Tag: books

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted February 10, 2015 by in General / 12 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is ‘Top Ten Things I Like/Dislike When It Comes To Romances In Books’.

Top Five I Like:

Intensity. I like to see some give and take. The ability to say ‘you’re wrong’, yell at someone, and still have them respect you.
Communication. Talk. To. Them. (The flipside, miscommunication, tends to really embarrass me — I’m easy to embarrass.)
Forbidden love. Actually, this has to be done right, but I spent most of my academic study on Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde. Rosalind Miles’ take on both failed for me, but Steinbeck did Lancelot and Guinevere in a lovely way, and I’ve played with both stories in my own writing.
“I see who you really are.” The classic is, of course, Beauty and the Beast.
Equal partnership. Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle might not be the most popular couple in the Arthurian canon, but they’re my favourite by far. Challenged to tell another knight what women want most or be killed, Arthur flounders. A really ugly woman comes to court and says she will give the answer — if Sir Gawain marries her. He says yes, of course, and she gives the answer that saves Arthur’s life: “sovereignty”, the power to choose for oneself, is what women most want. So the wedding goes ahead, but on their wedding night, Ragnelle turns out to be a beautiful young maiden. She asks Gawain whether he would rather she be a beautiful woman in the daytime, when everyone can see her, or at night, when only he can. He lets her choose — which breaks the whole spell she’s under, because he has given her “sovereynté”. It’s maybe the most equal partnership in Arthurian literature, because it’s not from courtly literature where a knight is supposed to worship his lady, and yet it still gives power to the female partner, and shows him respecting her.

Top Five I Dislike:

“You are a precious little flower and I will protect you.” Enough said.
Stalking = love. Just say no.
Keeping secrets. I guess that’s often related to #1, but yeesh, come on, be honest. (Circumvented if this has consequences, though. Like in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.)
Insta-love. Still needs saying, apparently. Which is actually where people fall down for me even if the things I mentioned above are alright!
“I’m too low/high in station to marry you.” This can be played well (come on, I like Jane Eyre), but after a certain era, the class implications become too awful.

And if you’re really curious, you can read ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’ for yourselves here; someday I will both translate the original into modern English, and write my own novel based on it, if I get all my dreams.

Tags: Arthurian, books, Patricia A. McKillip, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry

Posted February 9, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin

I can’t honestly remember why I first picked this up. It probably wasn’t a recommendation from a friend, who would have known better than to recommend me a book where a main characters dies of brain cancer. It’s kind of a sore spot, and that explains on its own why the ending of this book wrapped a hand around my windpipe and squeezed.

It’s kind of a fun read, for the most part; light tone, easy to read, not too deep, but with a love of books pervading it, the transformative power of them and the ability they have to bring people together. I was surprised, from the light tone at the start, how awful A.J.’s situation is — and the book doesn’t baulk from making that clear, even though the prose doesn’t linger on it and keeps things very simple. There’s a trick of it, very simple sentences, which can offer a sense of profundity. Sometimes it works for this book, sometimes not; all through, the simplicity was wearing on me. Large stretches of time and momentous events are skipped over in a handful of sentences; things that should be difficult (like a guy adopting a random child he’s not related to who was just left in his bookshop) are condensed into a paragraph. It all seems too slick and easy.

Still, Maya and A.J.’s relationship is sweet, and it’s hard not to like a redemption story with a little kid and a grumpy curmudgeon softening their heart (Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, any episode of NCIS featuring Special Agent Gibbs and a child…). I’m not enamoured, I’m afraid, but I can see the potential for making a film out of it or something, and if it keeps that love of books in place when they do, maybe it’ll produce some nostalgia for little persnickety bookshops.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books

Review – Stonehenge

Posted February 8, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Stonehenge, Mike Parker Pearson

The whole idea of Stonehenge is a potent one. Those massive stones, dragged there from so far away (40 miles, by the most conservative theory) by people so long ago, for purposes that have puzzled us for centuries. Pearson’s work acknowledges the hold it has on our imaginations, and discusses a lot of the different theories before setting out his own and that of the excavation team he worked with. That aspect may be disappointing to you if you believe in a Mycenaean influence, or aliens building it, or that it’s an astronomical observatory. Or that Merlin brought the stones from Ireland and erected them with magic.

