Tag: books

Stacking the Shelves

Posted March 28, 2015 by in Reviews / 10 Comments

I’m not quite sure whether I should be listing books I’ve saved on my book subscription apps this week! Best not, or I’d overwhelm my blog with book covers. But thank you to Blloon for sending me 1,000 free pages to trial the app (to get me more, if you’re in the UK, do consider signing up here! I’ll be reviewing the service soon), and Scribd for the free month. It’s been a quiet week, since I couldn’t really go to the library; I injured my foot last week, and getting to the library on crutches is just a bit too much faff.

So it’s just the two books I got myself to celebrate finishing my fourth OU textbook! Oh, and the book my sister got me.

Apparently ’tis the week of SF in translation? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to try The Three-Body Problem, and I enjoyed Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers, so when I saw these both for under £2, it seemed an obvious choice… My sister got me Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, which is the next pick for the Cardiff SFF Bookclub. <3

What’s everyone else been getting? Still behaving yourselves?

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves

Review – Cybele's Secret

Posted March 27, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cybele’s Secret, Juliet Marillier
Review from 27th January, 2011

To my surprise, I actually enjoyed Cybele’s Secret more than Wildwood Dancing. The main problem I had with Wildwood Dancing was the predictability, and maybe the tortuous way everything went wrong, and so the pacing… For the most part, Cybele’s Secret was better, in that respect. I didn’t figure out the whole plot in the first fifty pages as I did with Wildwood Dancing, so it didn’t drag so much for me — and when it got to the last part, I was hooked, toes curling with excitement, grinning like an idiot: the lot.

My main criticism of Cybele’s Secret is how very, very similar Paula’s tone was to Jena’s. The two sisters are alike, but… Not so alike, I’d thought. I might have been reading the same narrator, though, or so it seemed to me… And the separation of Paula and her father, the way she got on the ship… Once she was on the ship, she acted in character, but there was nothing level-headed about going to confront a man she believed to be violent, unscrupulous and cruel. I didn’t believe that as something she would do. Which is unfortunate, because part of the plot hinged on that.

I predicted who would be following them, too, and even how she would end, so it still didn’t keep me on my toes — but the feeling of utter familiarity wasn’t there.

It’s hard to say, after that, what I did like so much. Duarte and Stoyan, mainly. I believed in both their characters, and in their different loves for Paula. And I believed in her affection for them. The end made me smile a lot.

Rating: 4/5

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

Review – Station Eleven

Posted March 26, 2015 by in Reviews / 13 Comments

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

I originally received this to review, but have actually bought a copy in the meantime because I took too long about getting to it — and some of my friends were very enthusiastic about it.

I’m actually finding this one a difficult one to review, anyway. The prose is great, and the interweaving of the plots, the character arcs, and the way the different time periods are handled… all of that worked very well for me. The set-up of the world, too: the plague, the way people survive, the existence of something like the Travelling Symphony (though it did remind me of Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique). It just… doesn’t seem to be sticking with me. I finished it last night and I’m already forgetting details and connections.

Maybe part of it is that I didn’t really form an emotional connection to anyone. The way it shifts between central characters caused that, somewhat: I was never sure who was coming back, who was incidental. And sometimes the characters were just… drifting through their lives without purpose. The actor, for example, his hopping between wives and his callousness to his friends; he’s a well-written character, and yet not one I can be passionate about.

I think maybe what it really lacked for me was a sense of destination. “Survival” is all the characters aim for, and there’s no one unifying thing that they’re all drawn toward, so that their coming together feels unimportant. I don’t usually need some big epic event as a book’s climax, but it didn’t seem like this had a climax — it was more a character study, a world study, which normally I would enjoy, but because I didn’t really connect with any of the characters, it didn’t elevate the novel beyond “well, objectively I can see it’s well-written”.

I hesitate over giving it a rating, because I normally rate by enjoyment, but also by a sense of ‘okay, I’ll take a star off for x and y’. I don’t want to dock it stars, though, and yet it doesn’t merit the highest accolades I’ve given to books like The Goblin Emperor. I’m going to have to go with three stars (‘liked it’) — which is not to say it’s not a good book, maybe even a five star book in some ways, but it just can’t touch the involvement I’ve had with books I’ve given five stars.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Yesterday's Kin

Posted March 25, 2015 by in Reviews / 3 Comments

Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress
Received to review via Netgalley

This novella has two complementary storylines, really: each relies on the other to give it more meaning and to create tension, although each could be a satisfying story on its own. One thread of the story isn’t SF at all, as such: it’s about family and belonging, knowing who you are and knowing who your family are. The other thread is fairly typical SF: an alien civilisation contact Earth saying that they are very close to humans, genetically, and that a disease that devastated them is coming toward Earth. So then there’s a scramble to find a cure or a vaccine, with plenty of secrets and inequalities in the relationships, etc, etc.

