Review – Etiquette & Espionage

Posted December 18, 2014 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

Etiquette & Espionage, Gail Carriger

I read Soulless a while ago, and liked it enough that I had a vague intention of reading more, but not so much I was in a hurry. Likewise, I only really picked up Etiquette & Espionage because I know that Carriger’s work is pretty fun, and it was in a 3 for £5 deal in the Works. And then it languished on my to read pile for… well, just over a year. But I was feeling a bit bleh about the other books I had lying around, so I decided to just go for it and try this — and I promptly read it in one go.

It’s not a book I love like I loved, say, The Goblin Emperor. It’s more like frothy fun. It works well for that, though: 19th century sensibilities in a steampunk alternate history, girls learning to be spies, and a sprinkling of adventure. I liked Sophronia; she’s not perfect, but she tries to be decent, she doesn’t have prejudices, she does her best for the people around her, and she lets nothing get in the way of her curiosity. I guess the best term might be ‘spirited’, which does make me sound like some faintly disapproving adult…

It’s fun, and I’d definitely recommend it to teens who want a bit of adventure and supernatural stuff, without accompanying sparkles or plagiarism. (Sorry, they’re easy targets.)

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Gail Carriger, SF/F

What are you reading Wednesday

Posted December 17, 2014 by in General / 0 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?
Most recently, hmm… Etiquette & Espionage (Gail Carriger). I’d been meaning to read it for a while, since I thought Soulless was fun, and yesterday proved the perfct opportunity for it. I actually read it in one sitting, no pauses at all, which was surprising. It wasn’t earth shatteringly good or something, but it was fun.

What are you currently reading?
H is for Hawk (Helen Macdonald), which is a quite moving work on grief, training a hawk, and interaction with a historical figure. Bonus points for that figure being T.H. White, given that he wrote The Once and Future King, and I’ve done some academic work on that (albeit as little as I could get away with).

What are you planning to read next?
I actually still feel like reading familiar stuff, so I’m planning on sticking my head back between the covers of Whose Body? (Dorothy L. Sayers). I did reread that a year or so ago without going on to reread the rest of the series, but I want to do my Lord Peter spree right, and that means starting at the beginning. Though I probably will miss out the Jill Paton Walsh stuff: I just don’t feel that she does justice to either herself or Sayers, since I’ve enjoyed her own original work much more than her work for the Sayers estate.

Tags: books, Dorothy L. Sayers, Gail Carriger, reading meme

Review – Seaward

Posted December 17, 2014 by in Reviews / 6 Comments

Seaward, Susan Cooper

I’ve been meaning to reread this one for a while. It was lovely to go back to it. It’s a bit more mature than The Dark is Rising, I think; certainly, there’s a physicality between Cally and West that isn’t even hinted at in The Dark is Rising. The first time I read it I said that this book ends perfectly, “neither too early nor too late”, and I still feel that way. It’s enough to have the promise of Cally and West’s future, at the end of the book; I don’t need to read about it, and that would take away from the bittersweetness of the story.

I didn’t like this as much as the first time I read it, I think; I still enjoyed it, found it interesting, loved the creativity, but this time I was asking more questions, picking more holes. Why was this element taken from Welsh legends, and not that? When is it set — it feels unrooted, which might make for universality, but it makes it hard to imagine how Cally and West will find each other again, how to read their absence, their changes — and where do Cally and West come from?

It’s beautifully written, though, and full of lovely things: gorgeous passages, enchanting creatures (Peth!), mysteries and metaphors. I do still love it, and I also appreciate that unlike The Dark is Rising, it’s a personal journey, not an all-out fight against absolute evil. The absolutism of the Dark and the Light in those books is completely absent here, with the dichotomy drawn between Life and Death instead, and with both wearing kindly faces and less kind. It’s a journey for Cally and West, one in which they’re frightened, have enemies and allies, but it isn’t moving toward some apocalyptic endpoint, some make-it-or-break-it scene where a few decide the futures of the many.

I’m not sure the new cover does the book any favours, in that sense; the traditional fantasy elements here are the least important.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F, Susan Cooper

Review – The Zombie Survival Guide

Posted December 16, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks

If I were more secure in my ability to be humorous and keep it up throughout the review, doubtless I’d review this book with the same serious tone it takes: this theory about zombies is intriguing, this one is confirmed by personal experience, this one is ridiculous, etc. Since I’m not particularly funny, I’ll refrain. It takes a deft touch to do it at any length, and I don’t think Max Brooks really succeeds here. It becomes just a boring catalogue of things — some of it is interesting, like various ideas on how to defend different types of buildings, different ways to arm yourself for best effect, etc. But because it’s modelled very closely on the survival guide genre, it remains mostly interesting to that crowd. I’d be interested to see a survivalist’s reaction to this book, actually.

