Tag: books

Review – The Universe Within

Posted April 12, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Universe Within, Neil Shubin

I like sense-of-wonder science, like Carl Sagan’s assertions that we are “starstuff”. This sounds as if it’s going to be in that vein, and in a way it is — certainly it brings home that it’s only possible for us to have iron in our blood because of ancient fusion in the hearts of stars — but on a more banal level, it’s the perfect way of revising what you’ve learnt in the Open University’s introduction to science module, S104. If you can follow and understand everything here, you’re okay on at least the first and second book of that course.

It’s fairly simply written, not going too much into depth about the technical details, but more providing a survey of some important scientific discoveries. Though the title The Universe Within may imply that it’s more about our own bodies, it actually goes into a lot of Earth science, touching on continental drift, global warming, even the formation of planets and the existence of water in the solar system.

It’s an easy enough read, and not a bad way to check your understanding.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster, More

Posted April 11, 2015 by in Reviews / 5 Comments

Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster, More, Kelly Sue DeConnick, David Lopez

It’s no secret that I love Captain Marvel, so it’s probably not a surprise that I adored this, too. I love Carol and her stubborn determination to do what’s right, and the fact that she tries to do things that Captain America would approve of. I love her relationship with Rhodey (“I’m never gonna be the one who holds you down”!) and his acceptance of what she needs to do. I love the fact that she takes her cat into space with her, and I love her dumb banter in a fight.

I liked that this ties in with Guardians of the Galaxy, too — not in too obtrusive a way; you only need to know a couple of basic facts about the Guardians, mostly about Peter Quill and his father — so that we’ve got a sense of a whole universe, not just Earth’s problems.

Lopez isn’t my favourite artist for Captain Marvel, but the art is pretty good: clear, expressive, colourful.

Also, gotta love the casual queerness.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Marvel

Review – Dancing At the Edge of the World

Posted April 10, 2015 by in General / 4 Comments

Dancing at the Edge of the World, Ursula Le Guin
Review from October 12, 2012

I think Ursula Le Guin’s collections of essays were the first non-fictional works that I really learned to appreciate. I was very much not a non-fiction person at the time, but Le Guin’s writing is always so full of clarity, so well considered, that it draws me in when it’s non-fiction as surely as when it’s prose.

Obviously some of these essays are somewhat dated now, written and edited in the 70s and 80s, but there’s still a lot of interest there. Le Guin’s thoughts on the gender issues in The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, years after it was published, years after she originally wrote about it, for example. Or her reflections on her mother’s life, or on Jo March as one of the few female writers in fiction to be a writer and have a family at the same time… A personal gem for me was coming across, in the section containing book reviews, a review of C.S. Lewis that almost inevitably also reflected on J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis’s close friend and colleague, certainly shared many of Lewis’s views and was also a devout Christian. But it all comes out very differently in his fiction. Take his handling of evil: his villains are orcs and Black Riders (goblins and zombies: mythic figures) and Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is never seen and has no suggestion of humanity about him. These are not evil men but embodiments of the evil in men, universal symbols of the hateful. The men who do wrong are not complete figures but complements: Saruman is Gandalf’s dark-self, Boromir Aragorn’s; Wormtongue is, almost literally, the weakness of King Theoden. There remains the wonderfully repulsive and degraded Gollum. But nobody who reads the trilogy hates, or is asked to hate, Gollum. Gollum is Frodo’s shadow; and it is the shadow, not the hero, who achieves the quest. Though Tolkien seems to project evil into “the others”, they are not truly others but ourselves; he is utterly clear about this. His ethic, like that of dream, is compensatory. The final “answer” remains unknown. But because responsibility has been accepted, charity survives. And with it, triumphantly, the Golden Rule. The fact is, if you like the book, you love Gollum.
In Lewis, responsibility appears only in the form of the Christian hero fighting and defeating the enemy: a triumph, not of love, but of hatred. The enemy is not oneself but the Wholly Other, demoniac.

