October Book Log
This was a very odd-feeling month of reading, overall, for some reason. Too many books that somehow weren't quite what I wanted them to be or what I expected them to be, or something.
90. Inversions by Iain M. Banks
This is part of Banks' Culture series of SF novels, but it's set entirely on a world with a sort of medieval feel, and essentially the only SF element is the strong implication that the two central characters are, shall we say, not exactly local. Said characters being a physician attending a king, and a bodyguard working for another. (Well, technically the second one isn't a king, but, whatever, close enough.)
I wish I had something substantial to say about this one, but mostly... it was sort of okay? Honestly, it failed to grip me all that much. It's hard to say why exactly, because it certainly has a number of elements that seem as though they should be pretty exciting. Murder, intrigue, war, secret identities... But, while it did get more interesting towards the end, mostly I never felt particularly invested in any of it. I almost wonder if it's just because I didn't quite know what kind of story it was, going in, so my literary taste buds were set for space opera and didn't respond well to getting something more fantasy-flavored instead. More likely it's that Banks' very light touch when it comes to telling us much of anything about these characters and what they're doing here and who they are as people was a bit too light for me and left me without the feeling of having a good reason to care about them.
Ultimately, I dunno. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But... *shrug*.
Rating: 3/5
91. Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller
Lulu Miller has a weird fascination with David Starr Jordan, a scientist and naturalist known, among other things, for collecting and cataloging an extraordinary amount of fish, and for being the first president of Stanford University. In particular, she found herself obsessing over a particular incident in Jordan's life, in which thirty years of his fish-collecting career ended up in disarray on the floor after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, each specimen suddenly separated from its label. It's not too difficult to see a broadly applicable metaphor in this instance of a human trying to impose order on a world that, in an instant, can tumble all those efforts into chaos. How, Miller wondered, did Jordan keep going through things like that? What kind of mindset leads to picking your fish up off the floor and sewing the labels back onto the ones you can still identify, instead of just giving up in the face of nature's obvious indifference to your life's work?
The book that results from this obsession is partly a biography of Jordan, whose life, it turns out, takes some surprising and disturbing turns and ultimately offers up one set of answers to Miller's questions that should very much not be emulated. But it's much more a personal set of musings on chaos and order and how we perceive and categorize the world, and on how we can possibly find meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe.
I'll be honest, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about any of this at first. It was interesting, for sure, but the thought of Miller perhaps projecting her own issues onto some long-dead scientist felt mildly uncomfortable in a hard-to-pin-down kind of way. I also found her mindset and the exact nature of her philosophical journey a little difficult to connect with at times, as she perceives certain things significantly differently than I do, even if we're kind of starting out in the same place. But the place she arrives at the end of her journey is one I do feel comfortable joining her in, and along the way she weaves together a really interesting and sometimes deeply insightful tapestry of rich and important themes. So I think it's safe to say she won me over.
Rating: 4/5
92. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager
When Maggie was five, her family lived in a haunted house, where their experiences became so horrifying they left one day with only the clothes on their backs, never to return. At least, that's what her father's best-selling book claims. Maggie herself, to the limited extent she remembers anything at all, doesn't quite remember it that way, and her mother has basically admitted to her that all of it was all a lie. Her father, however, would say nothing about it to his dying day beyond "what happened, happened." Now Maggie has inherited the house, and despite her father's warning that it isn't safe for her there, she's returning to fix the place up, and hopefully to find out what actually happened that day.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Some of the details are pretty ridiculous, and it drags a bit in the middle, but it's an interesting take on familiar haunted house tropes, and it was a quick, engaging read that did keep me interested in finding out what the real story was. Mind you, I was pretty sure I figured out that real story well before the end, but while I was almost right about it, the novel did add a little extra twist to things to keep things interesting.
Rating: 4/5
93. Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The sixth collected volume of the dark fantasy comic Monstress. As always, it's fantastically complicated, visually gorgeous, and full of rich, complicated worldbuilding. This one features a particularly impressive climax and a real cliffhanger of an ending. I'm also amused and genuinely impressed by the way I increasingly find myself thinking: Huh, who would ever have imagined that the relationship between a damaged, violent, traumatized woman and the people-eating lovecraftian monster she's unwillingly bound to would end up giving me these kinds of oddly warm feelings. Hell, just pulling that off would probably make this series interesting all by itself, even without any of the other cool stuff it also features.
Rating: 4/5
94. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
A book about -- you guessed it! -- trees, especially about the aspects of them that we humans tend not to perceive or appreciate. Trees, it turns out, are much more sophisticated, complicated organisms than meets the eye, especially when you consider them in the context of a forest or an ecosystem.
