Books read, November 2015

[swan_tower]

This was one of those months that ends with me in the middle of reading a bunch of things, but not done with any of them. :-P

The Drowning Eyes, Emily Foster. Provided to me by the editor, Lee Harris. This is one of the upcoming novellas from Tor.com, a story set in a world where Windspeakers can control the weather — but for them to do so safely, they have to undergo a ritual which replaces their “wet eyes” with spheres of stone. Shina is still wet-eyed, but after invaders start killing Windspeakers and steal a priceless relic, she’s the only one left who can get it back. I very much liked the concepts behind this; my quibble (and it will be interesting to see whether this is a frequent reaction for me with novellas) is that I wanted more. The invaders never get explored in detail, and the story only begins to touch on the complexity of the Windspeaker thing. So it’s enjoyable, but I think I’ll enjoy it even more if this turns out to be the jumping-off point for a novel or series of novellas.

Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone. Third book of the Craft Sequence, after Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise (c’mon, Max, why couldn’t you take pity on us and number them in order). It’s a pretty slow burn compared to its predecessors; it starts off with a bang when Kai nearly gets herself killed trying to save a goddess whose investments have gone sour, but getting from there to the underlying issues takes a while. In the meantime, this is where this starts to look like a series: not only are there references to Alt Coulumb and Dresediel Lex, but characters from the previous books show up and play a fairly vital role. And as usual, Gladstone is also exploring social issues — in this case, the question of how a small island nation (clearly influenced by the Polynesian cultural sphere) can survive as an independent state in the face of much larger powers, and what constitutes the preservation of traditional culture vs. its commercialization for tourist purposes, and when it’s okay for a culture to change. The Penitents were super-creepy; they were probably the best part of the book for me, along with the pool in which the priests of Kavekana make and keep their idols. (The story of how Kai remade her body in the pool was excellent.)

Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers, ed. David Mazel. More research. It took me a surprisingly long time to get through this, given how thin of a book it is, but that happens sometimes when a book is a collection of smaller texts. (See also why it takes me forever to read an anthology.) The bulk of the content consists of excerpts from accounts written by female mountaineers from the nineteenth century up through the mid-twentieth, with brief introductions by Mazel to give context. It’s interesting to watch mountaineering techniques and jargon develop through the decades, and also to see feminism become an explicit issue, especially around the time when women started trying to mount expeditions without any male assistance at all.

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

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I actually found Full Fathom Five a pretty good entry point into the series! (I asked Max if I could read them out of order, because the con booksellers had sold out of the others, and he said it should be fine.) But when I went back for Three Parts Dead, I recognized characters I'd first met in FFF. I haven't yet read the rest because I am so disorganized. /o\

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

He did number them in order. He didn't write them in order.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

He wrote an article at tor.com about the issue: "This is How I Numbered My Books and I’m Sorry" (http://www.tor.com/2014/05/26/this-is-how-i-numbered-my-books-and-im-sorry/).

[sovay]

a world where Windspeakers can control the weather — but for them to do so safely, they have to undergo a ritual which replaces their “wet eyes” with spheres of stone.

What is the in-world rationale for this? "Eyes of stone" always puts me squarely in Tam Lin territory (heart of stone, eyes of tree), which I assume is not the intended evocation here.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The story is too short to really go into it. The stone eyes are given to them by their deity, so it's presumably some kind of divine protection?