Nice little haul this week — slightly more manageable than last week’s…
Five Flavors of Dumb is Cait @ Paper Fury‘s fault; she mentioned how amazing she found it, and hey, it has a deaf main character, I’m intrigued. The Sparrow will be a reread — it’s amazing, but serious and heartbreaking.
What’s everyone else been getting their grubby little mitts on?
The Darkest Road, Guy Gavriel Kay
Originally reviewed 26th January, 2012
No matter how many times I read them, these books still make me cry, and more, they still have me reading late into the night, breathless and stunned. I know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t take any of the poignancy out of it. Of the three books, this is the strongest: the best prose, the best action, the best images, the best in all the characters. He draws everything together do well, and puts the readers’ hearts through a blender without caring how much they’re undoubtedly cursing him.
(I seem to recall calling him a ‘magnificent, glorious bastard’ the last time I read it, and my other half agrees. No one can accuse Kay of being too gentle with his characters. He’s one of the few writers who can be ruthless. Tolkien’s work, dark as it can be, holds back from killing off the characters we love, and thus makes them less mortal, less fragile, and less dear.)
I still think that Kay sucks at building romance stories up. I believe in the established love of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere — and fresh from reading The Mists of Avalon, I find myself thinking that Kay wasn’t simply talking of loyalty to a lord when he wrote of Lancelot’s love for Arthur — and in that of Sharra and Diarmuid. Kim and Dave, Jaelle and Paul, though…
I’m pretty sure I’ll return to these books again, and find the same shining delight again.
Rating: 5/5
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Ursula Le Guin
I imagine most of these stories are collected somewhere else by now, but I was also interested in this book for the introductions to each story, which may not be collected elsewhere. It’s interesting to see what Le Guin feels the stories are about, what she thinks is important to know. For example, with ‘The Wife’s Tale’, she apparently warns audiences that it is not a werewolf story at the beginning. But I thought that mistake was kind of the point? That flip-flop moment of, oh. I got it wrong. I assumed.
I’d read most of the stories before, but the poems were new. Ursula Le Guin always has a beautiful clarity about her writing, capturing mannerisms and small moments, crystallising it… and sometimes her plots feel too clever for me, but most of these are pretty accessible, and the introductions helped.
Rating: 4/5
The Galaxy Game, Karen Lord
Received to review via Netgalley
100 pages into this, I ended up giving up, at least for now. I enjoyed The Best of All Possible Worlds, and thought I remembered it quite well, and yet all the interplay of characters and cultures felt confusing here. It features a minor character from The Best of All Possible Worlds as the main character, so you wouldn’t think it, but to be honest I am wondering if it’s best to read this straight after the first, so that all the societal details are at your fingertips. I just felt lost, unable to attach to characters or events, not quite sure why X was leading to Y, missing jumps of logic.
It’s entirely possible it’s also me being stupid, but I do think this lacked the structure and tightness of The Best of All Possible Worlds. The characters didn’t grab me, either; having Grace and her husband just in the background didn’t help, because they’re already strongly formed characters, and Rafi… you don’t know much about him in the first book, and he’s grown up a bit since then.
I might pick this up again if I ever give The Best of All Possible Worlds a reread, but I’m not that eager about it.
Rating: 2/5
Touch, Claire North
Hmm, I think I’ll be pondering on this one for a while now. Like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, it takes a classic idea — in that case a kind of immortality, in this a body-hopping entity — and explores it almost to destruction. It doesn’t always work 100% for me, here, but it works better for me than Harry August, and the pace is a lot more thrilling. There is something about the narrator that seemed similar, though; I kinda hope I don’t find that same tone when I go back to Mirror Dreams, Claire North’s first book back when she was Catherine Webb. I remember loving the tone of those books, the personality of the narrator; it’d be a little sad to me if that’s more about the author’s style than about the specific character.