It's all really interesting subject matter, and I did learn some cool things, but I had decidedly mixed feelings about the book. Wohlleben gets, I think, a bit too repetitive on certain subjects, whereas with others he doesn't go into nearly as much scientific detail as I would like. (Although perhaps that's not too surprising. Not only is this book clearly meant to have a broad appeal, including to less science-y types, but Wohlleben himself is a forester, not a scientist.) He also does a lot of what I can only call anthropomorphizing, and while to a certain extent that's effective in making his point that trees are very much living things, not inanimate objects, he goes a bit further with it than I'm entirely comfortable with, and it leaves me with niggling doubts about the extent to which he might be letting sentiment trump science.
Rating: 3.5/5
95. Doctor Who: Peacemaker by James Swallow
A Doctor Who novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones, set in the Wild West of America's Colorado Territory. The plot involves a traveling salesman whose snake oil "medicines" have suddenly become so miraculously effective they can even cure smallpox (although not without some side effects), and a couple of dangerous alien creatures who've come looking for him.
It feels very much like it could be an episode of the show, which does seem to be the general feeling this particular line of books tends to go for. It'd make an adequate, but not an especially exciting or memorable episode, I'd say. Lots of very familiar tropes here.
It was a reasonably diverting read, anyway, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that's remotely going to stick in my head about it is the moment where I suddenly realized that these characters were wandering around in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and were then presumably going to get back into their time machine and return to the 21st century and holy crap, no, Martha, please think about the possible consequences of that! She didn't, though, and apparently neither did the author. But then, we all probably had pandemics much less in our brains in 2007, when this was published.
Rating: 3.5/5
96. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Nineteen-year-old Polly suddenly realizes that she has two different sets of memories of the past nine years. One involves some very odd, even fantastic events she experienced in the presence of a man named Tom Lynn, who meant a great deal to her. The other is relentlessly mundane, and contains no trace of this person at all. And as she thinks back over the life she's forgotten, she eventually comes to realize why she's forgotten it, and to consider what she needs to do save poor Tom.
It's really hard to say precisely how I feel about this book. The plot is intriguing, if a bit slow. But the subtle, complicated ways in which Jones weaves together the mundane day-to-day world and the world of faerie is really interesting, and rather thought-provoking. There is, for instance, probably a parallel to be drawn between the way young Polly gets half-understood glimpses of the supernatural around her and her child's-eye view of her parents' divorce, and I think there's some fascinating material to chew over there.
On the other hand, man, did aspects of this story make me uncomfortable. The person who recommended it to me sort of warned me of this going in, saying that it contains "a romance between an adult and a child." And that's absolutely what it does contain; there's really just no other way of putting it. This isn't quite as horrifying as it might sound. There's not really anything terribly sexually inappropriate. But for much of the novel -- especially at the beginning, as Tom first strikes up Polly's friendship in a way that left me feeling like he was going to offer her candy in his van at any moment -- it did have me squirming more than a little. "Geez," I often found myself thinking, "I know this is an area where social mores have changed a little over the past decades" -- the book was published in 1985 -- "but how the hell can the author not be aware of just how creepily this is coming off?!" Aspects of the ending, however, had me reconsidering that, and thinking that perhaps not only did she entirely realize how disturbing it was, but that that was actually part of the point. And now I feel unsettled about it all in an entirely different way, maybe.
Rating: It's really hard to know how to rate this one. I think I'm going to give it 4/5, but maybe with a rather large asterisk.
97. Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West
Lindy West re-watches (or, in at least one case, watches for the first time) a bunch of extremely popular and well-known movies from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, kinda-sorta recaps them, and offers up lots of silly, snarky commentary about them and how well they do or don't hold up.
It's written in a slangy, casual, ultra-high-energy style, with lots of excited or annoyed parentheticals and rows of exclamation points and outbreaks of all-caps and such... Which, I have to say, is the kind of thing that somehow feels a lot more natural and fun when you encounter it on the internet somewhere than it does in an actual print book, especially when you're faced with two hundred solid pages of it. When the humor here does completely click with me -- when West is pointing out plot holes in Harry Potter, or reminding me of exactly how gloriously batshit insane Face/Off is, or having complicated flaily reactions to the end of Terminator 2 -- it can be positively hilarious. But most of the time it just all felt a bit... much. Or a lot much. And I say that as someone who really, really enjoyed West's previous book, Shrill, even though I seem to recall it having some of the same kind of tone, at least in places. Maybe that one kept the over-the-top stuff to more digestible chunks? Or maybe this one, despite all the political snark and legitimate points about awful writing of female characters and so on, just felt a bit too shallow, its outrage-laden humor less biting and more forced-feeling?