I’m not sure I agree with all of that — the Southrons are most definitely Othered, and I’m not sure they’re meant to be universal symbols of the hateful. Or rather, if they are, and perhaps they are, we need to examine why Tolkien made that decision. But I do think that this is an informative way of looking at the two authors, which reflects a lot on Le Guin herself as well.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, non-fiction, Ursula Le Guin

Review – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Posted April 9, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

People who know me fairly well are probably stunned and shocked right now. I’ve resisted rereading the first few books for so long, even in the cause of finally finishing the series, because I got sick to death of the hype. I had my first Harry Potter books just before the hype really started, but I was also already into Ursula Le Guin and Tolkien at that point, so I wasn’t quite so impressed or swept up by it. It doesn’t help that I’ve also studied the books two or three times, starting with an exhaustive read through during my A Level English class. It really doesn’t help that an older review of mine, which is fairly critical, gets a lot of trolls and snark and even one or two people saying I can’t possibly have a degree in English Literature if I don’t like Harry Potter.

I mean, I get it. I was seventeen, I was a brat, and I was sharpening my tongue on something you love. But I’m twenty-five now. Let it go.

So anyway, I finally came back to Harry Potter by way of a HabitRPG challenge to re/read all seven books, and obviously, the only place to start is the beginning. So here I am. I still have a lot of my old reservations; there’s a lack of subtlety, a lack of originality, and Le Guin still wipes the floor with Rowling. And Malfoy is still eerily similar to Jasper in some ways. But if I put that aside and just try to enjoy it for the magic, and for the nostalgia of reading it for the first time, it’s fun. There is a lot of world building — Quidditch, the history of the wizarding world, the types of spells, how Hogwarts works, etc, etc. It captures some of the really ordinary stuff about school (everybody has their Malfoy, right?) and some of the really cool stuff about fantasy and imagination, and sometimes it’s really funny and clever about the types of people Harry has to deal with (Malfoy again, also the Dursleys).

So yes, I am enjoying this now for what it is. We’ve got Le Guin, we don’t need Rowling to give us the same kind of story; here we have a main character with plenty of room for us to identify with him, a humble guy who isn’t too cocksure about his powers, an Everyman. An ordinary boy who through love and friendship can be a hero.

Okay, yeah. I get the appeal. Now sit down and shush until I’ve finished the series (yes, Ruth, I’m looking at you, not a word).

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Lumberjanes vol. 1

Posted April 8, 2015 by in Reviews / 10 Comments

Lumberjanes vol. 1, Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Brooke Allen

Not gonna lie, Lumberjanes was one of the first things I added to my list when I finally gave up and got a Scribd subscription. Volume one contains just the first four issues, while Scribd has about nine, so I imagine I’ll review the rest en masse sometime. Anyway, these first four issues are just enough to get a taste of Lumberjanes: quirky art, a great cast of characters who come in all shapes, sizes and colours, and a fun setting. There’s not time for much more than a taste, and it seemed to be over all too fast, but it is fun.

I especially love Mal and Molly. Their relationship is cute but casual, and low key enough that overzealous parents probably won’t even notice. The character designs are great; it took me a while to learn each girl’s name, because so far they haven’t focused on any one character for an issue or anything like that, but each girl has her own look, abilities and way of dealing with the world. You’ve gotta love that April’s pretty and fashion conscious… and capable of arm-wrestling a stone statue and winning.

I’m looking forward to reading more Lumberjanes; I might even subscribe to it once I’ve caught up with everything Scribd has, because it’s just cute.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics

Review – We Are Our Brains

Posted April 7, 2015 by in Reviews / 7 Comments

We Are Our Brains, Dick Swaab

I don’t particularly argue with the premise of this, but the constant emphasis on how everything is pre-determined for us before we’re even born… I prefer to live my life as if I have free choices, as if I’m a unique person formed by all sorts of circumstances over time, not just by stress chemicals my mother released while I was gestating. As if I’m responsible for, if not what I am, then what I do with what I am. Swaab’s research removes even that responsibility, if you follow it logically: if paedophilia is caused by something in the brain, and successfully inhibited in some people by their amygdala, that leaves people with the defence, “Oh, my amygdala is too small to inhibit these urges, it’s not my fault.”

