, and Zelazny. So I think it's more a matter of influence than zeitgeist.

The voice used in both books is one that I have heard referred to as "first person smartass."

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of Falco in the Lindsey Davis ancient Roman mystery series too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The style really doesn't do it for me, to be honest. I think there are ways to do "first person smartass" that doesn't sound quite so culturally bound, if that makes any sense.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've heard or used "first person smartass" too. (Ah, comes from Jo Walton.) Anyway, I'm pretty sure the influence is explicit, Brust consciously aping Zelazny's style. Zelazny wrote the Foreword to To Reign in Hell, too. Brust said once he had a picture of Zelazny on his desk, there's Z references in his music. My webpage says Brust ranked Z #1, I assume I got that off the mailing list or something.

So, not so much the time period as unabashed fanboy or inspiration, just as the Phoenix Guards steal from The Three Musketeers. That's one thing about Brust -- he keeps experimenting, stylistically. Zelazny, Dumas, epistolary novels, quasi-fairy tale...