december 2005 books

[jinian]

Pretties, Scott Westerfeld. When they make you pretty at age sixteen, they smooth out your meat. I really can't do better summarizing it than the Deadbeat Club (Flash? video). Not quite as interesting as Uglies, but I'm still looking forward to book 3.

The Art of Being a Parasite, Claude Combes, translated by Daniel Simberloff. Incredibly interesting parasitology! Highlights:

• p40: The frogs Rana ridibunda and R. lessonae can mate, creating a hybrid population intermediate in phenotype. These hybrids, called Rana esculenta (edible frog) can live in stagnant water that normally only R. lessonae can inhabit. The creepy part is that hybrids produce R. ridibunda gametes only. The R. ridibunda genome is parasitic upon the R. lessonae genome, which allows it to exploit new habitats. Whoa.


• p152: Some mitochondria favor their own transmission by skewing sex-ratio to females. (Mitochondria come from mothers, in the egg; sperm have them, but they're generally not passed to the zygote.)


• p260: Spiral valvule! (I just love the phrase. Looks like it was a translation artifact, though; the page linked says English uses the boring "spiral valve".)

Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich. From read_o_rama. Depressing, yet infuriating, and not in the way Ehrenreich meant it to be -- I was pissed off at her. I simply do not believe that the woman had never heard of a thrift store. Other upper-class stupidity abounds. Now, she may be right that this is how people actually behave, but could she at least acknowledge that she was totally clueless instead of glibly typing about how she was, oh heavens, almost poor as a child? I have never been poor, but at least I know it.

Air, Geoff Ryman. From rysmiel. A small low-tech community gets the super-web in their heads. Beautifully thought out, with detailed and believable characters and relationships. Wonderful. Go read this.

Picoverse, Metzger. From rysmiel. Entertaining, but I mostly forgot about it after reading it and, being reminded, mostly remember the bits I looked askance at. It is a mad time-travel and superscience and parallel universes thing, and if you like that sort of thing you may like this.

Bitten, Kelley Armstrong. desayunoencama rec. This is problematic in that it treads awfully near saying nonconsensual and irrevocable acts can be okay, but it also falls only a little short of excellence. I haven't seen anyone else talk about being a werewolf nearly so well. (Please note that this book is way way more literary and just better than later tacked-on paranormal-chick Armstrong novels in the same world.)

Faking It, Jennifer Crusie. Forgers and liars and thieves, whee. A lot of fun. Ties in with Welcome to Temptation, but it was fine that I'd read WtT first.
Fast Women, Jennifer Crusie. Loved it! Yes, women do quite often have sex with more than one person, and they do it when they're not in love too. Great characters.
Crazy For You, Jennifer Crusie. The stalker in this one was awfully creepy, which prevented me enjoying the sugar as much.
(I did not actually read these all in a row.)

Touched by Venom, Janine Cross. Has its own post. One weird thing is that it makes a paired reading with Ryman's excellent Air, on the topic of psychic passengers. Another is the way some folks in whileaway have totally drunk the Kool-Aid. Yes, I can see those feminist themes in there now that they point them out, and that's interesting, but having them out there in a really bad book isn't helping feminism much.

Nine Layers of Sky, Liz Williams. I've liked Williams' other work, but this one was lackluster. Roughly-present-day Russia has ties with a parallel world, where grey aliens come from, and factions in both worlds fight over what should be done. Some romance, not at all believable, and not much information about any of the characters really. It read kinda like a crummy TV movie.

White Like Me, Tim Wise. From Bitch. This made some good points about social privilege, but the book itself didn't really click with me.

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides. From read_o_rama. Highly literary novel about a Greek-American intersex person (called "hermaphrodite" in the book) and family history. I think this is the most pretentious book I've ever really enjoyed.

The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, Kenji Kawakami. Library shelf. www.chindogu.com says all that need be said. The book's commentary was just dumb.

The Compass Rose, Gail Dayton. I wish I knew where I got the recommendation for this; I want to go get more. [aha -- Kate Nepveu chez Coffeeandink.] Charmed! It has some of the stupidly-resisting-relationships plot features of standard romance novels, but the magic was mildly intriguing and the romance plot involved creating a multiple-adult marriage. My buttons are pushed; it is the yay.