Where the two come together is in the customs of the aliens, which emphasise family, and one of the scientists from the humans, who has besides her interests in genetics a somewhat dysfunctional family. I’m not going to spoil the various twists in the story which weave the two threads together, because I found it fairly predictable even without hints!

My main feeling is one that I’ve had before with Kress’ writing: I didn’t really feel the emotions deeply. It seemed like I should, but there was something distant about the characters. I could relate to them fine, but I almost didn’t believe their emotional moments, their turmoil. It was quite weird, intellectually recognising each reaction and knowing it was appropriate for the situation, and yet somehow not feeling as if it was real for the character.

Overall, I liked the ideas and the way the two threads work together, and though I’d begun to expect the twist, I did enjoy the way it happened. I just didn’t feel much for the story.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Nancy Kress, SF/F

Review – Myth and Magic

Posted March 24, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Myth and Magic, ed. Radclyffe and Stacia Seaman
Received to review via Netgalley

Normally I quite enjoy queer retellings of fairytales — I’ve written a couple, because it’s just fun to take such a familiar story and wring the heteronormativity out of it. I’ve enjoyed stories like Malinda Lo’s Ash greatly. But most of these took the same sort of tone, flippant and trivial — which is fine, but not what I’m interested in right now. There are some fun ideas, some humorous bits, but there’s also some aspects that make me wince: the idea that only one sort of boy (a gay one) would wear a felt scarf to dinner. Whaaaat? Stereotypes, really? Gah.

It wouldn’t be so bad if those stereotypes weren’t still harmful. In so many ways, it’s ridiculous to look at someone and say, “Oh, you look gay.” Or whatever. It’s not funny yet because it’s still so harmful.

Shrug. Mostly left me cold, though some of the stories were better than others.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, queer fic

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted March 24, 2015 by in General / 16 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is top ten books from your childhood you’d like to revisit. Now, I’m a bit odd in that I jumped from very basic books right up to adult books in a pretty short space of time. So there are some adult books mixed in here which I nonetheless read as a pre-teen.

Magician, Raymond E. Feist. Man, it took me forever to get through this doorstop, but I loved it. And promptly reread it when the extended edition, with more material and tiny font, came out.
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, I frequently revisit this one, but there’s nothing quite like the thrill of encountering Smaug by the light coming through a crack in your curtains after your parents have threatened to take away the book if you don’t go to sleep now.
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Maybe it’d just be a disappointment, but there’s still a sort of breathless romanticism about the idea of the shut away garden. And it’s set in Yorkshire, which I know well, and occasionally miss.
The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov. My most epic library fine ever was accrued on this one. The library wouldn’t let me take it out, because it was an adult book, so Mum took it out for me. And then had a lot of trouble getting it back from me. I didn’t have my own copy until I was dating my current partner and she tracked down a copy — all I’d been able to find was the book of short stories which contained the original.
The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff. Another book I read to bits. I think I went through three editions, and even the fancier edition I won as a prize from school quickly got a battering. I loved the Britain underneath the Roman occupation that Sutcliff brought to life — accurate or not, I was happy to believe in it all. And there’s some really, really powerful stuff here.
Animorphs, K.A. Applegate. I never did stick it out and get to the end of these. I loved the concept, though, the way you could let yourself believe that it could be real (or is that begin to fear that it is real?). Maybe I should just look on Wikipedia for how it all panned out…
Clockwork, Philip Pullman. This one creeped me the heck out. I never actually owned a copy, which is weird, but I loved reading it. Sometimes I’d whisper the words, because somehow it worked really well as a whispered story.
Across the Nightingale Floor, Lian Hearn. I remember being enraptured by these books. I should read them again and see if they stand up to my remembered fondness. I suspect they were quite appropriative culturally, though…
Just about anything by David Eddings. I really have a craving to reread his stuff. Just one trilogy/series will do; there’s so many similarities between them that after that it’d drive me nuts. But I did adore Sparhawk.
The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin. Or all the Earthsea books, really. God, they were an enchantment for me!

