March 2006 books

[jinian]

The Snow Fox, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. From read_o_rama. Understated and quiet, a little hard to get into, but very compelling after I did. Funny in places, gently sad overall. Clueless Girl thought it seemed respectful of Japanese culture and of its period. Best quote: "If you do not listen, one day you will perish for no reason."

"Little Faces", Vonda McIntyre. This year's Tiptree short list. Effectively posthuman and, yes, gender-examining. I was also really interested in the very-long-term social interactions of the apparently immortal characters.

Spin, Robert Charles Wilson. From Making Light. How many "the stars go out" stories are there now? Wilson continues to have pretty good characters and relationships as well as interesting implausibilities and scientific questions.

The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner. From oyceter. Very good YA adventure with an actually surprising plot twist. Excellent use of Greek.
The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner. Impressively disturbing sequel, also exceedingly good and surprising.

The Last Chance Texaco, Brent Hartinger. Library shelf. Teens in foster care try to behave well enough not to be sent to the prison-equivalent orphanage that's their next destination after the group home they're in. This is complicated by their personalities (well done! they are not merely misunderstood!) as well as by some external problems.

Curious Wine, Katherine V. Forrest. Classic and really sweet lesbian romance novel set in the 1970s, when lesbians were really not accepted at all yet.

Shatterglass, Tamora Pierce. First or second reread. This may be my favorite of the "Circle Opens" books; like the others, it has murder mystery and magic-teaching, but this one feels more complicated and realistic to me somehow, possibly because Tris is working with actual cops. Good even apart from being a comfort book.

Siberia, Ann Halam. I read this book and didn't want to die, which is why I jumped (really) when I read in the author bio that Ann Halam is Gwyneth Jones. Actually, I adored this book. Sloe has Technology Indistinguishable and a mission to go with it: trying to escape from a very nasty country. Her relationships with animals were so sweet, and her relationships with other humans were so cautious. It was great.

Bollywood Confidential, Sonia Singh. An Indian-American actress not getting anywhere in Hollywood takes a job that turns out not to be what she was after. Fair fluff.

The Amethyst Road, Louise Spiegler. Andre Norton Award nominee by a friend of a friend. This is also why I read Siberia, which I'm a little sorry to say totally beat the pants off this one as far as I'm concerned. (Valiant, which had many fine traits that did not include "liked by me", won.) But this is a well-written coming-of-age novel with a self-actualized girl protagonist, who makes mistakes and faces up to them and stuff. It's a good book, just didn't steal my heart.

The Price of the Stars, Starpilot's Grave, By Honor Betray'd, Doyle/Macdonald. From gwyneira. Unlike what seems like everybody else, I really didn't get into these, maybe because I've never liked anti-heroes. (Also it teased me with elusive glimpses of magic-geekery and didn't follow through. Grr.)

I'm Not the New Me, Wendy McClure. Bitch magazine rec. Somewhat funny but definitely depressing memoir centering on McClure's weight changes and relationships (none of which sound nice at all).

Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer. From Pharyngula. This one got its own post.

The Best of the Best, ed. Gardner Dozois. Some really good stuff in here, most a little depressing, all from previous Dozois anthologies.

Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower 5), Stephen King. The beginning of this seemed awfully familiar, and the recap of Wizard and Glass did not. Hmm. The universe-merging part of these is finally starting to be more interesting than annoying, but it hasn't quite made it yet.

Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn. From porcinea. Good idea (progressively lipogrammatical), fun story. I cannot help but feel, though, that the abandonment of orthography at the end is cheating.


Azumanga Daioh 4,2 (complete), Kiyohiko Azuma. Love love love.
Boys Over Flowers 14, Yoko Kamio.
Ceres 12, Yuu Watase.
Fushigi Yuugi 16, Yuu Watase. In which Miaka has to suck demons out of her boy's earlobe. Watase has outdone herself this time.
Naruto 3, Masashi Kishimoto.
Ultra: Seven Days (1), The Luna Brothers. Young superhero Ultra and her friends get their fortunes told and make some bad decisions as a result. Not bad, not great. For some reason I really disliked the parody ads and magazine covers about the characters, though the magazine interviews were all right.
The Year's Best Graphic Novels Comics & Manga, ed. Byron Preiss. I was glad to have the chance to read 4- to 6-page samples of lots of different comics, and the Gaiman intro was good, but the production values in this book were really low, especially near the end. Princess Ai had its pages completely disordered (it looks pretty bad in the first place), and several of the books pictured in the sidebar were not the same ones the art was from.

Comments

[oyceter]

Megan Whalen Turner! I'm so glad to see people reading her! I liked the first book, but adored the second to pieces; the third is much more like the tone of the second.

And oh, I loved Shatterglass most of the books as well, just because of all the details about Tris' magic and the braids and whatnot.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I bought The King of Attolia as soon as it came out. This having a job thing is really not good for my book-buying virtue. I found it much less disturbing than its predecessor, but definitely more like it than like the comparatively straightforward first.

The braids are good, but I think Cold Fire actually had a slight edge in the magic-geeking category for me. I like Shatterglass because I am something of a story-masochist; it hurt more when women we knew were killed. (Cold Fire also lost points for being creepily intimate with the sociopathy, which I do not like.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

How many "the stars go out" stories are there now?

Spin, Quarantine, and the Robert Reed duology, Beneath the Gated Sky and Beyond the Veil of Stars come to mind.

My theory is that these are all writers who were blown away by "The Nine Billion Names of God" as kids, and have spent a lot of intervening time thinking about what happened next.

[oyceter]

Whoo! King! It is less disturbing -- I was so mad when I was checking out Amazon on Queen and got spoiled for the Major Traumatic Incident. I mean, yeah, it happens in the first few pages, but still! Trauma!

I love love love King for the court intrigue, and I love Queen because it's Queen, and these books make me so happy.