Feed, M.T. Anderson. From read_o_rama. Disturbing and quite good look at a future with in-your-head TV-equivalent. Different from Air in that it's more cyberpunk: you get viral marketing, druglike trips, and other nastiness. The best part was the snippets of broadcast programming. (I think one of them might've spawned the whole book, actually. Wish I had written it down.) Another one with the first-person teen boy's "she's so weird, I love her!" to "she's so weird, I hate her!" story, to go with Stargirl.

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean. From read_o_rama. Entertaining travelogue/nonfiction about mad orchid fiends, and one man in particular who throws himself into passion after passion, orchids being only one in a fiercely monogamous series. The scientific bits could use work; Orlean's explanations of plant development and evolution are mostly factual but give an inappropriate feel. Her personal experiences are credible, though, and it's a fun book.
(The movie is plain weird.)

Magic or Madness, Justine Larbalestier. From Neile Graham. Larbalestier dedicates this to her husband, Scott Westerfeld, and she's taken a leaf from him as far as compelling plots (but also wrt massive sequel-hooks, argh). Interesting moral uncertainty, nifty and still unclear magic system, reasonably interesting characters and plot, fine feel for setting.

Evolution's Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide, Susan Oyama. From a comment thread on Pharyngula. Oyama's opinion is that the genome does not produce an organism in a vacuum, which everyone knows, and that the dichotomy between gene/cell, nature/nurture, etc. is therefore not valid, which most people think is crazy talk. Partly because of that nuance, this is not an easy read. The most engaging parts of the book are the sociobiological refutations of the second half; I would actually recommend reading chapter 11 first, since it summarizes stuff that appears in the first half in rather tedious detail and that I found hard to infer from all that (beyond that she was disagreeing with pretty much everybody). She does a little postmodern wordplay, which is amusing but one has to be wary of it. She lost points with me for using "highly evolved" and "Darwinists", though she means the latter differently from the way intelligent-design proponents do. I was pleased to see her expressing one of my major objections to sociobiology, which is that "innate" doesn't mean unchangeable and we still need to work on making a better society regardless of supposedly instinctive drives.

The Givenchy Code, Julie Kenner. Library shelf. Mainstream girly fluff plus mildly amusing mystery with a nodding acquaintance with codes.

Across the Wall: a Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories, Garth Nix. Not bad, not great, except for "Hope Chest", which I continue to really like.

The Cup of Morning Shadows, Rosemary Edghill. Series continuation from The Sword of Maiden's Tears, which is fairly good urban fantasy. There seem to be two more, but between the lack of any new publications since 1997 and the fact that there are Twelve Treasures I'm not sure it's worth tracking them down. I suppose I'll grab them if I see them used, as I did with this.

Beast, Donna Jo Napoli. Lovely, sensual retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" (with very few bungee-jumps of disbelief).

Peeps, Scott Westerfeld. rachelmanija, oyceter, and others. It's Westerfeld: it's catchy. This one's my favorite of his books so far, because of the marvelous parasitology infodumps. So so so fun.

The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming, C. J. Cherryh. It's Cherryh: the story is told largely by implication. And what we see is so obviously not all there is. And everyone has a motivation. And it's not all about humans. Very good stuff.

The Authority 2, Warren Ellis et al. Really nicely done vigilante superheroes.
BPRD: Hollow Earth and Other Stories. Ties in with Hellboy. I wasn't that interested.
Naruto 2, Masashi Kishimoto. I remain bugged by Sakura the gynoid applause meter, but this one was better plotwise than the last one. (I do go on to read more Naruto. I like it, and the Sakura problem gets better. Thanks for the encouragement, Rachel. The only reason I don't read it all nownownow is because there are massive hold lists at the library.)
Runaways 3-I-think.
Transmetropolitan 5-6, Warren Ellis et al. Still bitter, disturbing, and damned funny.

Comments

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

We love Crusie too, and have a collection of it.

I read Nickel and Dimed a few years ago and liked it. I learned a lot. I don't remember how resourceful she was, but I remember thinking that she seemed to make some fairly abritrary decisions.