That’s ten already? Yeesh! But I have so many more I could mention…

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Elizabeth is Missing

Posted March 23, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey

Elizabeth is Missing is a very interesting play on the unreliable narrator. Maud isn’t unreliable because she’s lying or because she has anything to hide – or not exactly. She’s unreliable because she can’t hold onto her memories or make coherent sense of the things around her. It might sound a bit like a weird mystery novel: you could imagine it like that, with Maud being really sane but being gaslighted by the people around her into believing she’s crazy, and that’s why none of them will listen to her when she talks about Elizabeth. But it’s more mundane than that, at least for one strand of the plot.

The real mystery is in Maud’s memories of her sister, Sukey, who went missing. There’s a great sense of time and place here, putting it so firmly in post-WWII Britain in the same way as those youthful memories are the most vivid for elderly people. There’s a lot of really great description, too, which is partly facilitated by the fact that Maud doesn’t remember things right. You can make the most mundane things fresh and new if they’re a surprise to the narrator; you can tilt the world slightly off-balance like that. Healey does pretty well with that, and with the narration; to me, she balances a lot of things very well.

For example, it’d be easy to show the impatient daughter who just won’t listen to her senile mother. But it’s not like that in real life for most people; it’s just that people are impatient, and will say a sharp thing or roll their eyes or utter something sotto voce just to help themselves cope with what’s going on. And we see Helen like that; we see her trying to be patient, trying to understand, and sometimes coming up short. If there’s a carer in the world, especially a family member, who doesn’t feel like that, well, get them sainted.

It’d also be easy to really mess up the narration, over-exaggerating the things Maud forgets, making her memory come and go too conveniently for the story, smoothing over the edges of the illness to give us a tidy ending. Healey doesn’t fall to that temptation, either.

I can see why you might find it tedious, too painful to read, too disjointed; I liked the slow unfurling of the mysteries, even when I expected the endings, and I laud Healey for writing an elderly heroine with patience and understanding.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, mystery

Review – Half A King

Posted March 22, 2015 by in Reviews / 5 Comments

Half a King, Joe Abercrombie

I originally had this as an ARC. It’s now out in paperback, so I do actually own a copy. I feel terrible about taking so long to get round to it; I can only cite a long, long, long, long… backlog. Also, I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood; I’ve read the First Law trilogy, and that is generally pretty violent and depressing. This was still… gritty, I guess, though that word might be overused, but the characters and situation are interesting enough.

I was actually amused by the parallels (initially) with The Goblin Emperor, which I love so much. It took almost every trope I was glad that Addison avoided, and used them to spin a new story. The result isn’t entirely original (I mean, I could go “oh goodie, it’s about time for the epic cross country trek followed by a battle”), but it is fun and very readable, and Abercrombie can ditch the worst of the profanity and write something that most people wouldn’t mind their teen reading. (I shouldn’t be surprised, given I know Chuck Wendig can do it too, and that man loves profanity like I love ketchup.)

Overall, the result is an interesting bunch of characters, a not-so-typical relationship between some of them (like, the teenage crush doesn’t come to anything), and a very readable book. I’ve got Half the World from the library, and intend to get to it very soon.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Joe Abercrombie, SF/F

Review – Speaking from Among the Bones

Posted March 21, 2015 by in Reviews / 3 Comments

Speaking from Among the Bones, Alan Bradley

I do like this series — and tear through the books — when I get round to reading it, but I don’t particularly feel a pressure to keep up. There’s just something too precious about Flavia, and indeed the whole portrayal of idyllic British country life after the Second World War. My usual pet peeves with this series are firmly in place, in that sense.

But it is nice to just relax into it and enjoy the family’s weirdnesses, the unusual set up for the mystery, the intrepid Famous Five feel you get from Flavia — and the fact that hey, she’s a young girl who is great at chemistry, who deserves and demands respect from the people around her for what she can do. Sometimes she overshoots (and, ah, I think I do recognise myself in that; I was quite a mature kid, but also very aware of it and keen for people to know, which then veers toward being immature again), but mostly she’s quite right that she deserves some respect. I do enjoy her little crush on the inspector, too.

The last line is clearly set up for Things To Change, and I’m quite looking forward to that. There’s a formula now to these books; I hope the next book breaks it, at least somewhat.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Alan Bradley, book reviews, books, crime, mystery

Stacking the Shelves

Posted March 21, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

Hey everyone! If you were curious about how my year’s goals are going, you can swing by my resolutions update here. If you just want to see what I’ve acquired this week, well, read on. It’s not actually a big haul; instead of splitting them up into sections, I’ll just list them together this week, I think!