July books

[jinian]

White Queen, Gwyneth Jones
Good book, yes. Enjoyable book, no. Too many destructive relationships for that. Self-delusion, horrible misunderstanding, betrayals, argh.

The Diamond in the Window, Jane Langton
I guess I prefer my kids' books to avoid using actual historical artifacts that were provably not where the book says they were, but apart from that this was a fine little adventure story of the "set of siblings saving some other children" species.

Inheritance, Simon Brown
Couldn't remember this one until I googled that it was "high fantasy". Then I thought, oh yes, the one with the very accurate cover depicting:

1. Fighter: Small, sturdy outlaw Prince.
2. Fighter: Giant, hulking veteran-turned-weaponsmaster.
3. Fighter: Hunchbacked veteran who can still kick your ass.
4. Mage: Student who knows how to navigate and that's about it. (A Girl!)

"High fantasy" is a phrase which here means "EFP".

The Ghost Sister, Liz Williams
Light, relationship-oriented SF with nearly human aliens, typical of Williams. I like her stuff but not enough to tell anyone else to read it.

Lady in Gil, Rebecca Bradley
Grayly humorous quest fantasy with unlikely hero goes darker at the end. A pretty fun read. I was interested enough to seek out her other work, but the library doesn't seem to have any.

In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories, Terry Bisson
Who put Terry Bisson on the Victoria's Secret mailing list? Almost half the stories in this collection contain loving descriptions of lingerie using very specific textile-related words, and it got weird after a while. The fact that there was always a justification for it might be even weirder. Anyway, most of these stories are original and fun, and only a couple were difficult for me to understand.

Flying in Place, Susan Palwick
An abused child meets the ghost of her sister, who helps her, but only so far. Beautifully written. (Could be a paired reading with Anise, see below, on the theme of older sisters who died.)

Little Birds, Anais Nin
Certainly this was more about eroticism than the Claudine books. I still found it oddly coy in places (e.g., male impotence was an unexpected theme), which may make sense with the author's statement in the introduction saying she was slumming for cash. And since this book is overtly about the smut, I wasn't particularly impressed.

Anise, Maren Henry
A Tanith-Lee-style "poor little rich girl" rebels against her obsessive father in a world ravaged by a poorly-thought-out plague, which damages some percent of one's DNA and thereby causes... short lifespan. I put that into the Magic bin as best I could, and found a decent older-YA romance with many likable characters and some quite scary ones.

Sisters in Fantasy, ed. Susan Shwartz
Many good stories, none I'd call great. Looking at the contents to find some to make remarks about, I mostly notice that they have stories in a row from Karr, Tarr, and Kerr, which are in that order rather than the single-letter-change order Tarr Karr Kerr or its reverse. How could they resist? Good stories:

• "Hallah's Choice", by Jo Clayton -- Less disjointed than usual Clayton, maybe, but the same vivid collage style.


• "Horse of her Dreams", by Elizabeth Moon -- Hmm. How not to spoil. Reminds me just a little of Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.


• "Remedia Amoris", by Judith Tarr -- Slow and sweet, about letting go, and I need to ponder why this story is okay and rape-turned-consensual isn't.

The Shadow of Albion, Andre Norton and Rosemary Edghill
Alternate history with magic, a bit like Sorcery and Cecilia, but merely fun instead of excellent. My dictionaries couldn't tell me what "inexpressibles" as a piece of men's attire might be. Has sequels, which I will neither seek out nor object to reading if they fall into my lap.

Preternatural³, Margaret Wander Bonanno
Not having read either of the first two books in the trilogy, I wasn't attached to the characters, which might've been a thing that would allow me to enjoy the book. I'm pretty sure that the snippy bitterness about the publishing industry was intended as humor, but it didn't work out for me. Mildly interesting time-hopping stuff, but not a book I needed to read.

Dark Matter, ed. Sheree Thomas
Stories from a century's worth of black Americans. I'd read several of the more recent ones, so what I was really excited about were the old stories, especially W.E.B. DuBois' tale about race relations in comet-devastated New York.