Overall, though, Pearson discusses the excavations themselves, the actual results of the digs and surveys, and the definite facts that came out of them. His interpretation is included, but I think he’s fairly clear that most of it is a working theory, albeit considered proven by himself and his team. I don’t know what archaeologists more generally think of it; to me, his theories seemed to make sense, but then I’m not an archaeologist, I have no particular specialist knowledge relevant to Stonehenge, and he wouldn’t exactly write the book to make himself sound like a crank. It does help that it seems aligned with theories about Seahenge that I read about by a different writer (review here).

If there’s a sense of wonder at history here, it’s about the things that humans could do, from so early in our history. It’s not about any religious awe; Pearson seems pretty devoid of that, at least as regards Stonehenge. And maybe a sense of wonder at what we can recover.

I think in some ways he theorises beyond his data, as the temptation always is with something like Stonehenge. I think he’s pretty convinced his theories are right, despite the fact that you can’t prove a lot of it (e.g. we can’t prove that henge burials tend to be of a family lineage over generations). But it’s overall a compelling book that pulls together the facts we have.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Faery Tales

Posted February 7, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Faery Tales, Carol Ann Duffy

This collection is pretty much what you’d expect from Carol Ann Duffy, especially if you’ve read her collection, The World’s Wife. It’s various twists on fairy tales, or folk tales, or stories that use those tropes and images and structures. The tone is generally wry and funny, and also fairly modern and casual; if you like your fairy tales serious, strictly adhering to the ‘original’ (or rather, most well known) lines, or in archaic language, then this might not be for you.

In a way, it wasn’t a great thing to read straight through. I do like fairy tales, but a lot of these stuck fairly close to what I know well already, with relatively plain language. Easy to read, but not literary. Which is fine, but not something I can just read straight through; I’d have been better dipping in and out. Still, I love Carol Ann Duffy’s voice no matter what, so I did enjoy this — and bonus, it has a gorgeous cover.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Carol Ann Duffy

Stacking the Shelves

Posted February 7, 2015 by in General / 37 Comments

And another week gone! This year is flying by already… which in a way is fortunate, because I was excited for the two books I picked up this week, both out on 03/02 (coincidentally, my mother’s birthday). Now it’s just A Darker Shade of Magic to go and then I’ll have the books I’m most eagerly coveting…

Bought

The cover of Karen Memory is just perfect. I’m already partway through — might even have finished it by the time this goes live — and enjoying it very much. I’ve already finished Trigger Warning…

Library

Guess who’s onto the chemistry section of their Open University textbook? And Stonehenge, well, who can resist archaeology about Stonehenge?

For review

I still haven’t read a single book by Ian Tregillis. I have them. I just need to, you know, read them. Oops.

Comics

Peggyyyyy. I really need to watch Agent Carter, too. Mind you, I still really need to watch Agents of SHIELD and, uh, Norton’s Hulk (though really Mark Ruffalo is the only Bruce Banner for me, sorry).

Anyway, this was quite a big haul for me, but I’m still keeping to my resolutions! For now, at least. I do need to hurry up and get reading my review copies, though. How’s everyone else been doing? Any massive hauls?

Tags: books, comics, Neil Gaiman, non-fiction, Stacking the Shelves

Review – Rivers of London

Posted February 6, 2015 by in Reviews / 13 Comments

Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch
Review from July 1st, 2011

I first came across Rivers of London on the Kindle store, and downloaded the sample. I was intrigued by the first chapter, and put it on my wishlist. A friend or two read it, and finally one lent me his copy. He thought I’d tear through it in one go.

Not quite true, as it happens. Oh, all in all, I think it took about two hours to read, but sometimes a few days would go by without me reading more. It reminded me a lot of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books — which is not really a compliment, coming from me. They were similar in tone, and something about the narrators was similar. Thankfully, I didn’t pick up on the same type of waves of misogyny — sorry, I mean chivalry — but I wasn’t entirely happy. Do guys really think with their dicks to this extent? Leslie was, most of the time, a great character — and then I was left feeling rather like she’d been there as a plot device all along. To fill in that role, of Pretty Polly, who is a silent onlooker and untroubled when wooed by a murderer…

Not a great start for women in this series, particularly with the nubile Beverley eventually used as a hostage, and then the whole thing ending with vagina dentata…!

