June (yes, I am a slacker) books

[jinian]

How to Be a Villain, Zawacki
Fairly amusing guidebook to evil, somewhat along the lines of the Evil Overlord list. It's unusual and fun to see writing that is actively reaching for every cliche it can find rather than trying to avoid it, but it got old by the end.

Ratha and Thistle-Chaser, Clare Bell
Ratha's Challenge, Clare Bell
I am torn between thinking four is too many of these books and wanting more of them. This was my first read of R&TC, because it's extremely rare; it was lost at the library for a while and I thought I was totally doomed, but it was found eventually. RC I have two copies of and have read once before, but it makes less sense without the previous book. I read Ratha's Creature about a thousand times in adolescence and Clan Ground only slightly fewer, and I always thought that was all. The series as a whole does a very good job of tracking Ratha from callow youth to leadership to, hmm, self-awareness? She learns to accept that she's done bad things and has to deal with the consequences, and she wants to become better at doing good. It's good. I've rarely read anything about developing a relationship after abuse that affected me so much. (I'd like to hear what others think on that issue, actually, since my reaction may be due to having such a long acquaintance with the character. Assuming anyone else has read all the books, of course.)

Sorcery and Cecilia, Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
I've never really gotten into Wrede's work, but Stevermer is one of my favorites, and this is a great book. I fancy I can see the authors playing with each other, dropping details the other will have to work into the letter game, and that makes reading the book much more fun. I'm really looking forward to the sequel, which is coming out soon. (Don't tell me how soon unless you're buying me a copy, okay? I'm going to wait like a good penniless student for it to come to the library.)

Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany
I love language-based plots, and authors playing with language and typesetting are pretty great too. This was a little hard to get into, but there were so many ideas and images that I had even more trouble getting out again. Yay.

Empire Star, Samuel R. Delany
This is a novel that someone's reading in Babel-17, and I got the library copy that had them bound back-to-back, so I read it. It's set roughly in the same universe, and it's still concerned with language, but it's definitely space opera/quest skiffy too. Interestingly self-referential.

Watchtower, Elizabeth Lynn
Lynn's fantasy has a sort of epic feeling that isn't present in a lot of what I read. It seems to have to do with how the large forces of different cultures interact and how people behave within them. I'm not sure how to explain it better. I found it uncompelling at first, but eventually I adjusted to the speed of the story and ended up liking it a lot.

Briar Rose, Jane Yolen
Juxtaposes past, present, and fairy tale pretty effectively. Since it deals with the Holocaust, it's somewhat difficult to read, but maybe also important.

Shizuko's Daughter, Kyoko Mori
A Japanese girl loses her mother to suicide and eventually comes out the other side of her grief. Very evocatively sad.

Waking the World, Allan B. Chinen
Chinen takes a variety of folk tales featuring strong women and groups them into slightly contrived categories to support his point, which seems to be that even devalued aspects of femininity have good lessons to offer today's world. Most of the stories were new to me, and I liked reading them, but what was really fun was analyzing the editor. (For instance, he seems to be big on duplicity as a good strategy if you're not going to win in a fair fight. Not something I see often.)

Wild Seed, Octavia Butler
Speaking of feminine traits, here's a story that comes awfully close to saying that women only exert benevolent control while men enslave. Granted, there are only two immortals in the book, and there's not a good way to allot stereotypical gender roles, but I'd like to see that handled by making the characters more complex. An entertaining read, but I was a little unhappy with the lack of character depth.

Time Travelers, Ghosts, and Other Visitors, Nina Kiriki Hoffman
It is Nina Hoffman, therefore it is good. My favorite of these short stories was "Skeleton Key", which made me love Hermes.

Dust, Arthur Slade
YA novel about a boy in the middle of a drought who's the only one to realize that something is seriously wrong with the scammer who has come to town to make rain. I found it actually suspenseful, which is pretty impressive.

The Tent Peg, Aritha van Herk
It was hard to keep track of the rotating narrators in this story about the young, female bush cook in a Canadian geological prospecting expedition, but the story was odd and compelling once I figured out who was who. A little annoying mysticism, a few unbelievable events, but overall very good.

Moon-Flash, Patricia McKillip
I never appreciated this book when I was ten, but something about it made me try several times even then. It still feels like there's something I'm not getting, or maybe this is not the McKillip that everyone is so impressed with. I like it, I find it emotionally evocative, it's good, but I have this feeling McKillip might be another P.C. Hodgell somehow. (My theory on Hodgell is that it's not that she's so wonderful, the books are good but not crazy good, but that there's some kind of virus that makes you tell other people to read her. I've done it too.)

The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud
I can see how, if a person hadn't ever read anything that was really funny or clever, Bartimaeus the demon might seem like he was one or both of those things. To me he just seems snide and annoyingly narcissistic. (I've read enough fanfic Malfoys to know that lovable narcissism is possible to write; this ain't it.)

Wildflowers and the Stories Behind Their Names, Phyllis S. Busch, ill. Anne Ophelia Dowden
Pretty watercolors, but superficial stories covering only about a dozen common wildflowers at a couple of sentences each.

Waters Luminous and Deep, Meredith Ann Pierce
Where the Wild Geese Go, Meredith Ann Pierce
(The latter is a picture book, the original appearance of one of the former's stories. Oddly enough, I think the collected version had been edited slightly for less obscure word choice.)
Good stories, all having something to do with water. I especially liked "The Fall of Ys" and "The Frogskin Slippers".