You can extend that argument forever, and then what’s the point in living? We don’t experience it as just a series of chemical processes.

I also noted that Swaab avoids addressing some things. I looked in the index for any mention of asexuality, for example — surely he must have considered studying people who don’t feel sexual attraction, in all of this? Apparently not. You can’t check up on any of his results and conclusions, because there are no references. He claims that socialisation has nothing to do with gender-based preferences in toys and later, by extension, professions. Tomboyish girls are, in his book, girls gone wrong: they just have too much testosterone, so they don’t prefer the things that biologically (he says) they should.

I don’t like the way this book tackles the subject, even where I know that other research backs him up. I don’t like his attitude to other experts, to people who question his results, or… well, any of it. I’ve read most of this stuff before, but presented with much more care and consideration. I find something about Swaab’s whole attitude distasteful.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted April 7, 2015 by in General / 21 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is top ten characters you want to check in on after the story is done. This is an awesome one — there are so many characters I wonder about!

Anyone from The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison). Don’t make me choose (obviously I’d choose Maia and his wife if I had to). I know she’s not going to write a sequel (as such), so I feel free to wonder about aaaaall of the characters. And I love them all, and even those who aren’t nice… I want to know how things end up.
Faramir from The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien). Total literary crush, ’nuff said. Plus, he’s with Eowyn, so you get a twofer there.
Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Middle-earth becomes our Europe, after all. What happens to the Ents? Where are they hiding?
Caspian from Prince Caspian/Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis). All of the books could’ve been about Caspian and Lucy having adventures and I’d have been happy.
The Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman). He’s so awesome, and we know so little about him. Need to knooooowwww.
Vetch from A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin). He was so faithful to Ged, and yet we don’t really know what happened to him.
Esca from The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). We get a little bit of an idea what’s going to happen, but I want to know eveeerything.
Mori from Among Others (Jo Walton). I know a certain amount of this is autobiographical, and I know Jo a little. But I want to know about Mori, where she goes, what she does. It could be anything.
Peter Carmichael from the Small Change trilogy (Jo Walton). We don’t end the trilogy with him in a good place. At all. I want to see him heal. Or not. I want to see what happens to him and to society.
Con from Sunshine (Robin McKinley). I love the vampire lore in this book, love the awkward alliance/bond that forms between Con and Sunshine. Give me moooore.

I wonder how weird my choices are compared to everyone else’s… Drop by and let me know!

Tags: books, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jo Walton, Robin McKinley, Rosemary Sutcliff, Top Ten Tuesday

Female Authors Only Month

Posted April 6, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

For a long time, one of my goals has been to spend a month reading only female authors. It’s prompted by projects like Lilit Marcus‘ year of reading only books by women. I have too many commitments to review books and read for book clubs, etc, etc, to go for a whole year, but a month seems to be a reasonable goal and one (looking at Mount TBR) I can accomplish easily — perhaps even without missing male authors very much at all. Scrolling through my blog, I review a lot of books by women: Joe Abercrombie and Guy Gavriel Kay, even Tolkien, can all stand being sidelined for a month around here.

There’s nothing actually wrong with reading works by male writers, even if they are the archetypical white old men. Many of their books are deserving, many of them say things that people need to hear, or say things in a unique way. But the market is saturated with male writers, while female writers are still often relegated to genre, sidelined, bypassed for awards, etc.

There are issues of intersectionality, too: it’s important to read books by transgender people, people with disabilities, people of colour, working class people, queer people. There are all kinds of voices that need to be heard, need more space available to be heard in, and many of those voices are male. I think a month of reading only books by people of colour, or only books by people who identify as disabled, would be just as valuable. Even reading books by men which never made bestseller lists, or something like that. It’s just not my intent right now.

