jinian | september 2005 books

Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh. Because I had paranoid feelings harking directly back to this book while writing peer reviews for my math class. I now feel that this is a book for adults really.
The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh. Also a book for adults, one that I think I would have been bored with as a kid, even more so than I was with Harriet. I should maybe read it again now, actually.

The Juniper Game, Sherryl Jordan. Web-poking. Pretty good supernatural YA with timeslipping and telepathy.

Death and the Librarian and Other Stories, Esther Friesner. Good-not-great fantasy short stories, mostly humorous.

Shadows, Behind the Eyes of Dreamers, and The Renewal, Pamela Sargent. (In Behind the Eyes of Dreamers and Other Short Novels.) Very good, don't remember enough to characterize well.

Burning Your Boats: the Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter. It took me a while to realize I could skip the early stories that didn't do much for me, but then I really enjoyed the fairy-tale takes.

Logo, Font and Lettering Bible, Leslie Cabarga. Cabarga is amusingly opinionated at the beginning of the book, but it stops being funny when he's very ranty and somewhat wrong in the later bits. It does at least look nice throughout.

Prom, Laurie Halse Anderson. Fun and very well written first-person-misfit YA featuring community and achievement.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, Gideon Defoe. From Pharyngula. The gags (about six total) are funny for about two pages, and I was alarmed by the egregious science misrepresentations, which might've been funny if some people didn't seriously think that stuff about evolution.

The Good, the Bad, and the Undead, Kim Harrison. Library shelf. Fun, not great. Familiar premise of our world gone cataclysmically fantastic, with some really good details, but kind of an annoying heroine.

The Wombat Strategy, Claire McNab. Library shelf. Cute lesbian romance/mystery with a little bit lacking in the resolution of each. (How do people with more common names deal with protagonists who share them? It's really weird, even spelled diferently.)

All-American Girl, Meg Cabot. From

read_o_rama. Girl saves U.S. President's life, is thrust into higher social class. Stubbornly modern YA fluff.

The Two of Them, Joanna Russ. Library shelf. Russ kinda rips me up, I don't know what to say. Everything goes wrong and you can see why, and maybe how to fix it, but they'll never get there. Also, parts of it are really funny.

Metallic Love, Tanith Lee. Library shelf. Definitely to be read after The Silver Metal Lover, especially if you didn't like that one; it's sort of an antidote, though of course it's still by Tanith Lee.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke. Lent by family, general hype. Quiet and slow and eerie, well realized, touching; not Best Ever Fantasy Novel as flipped out about by critics, but very good.

The Family Trade and The Hidden Family, Charles Stross. Lent by Wim. I have some real problems with the lack of inspection of the problems of our world/economy in these, but certainly getting people out of abject poverty is an urgent need too. I just worry that going to some other model (by the way, what happens when they run out of patents?) might make it more difficult to get to something good for everyone. Also please note neither of these is a whole novel. I may recommend the book later when it has all appeared.

The Word Museum, Jeffrey Kacirk. Definitions of obscure words, with a few amusing "see also"s. Good for browsing on car trips.

Banishing Verona, Margot Livesey. From

read_o_rama. Really lovely and odd. It's one of those novels in which not all that much happens, but I was interested and it didn't disappoint. I think using Asperger's syndrome didn't work all that well here as a label, but the character said to have it was a type of person who could certainly exist.

With No One As Witness, Elizabeth George. Mystery novel with a group of police-detective protagonists, which I hadn't encountered before and like. Didn't much like the creepy first-person serial killer bits. I got spoiled for something before reading this, but I enjoyed most of it anyway.

Daughters of a Coral Dawn and Daughters of an Amber Noon, Katherine V. Forrest. Very pretty language and relationships that feel real despite not being closely examined. Some outdated ecological concepts and weird evolutionary determinism. Graphic f/f sex at the end, but the really erotic part was the description of the new sculpture.
Amber Noon gets into the obsession/nurturing relationship between Joss and Africa, which I found interesting and emotionally realistic.

A Brother's Price, Wen Spencer. Mentioned on

whileaway. A romance novel from a different world, in which male births are rare and men are accordingly angels in the home, protected by large groups of sisters-by-convention. Not Tiptree fodder, but fun reversals and an engaging plot.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, In the Hand of the Goddess, and Wolf-Speaker, Tamora Pierce. I got the pretty little hardcovers of these at half-price on a gift certificate, so rereading was inevitable. Good production values, though I don't recall any proofreading mistakes from the older books, which they probably used for the text.

Thud!, Terry Pratchett. Amusing as per Discworld usual, but less satisfying to me for some reason. I have to be in a particular mood for Pratchett, and maybe I missed it by a bit.

Constellations, ed. Peter Crowther. Hit and badly-miss star-themed anthology. Very good story by Ian McDonald, most others not worth reading.

Beauty and the Beast: the Coevolution of Plants and Animals, Susan Grant. No quarrels with the book, but not much new information for me. Clearly written.

Shadows of the Night: Queer Tales of the Uncanny and Unusual, ed. Greg Herren. Tiptree web site, I think. I wasn't all that impressed with "Country People" Tiptree-wise, though; I want gender stuff, not orientation.

Teach Me, R. A. Nelson. From

rachelmanija. Wow. First-person geeky stalker girl with a very good reason to be angry.

Alien Taste, Wen Spencer. Surprisingly good fluff, much like A Brother's Price was but in the "comparison to X-Files inevitable" genre this time. I frankly can't remember which of the interesting facts about our werewolflike hero come out in this novel and which appear later, but the pace of revelations in the series is pretty good and I'm still interested in the plots.

Much Ado About You, Eloisa James. From

rachelmanija. Very cute and fun historical romance. Even some of the good romance novels have the "must resist love for no good reason" problem, otherwise there wouldn't be a book. That annoys me, and I found these characters' reasons for delay and confusion pretty believable, so I was pleased.

Boys Over Flowers 12, Yoko Kamio.
Ceres 10-11, Yuu Watase.
Fruits Basket 2, Natsuki Takaya. Yay, half-price manga of gift certificate.
Go Girl! The Time Team 1, Trina Robbins & Anne Timmons. LAME. Or possibly just very young.
Imadoki 4-5 (end), Yuu Watase. Sweet, not very complicated.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1, Alan Moore et al.
V for Vendetta, Alan Moore et al. As good as everyone says.
WE3, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Ad in Y. Wow. Bloody and awful, with some experimental layouts that don't work, but a really powerful story about cyborg animal-soldiers and their escape.
Y: the Last Man 5, Brian K. Vaughan et al.