Now, I’m not going to deny I have a zombie survival plan. It goes like this: “Find my dad as soon as possible. Ensure he is armed and we have food, water, and a stock of books. Let Dad protect me. Survive.” And yes, I’m that confident: my dad would survive a zombie uprising, and he’d put a bullet through my head before he’d allow me to turn into a mindless zombie. Draw whatever conclusions about my family you wish from that…

There’s some joke here about me getting into a mindless rage because I don’t have enough books vs. turning into a zombie and how you tell the difference, but I suck at humour, we’ve established this.

Anyway, the best part of this is the section of historical records of outbreaks, and that only where they’re more creative. By a certain point, they become repetitive, and the conspiracy theories are obvious without the point needing to be laboured. I’m sure there must be real records that you could use as evidence for past zombie uprisings, but I don’t know if Max Brooks incorporated any – that would require having the give-a-shit to look up each incident he mentions, and I don’t have it.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted December 16, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is “Top Ten Books I Read in 2014”. This one you can probably predict if you follow this blog, but I won’t leave you guessing. Also, links don’t show up on my theme very well, so I’ll just say now that all the titles are links to the reviews I wrote earlier in the year.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Yep, you probably predicted this one. I just loved it to bits — I’d have happily gone back to page one and started all over again right away. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it was pretty perfect for me.
The King of Elf-land’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany. This is definitely not new to a lot of people, but it was new to me. I think I’d read one of Dunsany’s short story collections before, but not this one. It’s a lovely mythic/fairytale-like world. In style and the like, it’s not like the more typical modern fantasy, but that doesn’t put me off at all.
We Have Always Fought, Kameron Hurley. I haven’t read any of Hurley’s fiction yet; she may even be a writer who appeals to me more as a commentator than as a creator, since I did start God’s War at one point and put it down again. But I loved this collection of her essays. She very much deserved her Hugo.
My Real Children, Jo Walton. Again, probably predictable. I loved the characters in this — the sheer range of them, the ways small circumstances could change them. It was quite upsetting on a personal level because of the mentions of dementia, but the fact that it had the power to upset me only made me like it more.
The Movement: Class Warfare, Gail Simone. I think this is a pretty timely comic. This sums it up, from my review: “[T]his is a group of young people getting together against injustice. Not supervillains: injustice. Crooked cops who beat poor people and POC because they can. The whole system of privilege and disprivilege. It’s a team of heroes for the Occupy Movement, for the 99%, for the disenfranchised.”
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge. Read this all in one go on a train journey and resented every interruption. There’s a great atmosphere to this book.
Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry. I’ve always been fascinated by Stanley Milgram’s experiments, and this was a great way of delving into them — looking at it not from Milgram’s point of view, not looking at the results, but at the people he used in this experiment.
What Makes This Book So Great, Jo Walton. This is kinda cheating, in that it’s a book chock full of the books Jo Walton likes. Not limited to a top ten, of course, but I have a feeling it could furnish the whole contents of this list.
Spillover, David Quammen. Fascinating stuff, with some very obvious conclusions that apparently still need to be said. We are destroying habitats, forcing animals closer together and closer to us: we’re creating the perfect situation for a pandemic. It’s going to happen again, as it’s happened before, and we’ve just got to hope it isn’t something exotic and deadly. Even the flu is bad enough when it sweeps the world.
The Broken Land, Ian McDonald. This is the only book in this list I didn’t give five stars. But it’s stayed on my mind the whole time, and the issues it examines aren’t temporary ones that’re about to go away.

This is gonna be a really interesting week to check out other people’s lists; I’m looking forward to this! Make sure you link me to your list if you comment. I’ll always visit and comment back.

Tags: books, comics, DC, Frances Hardinge, Gail Simone, Ian McDonald, Jo Walton, Kameron Hurley, non-fiction, SF/F, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Legion

Posted December 15, 2014 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Legion, Brandon Sanderson

I reread this novella to remind myself of the character(s) and the exact events in it in preparation for reading Legion: Skin Deep. I remember loving it a lot the first time; this time, maybe because I was already familiar with the character of Stephen Leeds, it didn’t work quite as well for me. I ended up focusing more on the plot, which is relatively silly — someone compared it to Dan Brown, and actually, I can kind of see that. The plot itself isn’t that important, though; it’s how the characters deal with the problems, and how Stephen’s multiple aspects work together and how they manage to affect the real world. I think the refreshing part is that Sanderson doesn’t try to fool us any with going back and forth on whether the Aspects are real; he starts off right away with the premise that they’re not.

I’m not totally sure that Sanderson got the diagnosis for Stephen right, though. There’s nothing wrong with Stephen’s perceptions, he just parcels them out between his ‘Aspects’ and deals with everything in that fragmentary way — he talks about being schizophrenic, and yet he still knows where to draw the line between reality and his delusions. Despite the fact that he says he doesn’t have a multiple personality disorder, that seems nearer to the mark to me.

