June books

[jinian]

Invitation to the Game, Monica Hughes. Well-elaborated dystopia turns into something a bit more interesting. Spoilers are everywhere and should be avoided. (I realize that I am little miss naive, so others might be more able to predict the ending, but it's more fun to be surprised.)

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson. The thing that got the Message through to me was that the book is so funny. Excellent.

The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr. Luca Turin sounds like a difficult person, but maybe it's a good thing. He's got a theory of how the sense of smell works that certainly seems to merit more attention than it's getting. Furthermore, he describes scents incredibly well.

A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman. From the Powell's best of 2004, I think. I didn't actually finish this, not being in quite the mood for Ackerman, but I might as well have, because I've read Ackerman before. It's lovely writing, really, it's just that content is not its strong point.

Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix. From reading lists on library web site. Illegal third child finds out there's a resistance and sees what happens to it. The book stands alone fairly well, though there are apparently later books in the same series.

Earthstar Magic, Ruth Chew. Yay, Ruth Chew! Even if all her books do wind up with the magic gone out of reach for the kids, they're charming along the way. This one was new to me, and I was happy to find kind of a disastrous adult in it. Maybe I identify more with the adults in these books now? I really seem to like finding imperfect/interesting ones.

The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson. From reading lists on the SPL web site. Curiously, I had never read this before, even though I remember being in 5th or 6th grade and lots of people were. It's sad, but it does the thing I like where actions have real consequences and the protagonist doesn't just get off the hook.

Rats Saw God, Rob Thomas. Very high-school. Predictable in general but with one plot twist I found very surprising. A good, quick read.

Holes, Louis Sachar. From reading lists on the SPL web site. Some plot elements came together a little too tidily, but I liked the descriptions and improbable adventure.

Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, John M. Ford. The only possible fault here is that "110 Stories" was saved for the end, and I already knew it. Also there's a fault in the library system that means I can't keep their books forever; Ford really requires repeated readings.

A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller. From coffee_and_ink.
"They had no feel for what these cells had to undergo in development," according to McClintock. "Organisms can do all types of things; they do fantastic things. They do everything that we do, and they do it better, more efficiently, more marvelously.... Trying to make everything fit into set dogma won't work.... There no such thing as a central dogma into which everything will fit. It turns out that any mechanism you can think of, you will find -- even if it's the most bizarre kind of thinking. Anything ... even if it doesn't make much sense, it'll be there.... So if the material tells you, 'It may be this,' allow that. Don't turn it aside and call it an exception, an aberration, a contaminant.... That's what's happened all the way along the line with so many good clues."
My note at the time was about how the scientific method as I'd been taught it forced you to come up with one hypothesis before practically anything, but my bio class currently started with observation, then demanded at least one experimental hypothesis and predictions for the null hypothesis, so I think McClintock may have been assimilated more in just the past few years. (She's not the only one to think that way, but there's certainly been a change that I think she'd agree with.)

Love's Body, Dancing in Time, L. Timmel Duchamp. Tiptree Award association. I'd already read "Dance at the Edge", a.k.a. the one about Emma Persimmon, because who could forget that name? "The Heloise Archive" was actually exciting to read, and "The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi" was very good too. "The Gift" was disturbing. I don't really remember "Lord Enoch's Revels".

Bat 6, Virginia Euwer Wolff. From reading lists on the SPL web site. 80% foreshadowing, 5% appalling event, 10% aftermath, 5% hopeful breaking out of molds.

Survival, Julie E. Czerneda. Prix Aurora finalist. Creepy as all hell in between a very good mixture of intrigue and biology. Unfortunately, it's book 1 of n. [Later: book 2 is also good, but I wonder just how many more there are meant to be. Stupid serieses.]

Random Family, Adrian Nicole Leblanc. Anthropology in a low-income neghborhood of an American city. Makes a lot of bad things very understandable. Excellent book.

Seven Spiders Spinning, Gregory Maguire. From reading lists on the SPL web site. Maybe it's just me, but I went into this sympathetic to the spiders: (1) they are the title characters and (2) this is Maguire. Things go poorly for the spiders, so I was disappointed. Unrelatedly, the ending is dopey.

Sun in Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar, ed. Mercedes Lackey. In which I find out that the good web fanfic is at least as good as what the ficced author approves. (In other words, several of these were SUPER-LAME, though the "people can be good without having a soul-mate or telepathic beastie" idea in lots of them is a much-needed infusion of diversity and sense into that universe.)

Storm Rising and Storm Breaking, Mercedes Lackey. Even after reading these, I really have no idea whether I'd read them before.

The Serpent's Shadow, Mercedes Lackey. This thing where I don't normally read Lackey and thus have a backlog of unread plot-immersion if I need it is pretty good. This one was annoying in several ways, but adequately distracting and easy.

The Big Love, Sarah Dunn. Booksense Picks. Great opening, and I liked where the search for an ideal relationship went, but it was kind of depressing throughout.

Wise Child and Colman, Monica Furlong. Mythopoeic 2005 finalists. Good magic and numinousness throughout, attractive adventure in Colman, but ultimately I feel a little flat about these. It might have something to do with the style mismatch: Wise Child is a very quiet, centered book until near the end, but Colman careers along with everything going on at once. Both are good, but I was dissatisfied after never getting back to the first feeling, which I liked very much.

Kit's Wilderness, David Almond. From citrine. Kids deal with the way death hangs over their heads in a mining town where lots of them have the same names as children killed in a mine disaster. As I recall, what citrine liked was the way the protagonist draws the outsider character back into interacting with other people by being nurturing, but I hope she'll correct me if I misremember.

Comics:
Alice 19th 6-7 (end), Yuu Watase. Okay, I admit that I really liked Nyozeka the bunny-girl. Apart from that, the ending was contrived and wrapped up too quickly, which I guess follows from the premise that negative feelings can simply be defeated all at once and ejected from the mind/personality.
Boys Over Flowers 1-3, Yoko Kamio. I'm never quite sure which kinds of hazing actually happen and which are merely for dramatic effect. This series has some pretty extreme incidents.
Ceres 9, Yuu Watase.
Fushigi Yuugi 12, Yuu Watase.
Mars 8, Fuyumi Soryo. Somehow the library has no copies of Mars 7. Eventually I gave up and moved on to the later volumes.