February 2007 books

[jinian]

River Secrets, Shannon Hale. Alert by gwyneira, book-availability bellwether to the stars. A bit weaker than The Goose Girl and Enna Burning, but still a good YA with very enjoyable writing.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, Liz Jensen. Library shelf. This was very hard for me to get into -- the voice is Dickensian topped with heaping spoonfuls of twee and it spends ages on setup -- but once the mysterious pulp-science plot got rolling I enjoyed it quite a bit.

A Keeper of Bees, Alison Wallace. Library via Wim. Nonfiction in that way where the person talks about their life as well as their topic, which I suppose I could have guessed from the title really. Not badly done, but I like bees more than divorces or hurricane aftermaths.

Sex as a Second Language, Alisa Kwitney. Library shelf. Fun romance between a geeky secret agent guy and an actress-turned-teacher who is kind of a different species from me (she had cosmetic breast surgery, yikes). Interestingly, the secret agent, who is clearly a little way down the autistic spectrum from the heroine, is able to help the heroine's son, who has similar problems dealing with people, figure out strategies for coping with humans. The son's story arc is weirdly wish-fulfilling in that regard.

Daughter of the Bear King, Eleanor Arnason. Used bookstore. Still more adventure-fantasy than Arnason's more recent very-alien SF stories, this has a lot of peculiar charm, and not just because it has multiple stories about badass chickens. The Arnason nature is very present in the characterization of the protagonist/antagonist conflict (integrity vs. shoddiness!) and the wonderfully deadpan appendices.

Larque on the Wing, Nancy Springer. Wiscon dealers' room. This (famously Tiptreeish) book does the Springer thing where it seems very flat to me. Not that flat is bad, it's just an oil painting instead of video. The story is very much about finding ways of being in the world that work for you through fluidity, explicated by way of sex-and-gender changing. I liked it.

Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge. Bookstore & notyourmothers rec. Adventure! Con men and robbers! A pugnacious goose! Religious conflict! A heroine who loves books, grows and changes, and finishes the book without being made pretty. Interesting worldbuilding and a nice twisty plot. I found the writing a little hard to get through somehow, but I suspect it's just me -- there's a lot to like here.

The Unicorn Trade, Poul and Karen Anderson. Wim's. I liked the first short story, "Fairy Gold", but could easily have done without any of the poems.

Sporting Chance, Hunting Party, Winning Colors; Elizabeth Moon. Rereading due to fluff requirement.

A Wind From the South, Diane Duane. Enjoyable fantasy free at http://raetiantales.blogspot.com/.

Dragon's Winter, Elizabeth Lynn. Lynn-flavored epic fantasy is always good.

One Hex of a Wedding, Yasmine Galenorn. Library shelf. I continue to require fluff, so I continue to read sort-of-dreadful supernatural romances. This one was okay as mysteries go, but the author seems woowoo enough that I felt uncomfortable.

Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl. From gwyneira. Some interesting stuff, but I wanted more food descriptions and more disguises, less about the author (whom I didn't really like from what I saw of her).

Bound for the North Star: True Stories of Fugitive Slaves, Dennis Brindell Fradin. Library shelf. Some really horrifying stuff, some really inspiring stuff. The book neglects to say that a particular punishment, being forced to eat tobacco hornworms if you missed picking them off the plants, could be seriously bad news; there is an awful lot of nicotine in their guts if they're very big.

The Murder of Bindy MacKenzie, Jaclyn Moriarty. From Justine Larbalestier, I think. Lots of fun, with a very disturbing stretch in the middle where the protagonist is clearly ill and refuses to realize it. Maybe that's not too close to home for everyone, but it is for me.

A Second Treasury of Magical Knitting, Cat Bordhi. Some appealing and topologically interesting projects based on circular knitting, but I'm having trouble starting anything. Hate to mess with a finishing phase.

American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang. From oyceter. Really, really good. I in my white-girl way thought the monkey king should not give in to fate! but was disappointed. Fuck, is THAT what it's like?

Bizenghast 1, M. Alice LeGrow. Library shelf. Clinically insane Dinah and her devoted boy toy Vincent solve a series of puzzles to free lost souls, on pain of death, at a rate of one per chapter. Unfortunately, the art changes without warning and I dislike all of the styles. The story so far is not interesting enough to overcome its problems.

Moomin: the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. Found at the comic store, bought for Wim. Very different feel from the books, but really not all the way to strip format either. The strips fall into four plot arcs and introduce characters differently from the novel series.