Nonetheless, this is fun, and the bit that works the best is the love Kepler has for the bodies he inhabits. The way you come to understand his absolutely genuine love, which at first seems impossible, then perhaps monstrous. It makes you care about him because, okay, going for the pun here — he gets into your skin. And it’d be a little intoxicating to be loved by Kepler, to have him make the best of you and give you a wonderful life because he loves you. That concept is scary and attractive at the same time, and that’s why it works.
It might be a 400 page book, but it didn’t feel like it. The short chapters help (and, don’t worry, are appropriate to the body-jumping nature of the main character — that slightly disjointed sense is perfect).
Rating: 4/5
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is Top Ten Authors we’ve read the most books from. It’s hard to tell on this one — Goodreads will only show me the authors I own the most books by, but let’s have a wild stab at it…
What about everyone else? This was surprisingly hard to think of…
It’s been a while since I did any kind of introduction post, and I have quite a lot more followers now, so I thought I’d introduce myself a little! I cobbled these questions together from interesting stuff I found in other introduction posts and memes. If there’s something you want to know, ask!
Name? Nikki.
Age? 26.
Gender? Irrelevant.
Partnered? Yes. Her name is Lisa. She does read books, I promise.
Family? Parents, sister, brother-by-mutual-agreement, grandmother. They also read books.
Background? Welsh, grew up in England.
Politics? Don’t get me started. (Small l liberal, small g green, disenchanted by all current political parties.)
Religion? Unitarian Universalism. Dad’s an atheist, Mum’s a Christian, I’m a melting pot of Christian-like and Buddhist-like beliefs.
Team? Wales (mostly in the rugby), followed by “anybody but the English”.
University? Yep, twice so far. English Literature BA and MA, and I’m a smartypants who got first class honours in the BA.
Job? A bit of everything, freelance. Mostly transcription, ghostwriting, copy. Also a volunteer for the RNIB and on the committee of a community library.
Hobby? Reading, mostly. Also sometimes running, crocheting, gaming, writing.
Earliest memory? Playing with Lego with my Grampy. He taught me how to overlap the bricks to create a stable Lego house. He liked books too.
Ebook or dead tree? Both.
Favourite book at the age of 5? There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake, Hazel Edwards.
Favourite book at the age of 10? The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg.
Favourite book at the age of 15? The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Favourite book at the age of 20? The Grey King, Susan Cooper.
Favourite book at the age of 25? The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison.
Favourite book you still have to mention? Among Others, Jo Walton.
You’re going on holiday for a week, how many books do you take? At least five, plus my ereader.
What genres will you read? Fantasy, speculative fiction, mystery, historical, alternate history, space opera, steampunk… The list goes on.
What genre won’t you read? At this point, I’m not sure what’s left that I haven’t tried at least once. Family saga?
Do you read non-fiction? Yes, anything that catches my interest. This sometimes produces weird looks at the bookstore or library.
If you were a book, what genre would you like to be? Fantasy. Portal fantasy, probably; I can’t help it, I’d love to end up in a Fionavar or a Middle-earth. Though preferably not at a time of war and destruction. Oh, oh, can I go visit Maia from The Goblin Emperor? Mind you, my manners would probably appal.
What fantasy creature would you like to be? A book hoarding dragon? I’m Welsh, after all.
What book do you wish you had written? The Lord of the Rings. Oh to be as clever and meticulous in creating a world as J.R.R. Tolkien.
Do you have a favourite poem? ‘Sonnet XCIV‘, Pablo Neruda. “If I die, survive me with such sheer force / that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold”.
What do people say to you in bookshops? “Awesome shirt.” (Truth.) Or “no, come on, put it back, you have enough books.” (Lies.)
Where are you going? Probably the library.
Do you do anything that is not books? No.
Any questions?
And hey, if you want to steal this and use it as a get-to-know-me-post, you’re welcome to.