Rating: Doing some weighted averaging between the hilarious stuff and the way-too-much stuff, I'm going to call this a 3/5.
98. Pariah by Bob Fingerman
It's the zombie apocalypse, and a handful of survivors are holed up in a Manhattan apartment building, caught between a seething mass of the undead out in the street and a seething mass of toxic masculinity inside. There's kind of an interesting premise for a zombie story here, and a bit of humor and such, but, honestly, it really is primarily just a constant parade of dysfunctional male horniness, from the pathetic to the downright psychopathic. There are some female characters, mind you. There's the one, for instance, who somehow manages to exist mostly only in relationship to men and/or babies even when we're in her POV. And the plot device one, whose primary trait is her lack of a personality. I don't mean that she's written two-dimensionally, either. I mean, that's literally her deliberate defining characteristic, leaving her free to be used, abused, and lusted after by men without the hindrance of actually having any opinions about it.
And, OK, there is a bit of a satiric, or at least sardonic flavor to all of this, or a vague attempt at one, anyway. Fingerman certainly isn't putting these guys forward as role models, especially the vile frat boy rapist character. But, still. Ugh. It's not even so much that it's all highly unpleasant. Zombie novels are allowed to be unpleasant. It's that it gets so tedious. At one point, I literally yelled "I'm tired of hearing about your fucking boner!" at the page. Fortunately, I was alone at the time.
Rating: 2.5/5. Usually, books that I rate that low have poorer writing than this one, just on a prose level. But in this case the decent-enough writing is probably the main thing saving it from a lower rating still.
99. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman
An illustrated dark fantasy (or maybe fantasy/horror) short story by Neil Gaiman, about a man seeking a cave where treasure may be found... for a price, of course. It's a good example, I think, of Gaiman's skill as a storyteller. Although it's short, this tale is perfectly paced, doling out effective little bits of mystery and revelation, tension and foreshadowing as it goes along. And the illustrations, by Eddie Campbell, are eye-catching, varied, and integrated into the storytelling in some interesting ways.
Rating: 4/5
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1015210.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
90. Inversions by Iain M. Banks
This is part of Banks' Culture series of SF novels, but it's set entirely on a world with a sort of medieval feel, and essentially the only SF element is the strong implication that the two central characters are, shall we say, not exactly local. Said characters being a physician attending a king, and a bodyguard working for another. (Well, technically the second one isn't a king, but, whatever, close enough.)
I wish I had something substantial to say about this one, but mostly... it was sort of okay? Honestly, it failed to grip me all that much. It's hard to say why exactly, because it certainly has a number of elements that seem as though they should be pretty exciting. Murder, intrigue, war, secret identities... But, while it did get more interesting towards the end, mostly I never felt particularly invested in any of it. I almost wonder if it's just because I didn't quite know what kind of story it was, going in, so my literary taste buds were set for space opera and didn't respond well to getting something more fantasy-flavored instead. More likely it's that Banks' very light touch when it comes to telling us much of anything about these characters and what they're doing here and who they are as people was a bit too light for me and left me without the feeling of having a good reason to care about them.
Ultimately, I dunno. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But... *shrug*.
Rating: 3/5
91. Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller
Lulu Miller has a weird fascination with David Starr Jordan, a scientist and naturalist known, among other things, for collecting and cataloging an extraordinary amount of fish, and for being the first president of Stanford University. In particular, she found herself obsessing over a particular incident in Jordan's life, in which thirty years of his fish-collecting career ended up in disarray on the floor after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, each specimen suddenly separated from its label. It's not too difficult to see a broadly applicable metaphor in this instance of a human trying to impose order on a world that, in an instant, can tumble all those efforts into chaos. How, Miller wondered, did Jordan keep going through things like that? What kind of mindset leads to picking your fish up off the floor and sewing the labels back onto the ones you can still identify, instead of just giving up in the face of nature's obvious indifference to your life's work?
The book that results from this obsession is partly a biography of Jordan, whose life, it turns out, takes some surprising and disturbing turns and ultimately offers up one set of answers to Miller's questions that should very much not be emulated. But it's much more a personal set of musings on chaos and order and how we perceive and categorize the world, and on how we can possibly find meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe.