Mushishi 1, Yuki Urushibara. From coffeeandink. The taxonomic dodginess at the beginning was far overshadowed by the interesting supernatural episodes and mysterious hero. Quietly creepy and very interesting. I don't love the art, but that's less important here.

Nana 5, Ai Yazawa. Okay, I now have a seamless Nana storyline in my head, yay. (That meant I'd already read a lot of this volume via Shojo Beat, but that's okay.)

Perfect Girl Evolution (Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge), Tomoko Hayakawa. Through about chapter 20. Sunako is an obsessive goth-horror fan, and the four cutest boys in town are assigned to civilize her with the incentive of reduced rent on their palatial palace. Sunako is very happy with her gruesome anatomical models and thinks conformity is stupid, and she's wonderfully prone to nosebleeds around the "radiant beings" she has to live with. What's great is that the boys come to love her (more than she does them!) and kind of want her to stay herself, though the rent situation keeps the tension on. Very silly and fun and sweet, even if I can't tell all those bishounen apart. [This title is ignominiously and inadequately called The Wallflower in the US release.]

Polly and the Pirates, Ted Naifeh. Library shelf. Naifeh does the great Courtney Crumrin series, too, and it's amusing just how much pirates in this book can look like goblins from the other. Polly is a very proper young woman who finds out that the Queen of the Pirates was her mother; between inherited aptitude and the surprisingly useful influence of her finishing school headmistress, she makes a good start on ruling the seas herself. (I expect further self-contained volumes if this one is successful, as that seems to be Naifeh's way. The short, satisfying plot arcs are one of the best things about Courtney Crumrin.)

Wild Adapter 1, Kazuya Minekura. From coffeeandink. Still cannot get over the wide variety of strategies employed by Minekura to avoid drawing that troublesome second eye. Sometimes it is just not there even though it should be in plain view! Um, right, plot and stuff. We get a lot of background on Kubota, who is a very scary person, in this volume, but there's not much else so far.

Comments

[jenett]

One Hex of a Wedding, Yasmine Galenorn. Library shelf. I continue to require fluff, so I continue to read sort-of-dreadful supernatural romances. This one was okay as mysteries go, but the author seems woowoo enough that I felt uncomfortable.

Her original publishing was Pagan stuff - she's since moved into fiction. (She's in my "Woo, but owns it" category, on the non-fiction.)

If you want stuff in that vein, but with less woo-woo and still with the mindless, she also writes under India Ink, with the heroine working doing natural perfumes and body products and stuff.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd heard of her nonfiction stuff but not read any. Thanks for the pointer. I actually think it was the author's note that bothered me most; I hadn't expected to be incredibly uncomfortable just because she signed herself "the Painted Panther", but I read that as a craft name and do NOT want to know it if I don't know her. Personal weirdness, I think, as I've always had kind of a thing about secret names staying secret. I guess she doesn't see it that way, for whatever reason.

[jenett]

Lots of people have a public name, too - Painted Panther is hers. (As, in fact, Jenett is mine.) I also have a secret one, which I don't share, but which I suspect people could figure out from my journal entries, because I think I've mentioned both bits of it (what language it comes from, and what it means) (though I think I've mentioned them both in filters where I don't mind if people on that filter know, and I'd tell them if they asked because it's the appropriate degree of closeness/interaction.)

Anyway. idle rambling, or something.

[oyceter]

Yeah, WA 1 feels a lot like Nana 1 to me: both are set up for the story to come.

I think I will pick up the Hardinge, thanks!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Ruth Reichl is much more likable and interesting in her first two books, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples, both of which also contain more food descriptions and are generally better. My reaction to Garlic and Sapphires can be summarized as 'oh, sweetie, this job was *so horrible* for you! Get out now now now!', because she is absolutely right that it made her into an unpleasant person, and the aftereffects do not seem to have worn off. Seriously, read Tender at the Bone. It is much much much better in all ways.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Okay!

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

I would hate to admit the incredibly anal procedure I have for knowing when books are coming out, but it's good to be useful.

I liked Tender at the Bone a lot better than Comfort Me with Apples (I read them in that order after Garlic and Sapphires, because I just didn't like Reichl in the latter and wanted much less of her personal life. (Oddly, though, oyceter had the opposite reaction, having read Comfort Me with Apples first.) There's a particularly wonderful bit where she goes to dinner at a friend's house and has really great food for the first time, guided by the friend's father (in a totally non-creepy way).