November 2006 books

[jinian]

I'll catch up someday!

Curse the Dark, Laura Anne Gilman. Library shelf. This book is subject to the usual Luna Press plot summary: empowered woman does magic, gets laid. (They do interesting things within that sometimes, which is why I pick them up sometimes. It's just that you have to multiply those sometimeses together to get the probability of my reading a good one.) This one is a thief who's just gotten involved with her business partner, probably in the previous book, and has to steal back a scary old manuscript. I didn't have much interest in it.

Blood and Iron, Elizabeth Bear. From gwyneira. I had trouble getting into the writing style, but the story was great -- dark urban fantasy with Faerie and human mages in opposition, and huge in scope, with a sympathetic but disturbing protagonist.

Cast in Courtlight, Michelle Sagara. Library shelf. Turns out to be a sequel to something I haven't read, oh well. I liked the adventure/mystery plot and the minor magic-geeking, but there was a lot of interacting with men plot that I didn't care about. Authors should not throw in D&D-knockoff anthropomorphic-animal races when there's nothing in the story to make me take them seriously. Reading science fiction has spoiled me, and I want nonhumans to be alien now.

A Just Determination, John G. Hemry. Library shelf. Military lawyer in spaaaace! Most of the charm in this came from the premise, though I bet the dry legal story has a devoted niche market. The best part was the New Year's fruitcake ceremony, in which the most senior enlisted person and newbie officer take the holiday fruitcake ration around the ship to present it to everyone, and then it is shot off into space, accompanied by a short speech from the C.O. about how hungry aliens may find it in a zillion years and it will be just as edible then as it is now.

Medicine Road, Charles de Lint. Library shelf. Just what I was after, a short, light modern fantasy novel with pleasing illustrations.

The Bug, Ellen Ullman. Guardian geeky book list responses. Mainstream novel in which the depressed hero, rather than being an English professor, is a programmer. What this did well was show the mental bent of programmers, and how a person could get there from being devoted to human language.

Catalyst, Nina Kiriki Hoffman.
Spirits That Walk in Shadow, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I got two new Hoffmans in the same month! Heaven! These are very different from one another, though they both do the Hoffman thing of examining what to do when someone has power over you. Catalyst is very cool, though not exactly the most plausible SF ever, and deals with sex as well as changing power differentials. Spirits includes a minor character from The Thread that Binds the Bones (though I don't remember her) but introduces new magical creatures and possibilities. [There is a whole Hoffman post sitting on my computer desktop waiting for me to work on it more, brought on by rachelmanija's criticism of the tolerant attitude toward abuse that often shows up in Hoffman's work. Will have to read MORE Hoffman; woe is me.]

To Ride a Rathorn, P.C. Hodgell. Jame goes to military school, and, being Jame, busts shit up. One drawback of slow publishing is that I'm more frustrated by slow, slow plot advancement when I have to wait years between books. However, this did enough differently from Seeker's Mask that I'm pretty happy with it; people shared useful information more, and the ending wasn't what I expected at all. (Still haven't been able to get through the morass of typos that is Blood and Ivory, though.)

Bleach, chapters 180ish to about 200. One thing Bleach is really good at is SCARING ME. Gin Ichimaru? Creepy as hell. End of 190? Just seeing the hole in this guy's chest scares me, though it might be more effective because of his eyeliner and half-helm. (Ikkaku, on the other hand: clearly a maniac, but very solidly OUR maniac. That's good characterization, or something.)
Eee! Rukia's back! With a posse of shinigami made dorks by incarnation! Yay! And pushing Ichigo, as usual, with a little extra emotional appeal.
Wow, I so love Orihime. And I so wanted Rukia to smooch her. :)
Japanese Comickers 2, put out by Comickers magazine. This would be really useful for someone trying to learn how to work in different colored manga styles. It has several sample pictures of each artist's work, then breaks down the exact sequence of tools used in computer-coloring one of them.
Land of the Blindfolded 8-9 (end), Sakura Tsukuba. Still so cute that the dark parts only half work.
Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman. I hadn't read this before, and the inclusion of more modern parts made it much more personal than I expected: not just about the Holocaust but about how the survivors were many years afterward.
Revolutionary Girl Utena 5. Still weird. TV version better than manga.

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

There is a whole Hoffman post sitting on my computer desktop waiting for me to work on it more

Ooh, looking forward to this.

I bounced off Catalyst and couldn't figure out why. I should probably try again.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize you'd never read MAUS. I sent it to my mother, in large part b/c of the scene where the one character is compared to an eternally-perfect dead brother (her experience) and in part b/c I thought she could maybe work through some WW2 stuff better if it was in comic book form. I think her entire commentary was something like "Hah hah the main character's dad was so [conniving/miserly/some other mean-spirited Jewish stereotype]" which kind of made me think she'd missed the point.