I'll be honest, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about any of this at first. It was interesting, for sure, but the thought of Miller perhaps projecting her own issues onto some long-dead scientist felt mildly uncomfortable in a hard-to-pin-down kind of way. I also found her mindset and the exact nature of her philosophical journey a little difficult to connect with at times, as she perceives certain things significantly differently than I do, even if we're kind of starting out in the same place. But the place she arrives at the end of her journey is one I do feel comfortable joining her in, and along the way she weaves together a really interesting and sometimes deeply insightful tapestry of rich and important themes. So I think it's safe to say she won me over.
Rating: 4/5
92. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager
When Maggie was five, her family lived in a haunted house, where their experiences became so horrifying they left one day with only the clothes on their backs, never to return. At least, that's what her father's best-selling book claims. Maggie herself, to the limited extent she remembers anything at all, doesn't quite remember it that way, and her mother has basically admitted to her that all of it was all a lie. Her father, however, would say nothing about it to his dying day beyond "what happened, happened." Now Maggie has inherited the house, and despite her father's warning that it isn't safe for her there, she's returning to fix the place up, and hopefully to find out what actually happened that day.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Some of the details are pretty ridiculous, and it drags a bit in the middle, but it's an interesting take on familiar haunted house tropes, and it was a quick, engaging read that did keep me interested in finding out what the real story was. Mind you, I was pretty sure I figured out that real story well before the end, but while I was almost right about it, the novel did add a little extra twist to things to keep things interesting.
Rating: 4/5
93. Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The sixth collected volume of the dark fantasy comic Monstress. As always, it's fantastically complicated, visually gorgeous, and full of rich, complicated worldbuilding. This one features a particularly impressive climax and a real cliffhanger of an ending. I'm also amused and genuinely impressed by the way I increasingly find myself thinking: Huh, who would ever have imagined that the relationship between a damaged, violent, traumatized woman and the people-eating lovecraftian monster she's unwillingly bound to would end up giving me these kinds of oddly warm feelings. Hell, just pulling that off would probably make this series interesting all by itself, even without any of the other cool stuff it also features.
Rating: 4/5
94. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
A book about -- you guessed it! -- trees, especially about the aspects of them that we humans tend not to perceive or appreciate. Trees, it turns out, are much more sophisticated, complicated organisms than meets the eye, especially when you consider them in the context of a forest or an ecosystem.
It's all really interesting subject matter, and I did learn some cool things, but I had decidedly mixed feelings about the book. Wohlleben gets, I think, a bit too repetitive on certain subjects, whereas with others he doesn't go into nearly as much scientific detail as I would like. (Although perhaps that's not too surprising. Not only is this book clearly meant to have a broad appeal, including to less science-y types, but Wohlleben himself is a forester, not a scientist.) He also does a lot of what I can only call anthropomorphizing, and while to a certain extent that's effective in making his point that trees are very much living things, not inanimate objects, he goes a bit further with it than I'm entirely comfortable with, and it leaves me with niggling doubts about the extent to which he might be letting sentiment trump science.
Rating: 3.5/5
95. Doctor Who: Peacemaker by James Swallow
A Doctor Who novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones, set in the Wild West of America's Colorado Territory. The plot involves a traveling salesman whose snake oil "medicines" have suddenly become so miraculously effective they can even cure smallpox (although not without some side effects), and a couple of dangerous alien creatures who've come looking for him.
It feels very much like it could be an episode of the show, which does seem to be the general feeling this particular line of books tends to go for. It'd make an adequate, but not an especially exciting or memorable episode, I'd say. Lots of very familiar tropes here.
It was a reasonably diverting read, anyway, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that's remotely going to stick in my head about it is the moment where I suddenly realized that these characters were wandering around in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and were then presumably going to get back into their time machine and return to the 21st century and holy crap, no, Martha, please think about the possible consequences of that! She didn't, though, and apparently neither did the author. But then, we all probably had pandemics much less in our brains in 2007, when this was published.
Rating: 3.5/5
96. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Nineteen-year-old Polly suddenly realizes that she has two different sets of memories of the past nine years. One involves some very odd, even fantastic events she experienced in the presence of a man named Tom Lynn, who meant a great deal to her. The other is relentlessly mundane, and contains no trace of this person at all. And as she thinks back over the life she's forgotten, she eventually comes to realize why she's forgotten it, and to consider what she needs to do save poor Tom.