Prince of the Godborn, Geraldine Harris
Had trouble getting into this initially because one of the minor characters has a very silly name, but eventually I forced myself past his moniker and the viscous writing into a decent, ornately described quest fantasy. Oh, wait, that's Part One of a quest fantasy that might get better later on, but the library has a mysterious no-holds setting on part two. Hmph. May get round to it eventually.

Waking the Moon, Elizabeth Hand
Another alternate universe, this one with vivid characters and a fascinating plot. The excesses of the villain-equivalent stopped being interesting eventually, and the climax was a little less emotional than I wanted, but I liked this book a whole lot. It won the 1996 Mythopoeic Award.

Sunshine, Robin McKinley
This is a 2004 Mythopoeic Award winner, as well it should be. Practically anything I can say about it will tell you too much; suffice it to say that this is a book with vampires in, and you should definitely read it.

Set This House In Order, Matt Ruff
Excellent, very spoilerish discussion here. I somehow managed to divorce my knowledge that this was a Tiptree winner from my reading of the book, which my readers may now not be able to do. Sorry 'bout that. I didn't detect any ways in which it was actually speculative fiction, but I may be starting to understand the concept of "SF sensibility". Some scenes were uncomfortable for me; the books deals with child abuse in some interesting ways, but it doesn't keep it from being awful. Very, very fine book.

Fire Logic, Laurie J. Marks
Earth Logic, Laurie J. Marks
Queers in SF, lots of them, and complex family structures that warm a frustrated poly person's heart. The big plot concerns a peaceful country invaded by soldiers, and the nature of each group of people and how they can change each other. The small plot is largely about Zanja, whose tribe is eliminated by the soldier group, and who does not have the skin color of the woman on the cover. I found the writing a little distant, but it wasn't a problem for me in this instance.
(I don't actually know when I read FL, since I forgot to write it down. Probably June.)

Body Electric, Susan Squires
Someone over coffee_and_ink's way mentioned this as an interesting failure. I found it more failure than interesting: the part of the book I enjoyed the most was reading the blurbs for other romance novels out loud to Eli, and having him laugh and disbelieve. It does examine gender issues to some extent, in that the heroine has Ideas about femininity and swings from sexless/fake-lesbian persona to predator-girl, and that the AI she tries to create to be superwoman decides he's a guy, but I found the heroine and her sociobiological notions about women to be impossibly annoying. The science, computer and otherwise, was laughable. Disrecommended.

Tomoshibi (Light), trans. Marie Philomène and Masako Saito
The best part about this book of poems written by the then-Crown Prince and Princess was the way it was possible to track their lives, especially their trips to other parts of the world and their relationships. One of Emperor Akihito's poems, from a set marked "In Ethiopia":

As the black dots
Draw nearer, they assume
Discernible shapes:
They are flocks of oryx
In the savannah.

Empress Michiko's "On the Birth of Prince Naruhito":

Like a treasure
Entrusted to me,
Even though he is my baby,
There are times when I am aware
Of holding him in my arms with awe.

Most of the poems are on a given theme, since the Japanese nobility still has poetry-writing parties, but the ones that weren't produced on demand were my favorites. I also learned that the grounds of the Imperial Palace are maintained at least partly by volunteers, who come from all over Japan, which makes me wonder if they'd let weird American girls do that too. The book includes Japanese versions of all the poems as well, transliterated and in the original script.

Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Pojar & MacKinnon
I only read most of this while we were camping, but I want to mention its excellence to everyone. It's not ideal as a field guide unless you already have a good idea of what family your plant is in, but it's full of stories and amusingly delivered information. If I hadn't had it, I would never have tasted the interestingly bland-then-sweet berries of false Solomon's seal.

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I love that you had to google the one to find out what it was about (what is EPF?)

also, the lingerie one.

from dictionary.com:

inexpressibles

\In`ex*press"i*bles\, n. pl. Breeches; trousers. [Colloq. or Slang]

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Extruded Fantasy Product. What all those improbably large volumes of neverending series fantasy are made of.

Thank you! I really couldn't find it when I looked it up in my Funk and Wagnalls. :)