So, from 1st May to 31st May, this blog will review only books by female authors. (That’s how far in advance I’m scheduled — April is full.) Once I’ve finished reading Traitor’s Blade and The State of the Art, I’ll have no books on the go by men, and so the month of reading female authors only will commence. I might give you updates on how it’s going and what I’ve been reading, so you can see what reviews are coming up in May!

But a request to all of you, too: I want to read books by queer women, trans women, women of colour, Native American women… all kinds of women, in summary. Look through my TBR and STS posts and highlight someone you think I should read now now now, or suggest someone new. I’m especially looking for comics by women — I’m aware of Gail Simone, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Noelle Stevenson, Fiona Staples, Emma Rios… Gimme more!

Tags: books, comics

Review – The Mechanical

Posted April 6, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Mechanical, Ian Tregillis
Received to review via Netgalley

This one took me a weirdly long time to read, considering the fact that I don’t have major criticisms. I just… didn’t feel like reading it. In part that’s because of emotional stuff: tortures, transformations, losses… Tregillis writes well about these, and I tend to be bad at reading that. There’s one aspect of Visser’s character arc in particular that still has me cringing now. It’s worse with characters I feel more involved with, which is maybe the place that Tregillis failed to capture me. I’m not fascinated by his characters, so I didn’t have that drive to carry on reading and find out what happens, how they get out of their messes. I’m not sure I’ll read future books, because I only sort of want to know what happens to the characters, and I’m not sure if that’s enough to keep me going through the bad stuff.

And Tregillis definitely demonstrates he isn’t afraid to hurt his characters. There’s no real reassurance that there’ll be a happy ending. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it shapes my idiosyncratic response to the story.

In terms of plot and setting, it’s pretty awesome. He sets up an elaborate alternate history with mechanical servitors and alchemy, and a war between the French and the Dutch in consequence. There’s all sorts of philosophical stuff explored around this: concepts of the soul, theology, practical and societal changes… Tregillis doesn’t skimp on that kind of detail and background development at all. There’s room and to spare for more development as well: this isn’t a concept exhausted after the first book.

If I sound ambivalent, that’s a personal reaction; there’s a lot here to fascinate and absorb.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales

Posted April 5, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter

Read this one for the Cardiff SFF Book Club. I’m not the biggest fan of Angela Carter, having read a couple of her books back during my BA, but I do love fairy tales, so I was ready to give it a go anyway. Turns out, it isn’t a book of fairy tales by Angela Carter (which to be fair, having read The Bloody Chamber, wouldn’t be unexpected), but edited by her. She wrote a fairly scholarly introduction to it, acknowledging colonial bias, etc, etc, and commenting on the content. I’m… probably going to read that again before the book club meeting to see if I want to discuss anything from that angle.

Then comes the collection. The ordering is roughly thematic, although some stories would fit in multiple categories. Despite Carter’s acknowledgement of the limitations of her collection (due to her lack of linguistic skills), it is a pretty diverse collection, with fairy and folk tales from all kinds of cultures and time periods. It’s not just the traditional ones, but variations thereof and whole new stories that are more foreign to a Western audience in their preoccupations (I was a bit puzzled by the mothers turning into lionnesses and dogs forming from their saliva, for example). It can get a little repetitive — a Cinderella story is, ultimately, a Cinderella story: many cultures have it, and we know how it typically goes — but it probably didn’t help that I read this in the space of two days. The tellings chosen are usually fairly clear, and Carter avoided editorialising them too much, so it’s not a chore to read at all. My version does have some proofing errors like missing quotation marks, which was kind of irritating, especially when you’re trying to figure out which character is saying what in some of the more dialogue-heavy sections.

Overall, though, it’s an enjoyable read, and one I’ll keep around. Fairy tales are such a fun way to tell a story: they’ve been evolving so long, so they’re flexible, and they’re so familiar that when you make a change, it’s obvious what that change was and what you want to highlight. It can be a way to write marginalised people back into society, etc… They’re so rich and full of possibility.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books