Books read, March 2015

[swan_tower]

Avatar: The Promise, vol. 1
Avatar: The Promise, vol. 2
Avatar: The Promise, vol. 3, Gene Luen Yang.

I read the first of these a while ago, but forgot until I went to shelve my new acquisitions that I hadn’t read the rest of the set. So I backed up to the start again.

In this trilogy of comic books, Yang takes on issues of postcolonialism and interracial marriage — no, really. It got me reflecting on the differences between what I’ll term a “simple” treatment of something and a “simplistic” one: here, those issues get resolved more easily than they would be in the real world, but they are present. I think of that as a simple treatment, but not a simplistic one. The city of Yu Dao is a Fire Nation colony, but it’s a century old; it has been built up from a tiny village by a mixed group of Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom citizens, some of whom have intermarried, others of whom are close friends. Making amends for Fire Nation imperialism by yanking all people of that ethnicity out of Yu Dao would not actually be justice . . . but just leaving them there isn’t quite a solution, either. And this all gets tangled up in a promise between Zuko and Aang, which provides your regularly scheduled dose of Zuko Angst. :-) I quite enjoyed it.

Avatar: The Rift, vol. 1
Avatar: The Rift, vol. 2, Gene Luen Yang.

Haven’t acquired and read the third volume yet. Aang takes the Gaang to see an old sacred Air Nomad site, and finds a factory has been built on top of it. Things get complicated from there. I’m really enjoying these comic-book continuations; they provide nice explorations of the world and how it changed from Aang’s day to Korra’s. And I really like how the Air Nomad fankids are being handled.

Chains and Memory, Marie Brennan. My own books don’t count.

a friend’s novel in manuscript I won’t give the title or author here, because this book hasn’t even been submitted to editors yet, and it would be cruel of me to taunt you all with gushing about its awesomeness when you won’t be able to read it for who knows how long. :-) But never fear! I will be back to talk about it more when the time comes.

Chains and Memory, Marie Brennan. Can you tell what I’ve been revising this month?

Taltos, Steven Brust. The structure of this one was interesting. Based on the cover copy, I was quickly able to make a general guess at what was going on in the brief/later bits opening the chapters, and it added a nice (if slightly vague) element of tension. The flashback stuff . . . I liked it, but I think I would have liked a smaller/less frequent dose of it, just because it kept pulling me out of the main story with Aliera/Morrolan/the Paths of the Dead/etc. The latter had some very cool moments in it, and I would have liked to stay in that mood, instead of jumping back and forth. But hey: I don’t fault Brust for experimenting. With a long series like this, it’s nice not to have every installment be like every other installment.

The Guns of Avalon, Roger Zelazny. I was a little unfair to this one: I started reading it some number of months ago, got interrupted, and when I came back I didn’t feel like re-reading the beginning. So it took me a while to get my footing and remember what Corwin was doing, apart from “trying to take over Amber.” I got into it pretty well by the end: there was a point where it seemed entirely possible that the message of the story was going to be “by the way, the protagonist is the villain,” and even though it didn’t go down that path, it went far enough to be interesting. And I want to see what’s up with Dara, though given the time period these were written, I recognize that the answer to that question may frustrate me more than it pleases.

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

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Taltos: and it was his fourth book in the series! I like the structure, but I've re-read it a lot.

Guns: been a while, but I seem to remember earlier Corwin being more of a jackass, if not villain. Or intimated to be such.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, Corwin's definitely a jackass. It was just that there's a stretch where everybody is saying to him "don't attack Amber; it's under siege right now from some terrible threat we don't understand," and he's just going full steam ahead. If he'd kept on that way, then yeah -- I would have called him a villain, because he would have been putting his own ambition and hatred of Eric ahead of the well-being of his supposed kingdom.

But as it happened, he changed course. With an eye to his own self-interest, naturally -- "if I swoop in and save the day, that'll earn me a lot of political credit" -- but he did come to their aid.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Ha! I just have to comment on the coincidence. My 14-year-old son still lets me read to him at bedtime (he’s in Honors English but reading is definitely not how he’d choose to spend his leisure time, and it’s good one-on-one time for us). Anyway, in the fall we read the first five Amber books, and after that I got to introduce him to Brust. He liked Jhereg well enough, and put up with plodding along through Yendi and Teckla, then we got to the fun ones. Like you, we read Taltos in March, and then last night we finished Phoenix. My favorites are coming up reasonably soon: Dragon and Issola. I’ve warned him that before we can read Tiassa we'd have to read the Khaavren books.

I’ve been enjoying the AtlA comics as well, although I’m buying and reading them in batches of three, so that I don’t have months of suspense. I think I read The Rift a few months back.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I prefer to buy these in batches so I can get the whole story. A single volume doesn't feel like much, on its own.

I'll try to remember to pause for the Khaavren books before Tiassa. :-)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

That's a fairly long pause.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I have long stretches of time going by between books anyway; I might as well play around with the order, too.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

You could read them in parallel... the first of them, The Phoenix Guards, was published right after Phoenix and would be good to read at that point too, given the pacing of the Vlad books.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

My first Vlad book was _Phoenix_, because of the title. It worked. I don't think you *have* to do anything, and Steve's taken to actively frustrating chronological order people.

_Phoenix Guards_ is fun for me, but if your son starts finding them a slog I wouldn't hold him to it. Three Piro books is a whole lot of Paarfi at once.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Paarfi is probably my favorite character in all of Dragaera, but he's not to everyone's tastes, I'm sure!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've been reading in publication order, which is what he recommends. (In contrast to the Vorkosigan books, which I read according to internal chronology.)

I tried The Phoenix Guards a while back, because I had bounced off Jhereg, but it didn't work for me at the time. Having gone back to publication order, I will see what I think of that one when I get there.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I liked the first two Paarfi books but I found The Viscount of Adrilankha to be a bit much.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Brust definitely plays around with structure some more in some of the later Vlad books, although many fall into a pattern.

Taltos I also find interesting for being the first place where it's made very clear that Vlad is an unreliable narrator. Or at least it's the first place where I noticed.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

At this point I just assume every first-person narrator is unreliable.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Reasonable. I was a naive 19-year-old when Taltos came out so it made more of an impression on me.