It's really hard to say precisely how I feel about this book. The plot is intriguing, if a bit slow. But the subtle, complicated ways in which Jones weaves together the mundane day-to-day world and the world of faerie is really interesting, and rather thought-provoking. There is, for instance, probably a parallel to be drawn between the way young Polly gets half-understood glimpses of the supernatural around her and her child's-eye view of her parents' divorce, and I think there's some fascinating material to chew over there.
On the other hand, man, did aspects of this story make me uncomfortable. The person who recommended it to me sort of warned me of this going in, saying that it contains "a romance between an adult and a child." And that's absolutely what it does contain; there's really just no other way of putting it. This isn't quite as horrifying as it might sound. There's not really anything terribly sexually inappropriate. But for much of the novel -- especially at the beginning, as Tom first strikes up Polly's friendship in a way that left me feeling like he was going to offer her candy in his van at any moment -- it did have me squirming more than a little. "Geez," I often found myself thinking, "I know this is an area where social mores have changed a little over the past decades" -- the book was published in 1985 -- "but how the hell can the author not be aware of just how creepily this is coming off?!" Aspects of the ending, however, had me reconsidering that, and thinking that perhaps not only did she entirely realize how disturbing it was, but that that was actually part of the point. And now I feel unsettled about it all in an entirely different way, maybe.
Rating: It's really hard to know how to rate this one. I think I'm going to give it 4/5, but maybe with a rather large asterisk.
97. Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West
Lindy West re-watches (or, in at least one case, watches for the first time) a bunch of extremely popular and well-known movies from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, kinda-sorta recaps them, and offers up lots of silly, snarky commentary about them and how well they do or don't hold up.
It's written in a slangy, casual, ultra-high-energy style, with lots of excited or annoyed parentheticals and rows of exclamation points and outbreaks of all-caps and such... Which, I have to say, is the kind of thing that somehow feels a lot more natural and fun when you encounter it on the internet somewhere than it does in an actual print book, especially when you're faced with two hundred solid pages of it. When the humor here does completely click with me -- when West is pointing out plot holes in Harry Potter, or reminding me of exactly how gloriously batshit insane Face/Off is, or having complicated flaily reactions to the end of Terminator 2 -- it can be positively hilarious. But most of the time it just all felt a bit... much. Or a lot much. And I say that as someone who really, really enjoyed West's previous book, Shrill, even though I seem to recall it having some of the same kind of tone, at least in places. Maybe that one kept the over-the-top stuff to more digestible chunks? Or maybe this one, despite all the political snark and legitimate points about awful writing of female characters and so on, just felt a bit too shallow, its outrage-laden humor less biting and more forced-feeling?
Rating: Doing some weighted averaging between the hilarious stuff and the way-too-much stuff, I'm going to call this a 3/5.
98. Pariah by Bob Fingerman
It's the zombie apocalypse, and a handful of survivors are holed up in a Manhattan apartment building, caught between a seething mass of the undead out in the street and a seething mass of toxic masculinity inside. There's kind of an interesting premise for a zombie story here, and a bit of humor and such, but, honestly, it really is primarily just a constant parade of dysfunctional male horniness, from the pathetic to the downright psychopathic. There are some female characters, mind you. There's the one, for instance, who somehow manages to exist mostly only in relationship to men and/or babies even when we're in her POV. And the plot device one, whose primary trait is her lack of a personality. I don't mean that she's written two-dimensionally, either. I mean, that's literally her deliberate defining characteristic, leaving her free to be used, abused, and lusted after by men without the hindrance of actually having any opinions about it.
And, OK, there is a bit of a satiric, or at least sardonic flavor to all of this, or a vague attempt at one, anyway. Fingerman certainly isn't putting these guys forward as role models, especially the vile frat boy rapist character. But, still. Ugh. It's not even so much that it's all highly unpleasant. Zombie novels are allowed to be unpleasant. It's that it gets so tedious. At one point, I literally yelled "I'm tired of hearing about your fucking boner!" at the page. Fortunately, I was alone at the time.
Rating: 2.5/5. Usually, books that I rate that low have poorer writing than this one, just on a prose level. But in this case the decent-enough writing is probably the main thing saving it from a lower rating still.
99. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman
An illustrated dark fantasy (or maybe fantasy/horror) short story by Neil Gaiman, about a man seeking a cave where treasure may be found... for a price, of course. It's a good example, I think, of Gaiman's skill as a storyteller. Although it's short, this tale is perfectly paced, doling out effective little bits of mystery and revelation, tension and foreshadowing as it goes along. And the illustrations, by Eddie Campbell, are eye-catching, varied, and integrated into the storytelling in some interesting ways.
Rating: 4/5
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1015210.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.