To some extent, it depends what happens to Leslie now. Is she just the instrument for trowelling on Peter’s manpain? Or the exposition tool to help Peter figure everything out? Or will she have a plot of her own?

I will be reading Moon Over Soho, though I did think Rivers of London also had a few problems with pacing, but I won’t have the same tolerance with it. I do like the idea — actual, officially sanctioned members of the constabulary dealing with supernatural events — and I do love a good crime story when it falls together reasonably well.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Ben Aaronovitch, book reviews, books, crime, Flashback Friday, SF/F

Review – Trigger Warning

Posted February 5, 2015 by in Reviews / 14 Comments

Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman

It’s difficult to rate a book of short stories, for me. They can be so different from each other, so that one is totally to your taste and another is not. Throw in some poetry too, and there’s even more opportunity to leave people cold (I don’t know many people who aren’t picky about poetry). So the good, first: this is pretty typically Gaiman’s work, wry and dark and twisted, rich with implications and things lurking in the shadows. His stories all flow well, so that it all leads logically on to the ending (which is not to say that the endings are predictable, though familiarity with Neil Gaiman’s imagination might give you a pretty good idea).

The bad: I did find it a mite too familiar. That might partially be because I read the introductions to each story first — always something of great interest to me, but it does flavour how you’re going to experience the story. Secondly, Neil Gaiman’s poetry pretty much doesn’t do it for me. And thirdly, the opinions on “trigger warnings”, from which Gaiman took his title, were… fairly typically as though he had not actually discussed them with anyone. I’m a big advocate for them, and I think most quibbles against them are nonsense; sure, life itself doesn’t have trigger warnings. And? Why should that stop us from giving other people notice when we can? “Here be bad things” is something, but triggers are so different for different people… Stick a label on the story like you do nutrition information on food: not everyone will read it, but those who can benefit from the additional knowledge and preparation. And not “this product may contain nuts, soy or dairy products”, but “this product does contain nuts” or “this product was manufactured in a factory which also processes nuts”. Actual, precise information about common triggers. It’s not going to cover every eventuality, and we can’t pretend it will, but it would make sense to try.

And not just by saying “these stories end badly for at least one person in them”.

All in all, that sounds very critical. I did enjoy reading the stories, though, and I think Gaiman does clever things with the form. I’m just a bit too used to his kind of cleverness.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Neil Gaiman, SF/F, short stories

Tough Travels – Lairs

Posted February 5, 2015 by in General / 14 Comments

This week’s Tough Travels theme is “lairs”:

The evil lair is where a great fantasy villain will spend the plurality of his or her time.

Now of course, there are some really iconic ones — Saruman’s Isengard, Sauron’s Mordor, even Shelob’s Cirith Ungol and Smaug’s Lonely Mountain — but I’ve been racking my brains to think of something a little off the beaten path. So I remembered a quote I read somewhere quite recently, about the people who ultimately do the most evil being the people who are unshakeably sure they’re right.

Which gave me…

Roke, from The Earthsea Quartet and The Other Wind. It’s a stagnant world, not willing to bend with the times and let in new people (particularly, women). It’s the Establishment, really. With the best of intentions, they make a total mess of things. I think that goes for a lot of magic regulating bodies in fantasy…
Malthus and Aracus’ strongholds/camps/etc from Jacqueline Carey’s The Sundering. I could’ve picked Satoris for this without twisting it even slightly, since most people view him as the bad guy — essentially this world’s Sauron. And yet, his side are more accepting of grey areas and outcasts, while Malthus and Aracus’ forces are completely self-righteously convinced that they’re on the side of right. That’s more dangerous, to me.
Sky, in N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. There are some good people trapped in the system there, mostly kept turning by Itempas’ injustice…
10 Downing Street, circa Tony Blair’s stint as prime minister. Oops. That’s not fantasy.