Meetings With Remarkable Trees, Thomas Pakenham
Huge, beautiful pictures of sixty British trees and groups of trees, plus enough text to give a good idea of what it's like to be there and why the trees are special. A very fine book.

He, She, and It, Marge Piercy
The cyberpunk elements in this book are mercifully pretty ignorable, and the characters and their conflicts are well drawn enough to make up for them. My problems with the ethics of building androids are not exactly the same as any of the issues the characters bring up, but the parallels to the story of an earlier golem meant to protect persecuted Jews are interesting.

The Goose Girl, Shannon Hale
I really, really liked this. I feel like I need to apologize, but I'm not going to. I like young adult novels with strong, talented girls who make friends and eventually prevail, and this is an excellent one of those. If you like them too, you should read it.

Sisters in Fantasy 2, ed. Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg
This is the second time I've had to unpack languishing book boxes to find a story of pameladean's I wanted to read. Thank you, Pamela. :) "This Fair Gift" is, of course, the best story in the book.

Irresistible Forces, ed. Catherine Asaro
Read the Bujold novella, "Winterfair Gifts", which is quite good though not her best work, but skip the rest. Catherine Asaro's story -- now, to be fair, I dislike when editors include their own work, but listen -- contained SPARKLY UNICORNS. Really. It's possible they were sparkly antelopes, but the unitary nature of the horn was strongly implied. And the grasses were all iridescent and gave off pretty BUBBLES. Also, the plot was stupid, but you probably could've guessed that. The other pieces ranged from unremarkable to fairly dire, but the Asaro was the worst.

Triton, Delany
The main character is painfully inept at social interaction, though people certainly try to befriend him, and, surprisingly enough, [spoiler] does not help. Feeling as though I was missing something, I checked rasfw to find that one Ron Henry says, "The interesting thing about Triton is how effectively it gets the reader to identify with the polyvalent gender and socialist socioeconomics of the moons [sic] society and see Bron as some kind of cultural primitive who can't hack it." Maybe I'm just not the right reader; the gender stuff seems very reasonable to me regardless of the book, and the economics seem just as twitlike now as when I was reading. Also, my god Bron is annoying! I know, Bron is supposed to be annoying, but I can only take so much.

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Oh, good, someone else who wasn't thrilled with The Amulet of Samarkand. It's gotten such good reviews that I thought I was being overly picky, but Bartimaeus just drove me nutso. And all those footnotes!

I wish my library would get Irresistible Forces. I really want to read the Bujold, but the rest of the collection just doesn't sound worth buying, particularly if it has sparkly unicorns. :)

And I really, really liked The Goose Girl, too. Did you know she's working on a sequel, called Enna Burning? No idea when it's supposed to be out, though.

[eub.livejournal.com]

What's struck me happening with McKillip is that people have one book of hers (or maybe two, or conceivably zero) that is good beyond all rights -- it's not the same book for different people, of course -- so they recommend that to everyone. The other books, whichever those are for me, show glints of the brilliance, so I'm willing to read them in hopes that it's another of the good-beyond-all-rights ones. (For me it's Riddle-Master.)

[drakemonger.livejournal.com]

I actually rather enjoyed the Asaro short. There were one or two in there that I couldn't stand, but by and large I enjoyed it. I thought the Asaro was a little bit blunt, but on the other hand, perhaps it makes sense for teenagers to be hitting such blunt and easily expressed lessons.

I loved Babel-17. Somewhere I have either a first or second edition of it, in a dust slip, and another ratty copy for rereading. It's the only "old" book I own. (I used to have first editions of the Illuminatus! triology - well, two first and a second - but gave them to someone else as gifts.) I should reread it sometime soon.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I loved Triton and Empire Star. Delany has said he meant for Bron to be a thoroughgoing shit, but I couldn't help sympathizing with his social challengedness.

[pameladean]

*blush* Thank you.

I have a very soft spot for that story. It's hard for me to write short fiction. And I really did work in a patent-law firm, though nobody, alas, ever showed up with magical clothing.

Pamela

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not alone, too. I like footnotes in general, but not those.

Does your library allow you to request things? SPL has a web form to do it, though the telnet access doesn't have the option. I'm sure other people would read a bunch of romance novellas.

Didn't know about the sequel. I hope it stays good. It's too bad publishers aren't more willing to take chances on non-series books.

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

I think the library does allow requests, but they've just gone through a huge catalog upgrade (so-called) and I haven't figured out how to do it yet. Sheer laziness (and unwillingness to deal with the poorly designed new system) on my part, really.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

I think it's interesting how Bron, in the social milieu of Trouble on Triton, is overpoweringly annoying; whereas Bron-like characters in modern fiction are perfectly natural. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt pushes the type to the point of parody; but Tom Wolfe, Trevanian, Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, ..., populate their novels with Bron Hjellstroms left and right and they're not jarring at all.

I love the irony that Bron, a chauvinist heterosexual male, cannot find a partner who satisfies him; so he reinvents himself as the partner who would satisfy him, and then she can't find a partner to satisfy.

Plus I love all the other characters in the book.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

Oh, and LaHaye/Jenkins too.

It's just that in Left Behind-type novels, and to some extent modern American life, Bron-like behavior is rewarded. And the interesting thing is that on Triton it's not actively penalized, it's just unrewarding.