The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
I’ve been meaning to read this one for ages; I first picked it up around when I got Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) and Maus (Art Spiegelman), but it takes time to get round to reading an autobiographical graphic novel, for me. It’s a different kind of reading, and for some reason it always takes way more of my attention than ordinary comics or ordinary non-fiction.
I think the first half, depicting Satrapi’s childhood, is actually the best part. The way the art compliments her childhood naivety, the particular view you get of the conflict coming from someone who was a child during it, all of this comes across really well. The latter half of the book is more about growing up in Iran, and less about just being in Iran, to me, and so it was less interesting, because a lot of the issues are shared between cultures. Although, for some people, that might be a revelatory thing to realise, so I’m not criticising the fact that Satrapi wrote about it — it just wasn’t as interesting for me.
I wanted to know more about Marjane’s mother, where she came from, how she formed her beliefs. Her father too, actually. Both of them sounded pretty wonderful, from Satrapi’s point of view, and that’s perhaps unexpected for the Western reader. I wish we’d got to know them a bit more through this, rather than as rather all-knowing, all-tolerating parental figures on a pedestal.
Rating: 4/5
The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman
I’ve been meaning to get to this one for ages, and then Robert suggested I read it while I was feeling cranky and not like reading anything. I’m torn on the rating; I did enjoy reading it a lot, but I also felt like it was a bit scatterbrained, a bit… well, disorganised. Lawless. Chaotic. Which is part of the point of the story, I know, but I felt it also on a narrative level. Something just didn’t quite gel for me. Still, I thought it was a lot of fun and I’ll pick up future books. It’s just that this felt very much like a first book; it reminds me a little of Gail Carriger, in that it hits some of the same highpoints but doesn’t delve into the absurdity that turns me off in the Parasol Protectorate books.
And hey, this is a book about a secret organisation that collect books from alternate worlds and keep them in a timeless dimension where they’re safe. Of course I like that aspect. Even if the mechanical centipedes and armoured alligators gave me some pause, I can quite get behind a whole society dedicated to saving books, and of course books are ties to other worlds. I liked the background with Alberich; liked the slight mystery about Kai and where exactly he’s from, what he is; liked the weird mix of mythology that gives us mechanical centipedes and vampires in the same world. And I especially liked that Vale was an archetype of a great detective, that that appealed to Irene, that part of the background was that chaotic worlds like Vale’s cause people to begin to fall in with the story, and Irene does.
I also like that she’s a capable but not infallible person; skilled enough to use the Language (also a great concept), to think outside the box, but enough of a person to have conflicts with other people, to be not the best at what she does and able to admit that. Some of her interpersonal relationships were a bit too much: her tolerance for Kai, her easy decision not to push him for information; her decision at the end to ask Bradamant not to waste energy hating her. It didn’t ring true there.
Still, pretty fun. Honestly, though? I’d have liked to spend more time exploring the Library itself.
Rating: 3/5
The Hollow Crown, Dan Jones
Received to review via Netgalley
Raised in Yorkshire, I always feel like I should know more about the Wars of the Roses. I’m sure there were attempts to teach me, and I’ve even read Shakespeare’s history plays — and enjoyed them — and yet the information just doesn’t stick. Unfortunately for this book, it was much the same again. I can keep the basics in mind, even some anecdotes (especially if they were also referred to by Will), but the whole tangle of the family trees, the politics, the exact relation of this family to that… It just won’t stay clear in my head.
So I had the unfortunate experience with this book of reading it and taking time over it and nothing going in. And it’s not the author’s fault: the writing is clear, footnoted meticulously, follows a logical order, etc. It seems to be a perfectly fine book if you’re interested in the Wars of the Roses, and I even sort of enjoyed reading it. But alas, a casualty of my utter disinterest in most of the key players.
(An exception is Richard III. I don’t know why, but I’ve been able to assimilate more information about him that others. Which I suppose makes sense, since I grew up in Yorkshire, except that if you’d asked me the names of kings on either side before a few years ago, I’d have been blank.)
Rating: 2/5