Looking forward to seeing what other people came up with, here; hoping it won’t make me want any new books, because I don’t have a debit card to buy them with at the moment!

Tags: books, Jacqueline Carey, N.K. Jemisin, Tough Travels, Ursula Le Guin

Review – Lock In

Posted February 4, 2015 by in Reviews / 6 Comments

Lock In, John Scalzi

I generally find Scalzi’s work fun, very readable, but maybe not too thought provoking, not too serious. This managed to combine that sci-fi fun feel with serious issues of disability politics, racial politics, gender — well, all kinds of identity politics, really. It helps to read Unlocked if you’re not very good at picking up context quickly, though I don’t think it’s necessary; it gives you a lot of background, and even a starting point for imagining the characters.

I would actually be interested in listening to the audiobook for this, because Scalzi avoided stating a gender for Chris Shane. Thus, there are alternate readers — Will Wheaton and Amber Benson. The existence of the two versions meaning that I don’t really consider this a spoiler! Particularly as it’s not germane to the plot: it’s a thing outside the plot that will affect your reading, because you’re almost inevitably going to choose which gender you assign to the narrator in your head unless you’re used to queer communities. Personally, I chose to read Chris Shane as female if I could. I ended up reading them as something more nebulous: if you grow up spending most of your time outside your physical body (in the Agora or in a threep, it doesn’t matter which), are you going to think of gender in the same way as embodied people do? I don’t think we can answer that with modern technology, but I think the answer might be no, and that’s how I read Chris.

In a way, this fits right into a tradition with Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, which is a mystery as much as it’s a sci-fi story, and which relies intimately on both elements to make the full story (rather than being a mystery story that happens to be in a science fiction world, or vice versa). And because one character is walking around in an artificial body and the other isn’t, and with some of the political issues. (Ask me another day how I react when Hawking says a robot uprising might destroy humanity, everyone reports it as news, and nobody wants to listen to the sci-fi fan in the corner yelling “Isaac Asimov got there first!”)

Ahem. Anyway, Scalzi keeps his lightness of touch here, despite all the issues that he explores; it remains intensely readable, a page turner, and something that can suck you in enough that you forget about your surroundings. And I love that it’s based on all sorts of real situations: some people are ‘locked in’, we are finding solutions like the ones here for them (my New Scientist this week has a cover story: “Out of the Twilight Zone: Portable mind-reader gives voice to the locked in”), there were epidemics like this before (the closest analogue being the flu epidemic closely followed by the sleeping sickness epidemic)… These are not concerns only relevant in a hypothetical science fictional world.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, John Scalzi, SF/F

Review – Ghost King

Posted February 3, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Ghost King, David Gemmell

Okay, generally I find Gemmell’s books to be fairly fun; standard fantasy, with enough interesting characters, twists or references to keep me interested. And you’d think this one would be especially so, since it’s basically about King Arthur (albeit as a young boy). Maybe it’s the fact that this was one of the earliest of Gemmell’s books (as far as I can tell from publication dates), but it really, really didn’t work for me. There was that same moreishness about it in some ways, but I kept getting distracted by the tone, which bounced all over the place. Serious teenage crushes to slightly ridiculed slave/master relationships in a single bound… It’s great that there’s a disabled protagonist. It’s great that in that sex scene between him and the slave, she feels that she has control over the situation.

It’s less great that one encounter with the maimed comic relief hero is enough to cure her of her fears and trauma about rape, but that’s a personal bugbear of mine. One good experience doesn’t cancel out one bad experience, people! It’s something like a one-to-five ratio, more like!

Anyway, maybe it was that irreverent tone that got to me. The liberal mixing of mythologies (a guy was a proto-Arthur figure, he was also Ares, there might be a link intended with Cú Chulainn, throw in some Babylonian mythology too, and a dollop of Gemmell’s own mythology as well…) really didn’t work: it’s not that I’m fundamentally opposed to it (hell, if you dig into it, that’s exactly what J.R.R. Tolkien did), but it didn’t work. It felt thrown together.

I’m not gonna read the sequel; it’s due back at the library anyway, and may the next borrower have more joy of it.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, David Gemmell, SF/F