February 2006 books

[jinian]

The Feast of the Trickster, Beth Hilgartner. I liked this less than the first book (Colors in the Dreamweaver's Loom), but it had pretty good characters and some innovative takes on very standard fantasy elements.

Olympos, Dan Simmons. Sequel to Ilium. Still very interesting and overall enjoyable, with lots of plot going on. Unfortunately the anachronisms that are acceptable if sometimes groan-worthy in Shakespeare-loving robots constitute shark-jumping in socially ordinary Greeks.

"Oh, fuck me," growls Hephaestus, each word quite audible over his helmet speakers. He hurries to the device and wiggles some metal rods that remind Achilles of the ears of a rabbit.

No they bloody do not.
There was also a "nuke 'em from orbit" reference, but that at least was robots.

Harry Marshall Ward and the Fungal Thread of Death, Peter G. Ayres. Reasonably good biography of HMW, a botanical researcher working mostly in the late 1800s. I was hoping for more of the interesting plant epidemiology of the first couple of chapters, but the book came to be mostly about personal stuff.

Sing the Four Quarters, Tanya Huff. Big-time comfort reading. Have I mentioned the Cool Bits where the main characters piss each other off but grow to have a fine nonstandard relationship including multiple adults, and queerness is so utterly accepted that no default orientation is in evidence?

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Was on my long list as a Powell's pick from I think 2004, then my mom insisted I read it right away. Does *handwave* literary things, and does them very well. (The beginning/ending parallel was almost too much, but not quite.) A little depressing but very good.

Betsy and the Emperor, Staton Rabin. Library shelf. Didn't suck, but I think the author tried to do too many things at once -- heartwarming relationships, coming of age, harrowing adventure, and personal look at historical figure didn't really come together well.

Gifts, Ursula K. Le Guin. Short YA fantasy heavy on morality and self-determination. I can see the great goodness in this, but it was just a little too spare for me and I didn't really engage with it.

Demons in Eden, Jonathan Silvertown. The metaphor (for invasive species) was belabored and I knew most of the information, but the author did a good job of structuring and explaining the information, and there were some pretty good insights about what makes a plant invasive in a biome.

Evolution's Darling, Scott Westerfeld. Interesting, disturbing, very non-YA space SF with piles of moral ambiguity. Recommended.

Local Custom, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. An undistinguished romance novel with a slightly better than usual excuse for stupid misunderstandings. Somewhat entertaining, but the space-elves (Liaden people) were a little hard to swallow, and the writing was not so good.

The Shapes of Their Hearts, Melissa Scott. Library shelf. This didn't make a big impression on me, but I remember liking it fine.

Drum Calls, Drum Warning, Jo Clayton. Way more fantasy-standard than older Clayton, and disappointing about the place of women in adventure (endangered, pursued relationship material with oh yeah I guess she's really powerful too). What happened to the strong, complex women of her earlier work? I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read the third, which was completed by another author after Clayton's death, but I did in March because the library had it.

Azumanga Daioh 1,3, Kiyohiko Azuma. I love this series. And now that I know these comics come in strips, some things about the anime's pacing (if it can be said to have that) make more sense.
Box Office Poison, Alex Robinson. From beaq, indirectly and some time ago. Ordinary young people, meaning various degrees of messed up, have relationships and lives and pasts and whatnot. I did like it, thank you.
Yotsuba& 1, Kiyohiko Azuma. Yes, there's an ampersand. This is trying to do some of the same wacky, endearing things as Azumanga Daioh, but in a short comic-book format a bit like What's Michael. It works less well, but it's amusing. [It gets better in later volumes.]

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Betsy and the Emperor, Staton Rabin. Library shelf. Didn't suck, but I think the author tried to do too many things at once -- heartwarming relationships, coming of age, harrowing adventure, and personal look at historical figure didn't really come together well.

yes, but what fine choice in character naming.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Actually, the Betsy in question was a real person, so it's more of a historical reflection of the ongoing excellence of the name.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

"the main characters piss each other off but grow to have a fine nonstandard relationship including multiple adults"

:)