Anyway, looking forward to the sequel, although it worries me slightly that people mention it going deeper into science-y stuff. As you can see from my doubts about Sanderson’s medical research, I’m not convinced by his attempts to pin this down too firmly. He’s famous for his fantasy worlds, and deservedly so; I’m happy with contemporary fantasy, and yet very similar science fiction that doesn’t adhere to what we understand of science drives me bonkers.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Brandon Sanderson, SF/F, short stories

Review – The Language Wars

Posted December 14, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Language Wars, Henry Hitchings

In theory, this is a subject I’m really fascinated by. The whole idea of ‘proper English’, all the classism and imperialism and prejudice caught up in it, and the way people’s attitudes to language have developed. However, turns out that either the minutiae of who wrote which grammar/dictionary/book about etiquette and when isn’t that interesting, or Henry Hitchings has a really boring prose style. Or, well, both of those things. I felt like there were a lot of facts, but not much analysis to go with it; some chapters felt like they were just lists of who wrote what about grammar and when.

I was hoping for other stuff about proper English, more about the imperialism — there’s lots of scope for that without even leaving the United Kingdom, with the suppression of the Welsh and Irish languages, and there’s hints about the struggle between US and UK English. Overall, though… if that was addressed, the deadened prose style made me miss it.

It’s still an interesting topic, but this particular book had a soporific effect on me.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Stacking the Shelves

Posted December 13, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments

It’s been a quiet week, despite the great temptation caused by people’s end of year lists. Like Tor’s Reviewer’s Choice, oh man. I gave myself a limit, though, and I stuck to it.

Ebooks

Daughter of Mystery and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet were from best-of lists — possibly even the Tor one I linked. Legion: Skin Deep, I actually picked up two or three weeks ago but forgot to include back then. Mea culpa.

For review

A somewhat random choice from Bookbridgr!

Library

Someone in my book group said they wouldn’t rest until I read more of Brubaker’s work, so, tahdah. I thought I’d make sure they could rest. Crow Country was a somewhat random choice between that, Badgerlands and Otter Country; I feel in the mood at the moment to read about Britain’s indigenous species.

Anyway, that’s it for me. Anyone else been getting anything exciting? Or are you saving all the excitement for Christmas?

Tags: books, Brandon Sanderson, comics, SF/F, Stacking the Shelves

Review – A Face Like Glass

Posted December 12, 2014 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge
Review from November 24th, 2012

I’d never heard of Frances Hardinge before, and I have no idea how I came across this on the Kindle store, but I’m so very glad I did. It’s an enchantment of a book — I think I said something similar, recently, about Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and I can see the similarities there: the long games being played in both plots, the dazzling strangeness of the worldbuilding, the magic of it all. But at the same time, they’re very different stories: it’s just something about the flavour that’s similar.

A Face Like Glass is marketed as YA, but I don’t think you should see that as a discouragement. It’s not one of those YA books that slots neatly into the ranks of the YA books that’ve come before: it’s something wild and entirely itself. The same goes for the fact that I’ve tagged it as dystopia — it doesn’t follow the current dystopia tropes either. It felt like a breath of fresh air for me.

I got hooked on it from Amazon’s preview, which is worth a look: it’s a slowish start compared to the pace the book gets to near the end, but if you’re intrigued by it, you’re in for a wonderful ride. I loved every scrap of it, to the extent where I’m almost afraid to look for Frances Hardinge’s other books in case they aren’t as good. I love Neverfell and I love the bizarre details of the world and all the weird concepts like people being unable to perform expressions without learning them and…

Basically, it’s a heck of a ride. Best impulse buy of my year, up to and including my big plush Moomin. Possibly excluding only the ticket I bought to the screening of Avengers Assemble that got me hooked.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Erin Morgenstern, Flashback Friday, Frances Hardinge, SF/F

Review – Heart's Blood

Posted December 11, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Heart’s Blood, Juliet Marillier

When I first read Heart’s Blood, I really loved it, and at least part of that was because I finally found a Juliet Marillier book I really appreciated. I’m a little sad that I don’t think I loved it as much this time as I did before: things that were obvious to me then were painfully so now, and the narrator still seems like much the same as every other Marillier narrator.

On the other hand, there’s still plenty to enjoy: the imaginative treatment of the Beauty and the Beast story, which takes some pretty familiar elements and twists them just enough that they can still surprise you. I love the main character’s calling as a scribe, and her slow rediscovery of herself and how to stand up for her world. I like that it’s firmly rooted in the real world, for all the supernatural elements, and in history: this isn’t a disconnected fairytale, but one that takes place in a world that carries on around it. I liked Anluan, too; he works very well as a Beast character, because at first he does seem so awkward, so impossible, but he blossoms as much as Caitrin (Beauty) does.

There’s a lot of great side characters, too; all of the characters that surround Anluan and Caitrin are interesting, and really, there could be whole books about what exactly each of them is, what they did, who they really are.

Despite me saying that I didn’t enjoy it as much as before, I did enjoy it a lot. It’s a satisfying story, where good triumphs but not too easily, where struggles and setbacks feel real. The attraction and desire between Anluan and Caitrin comes naturally, and doesn’t cross the line into being too much of a fairytale — it doesn’t break the in-the-real-world feeling that the history and setting give the story. I love Caitrin’s development over the course of the book, and I love the way everything comes together at the end.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Juliet Marillier, SF/F