Late Pile of Books
I haven't updated my reviews since May; I think I am going to post what I had the last time I wrote something down, rather than write down all the new books I've read. So this is rather belated, and we'll see how far caught up I can get quickly.
The Alchemy Wars: The Mechanical, The Rising, and The Liberation (by Ian Tregillis) I bought the first in audiobook when it first came out, but didn't get around to listening to it until the rest had come out. Probably a good thing, because Tregillis tends to go really dark in the middle of his series. (I need to go back to Milkweed now that *it* is all out, and I think I know how the third book is going to recover; I wonder if I am right.). Anyway. This is set in an early 20th-century steampunk-ish setting, where the Dutch Empire rests on the back of its golem/robot servant/soldiers (invented by Christiaan Huygens). There's a simmering cease-fired war between the Protestant Netherlands and the Catholic France-in-exile in Canada as the backdrop, and the main-est characters of The Mechanical are a mechanical servitor (Jax) and the French spymaster Talleyrand (her title, not her name). The mechanicals are controlled by alchemical geasa and meta-geasa; the latter are much like Asimov's three laws, but the cruelty of the laws written from the inside as compulsion, makes Asimov's stories retroactively into screaming horror.
As you might guess from the titles, there is a big enough Robot Apocalypse Uprising to warm Marleigh's heart; the plot escalates quite a lot (as well as meandering), but never really loses its way. Tregillis is maybe not an eloquent writer - I would have cut out about half of his metaphors, myself - but he is a darned good plotter. And possibly some of the swearing reaches high levels of poetry. Berenice (Talleyrand) curses like a very lapsed Catholic who has been living in a sewer. The non-lapsed Catholic soldier curses like a drill sergeant, just as creatively but staying clear of blasphemy. Comparing their two swearing styles was entertainment all by itself.
(Audiobook notes - the narrator is the same through all three books, but he changes some of his pronunciations between books one and two. Oddly, it's as if someone has given him notes to dumb it down - some of the French names are no longer pronounced with a French accent (Longchamp becomes the obvious English pronunciation, but Montreal is stil Mon-reyal), and "geas" goes from "gesh" to "gees". Of course, it was the Laundry series audiobooks that taught me "gesh" in the first place...)
Four and a half stars.
Carousel Tides, Carousel Seas, Carousel Sun (by Sharon Lee)
mathhobbit suggested these since I didn't so much care for Liaden. I admit I liked them better than that, sufficient to read the main triology but not enough to pick up the more extended series. I did notice that I fell into my traditional blind spot of not examining the morality of the premise very hard - "the weird shit locals in a small town in Maine have been tasked by Faerie to keep a set of fairy prisoners bound into the carousel horses" being the premise, which slowly subverts into "exactly why is it our job to do this, and why are they prisoners anyway?" If the characters hadn't started asking those questions in book two, I would have just taken it all for granted. I really didn't care very much about the Faerie politics back story, though, and I often wanted to shake the main character. Anyway. I think Lee is like CJ Cherryh for me - I'm not criticicizing her craft, and Liaden is clearly very popular with a lot of people. But she's like blueberries - I'll eat them, and I know a lot of people think they're awesome, but pretty much every other fruit is more to my taste.
City of Stairs, City of Blades, City of Miracles (by Robert Jackson Bennett) I read the first of this series a while ago but after the second two came out, I reread the whole series. The first one is still my favorite - you can only pull off "Hey! There's still divinities lurking around!" as a revelation the first time. In contrast to the previous two trilogies, this one is definitely three stand-alone books. A lot of time passes between them, and the baton gets passed to a new main character each time (though, hilariously, both of the characters in the second two books spend a lot of time thinking 'what would the main character in book one have done here?'). But everything I liked about the first book is pretty solidly there in the second two - the sense of place is very strong, and the City of Blades setting is very different and just as place-ful as the first book. Then in City of Miracles we're back to the first city of Bulikov, but a lot of time has passed, and that's interesting too. The main characters are very different, both in voice and outlook and how they solve problems. Shara is the thoughtful spymaster; Turyn is the classic wielder of the conversational broadsword; Sigrud is the big guy who is first in warfare and endurance and at a loss for anything that doesn't use one of those two stats. And they're all deeply flawed people, trying in very different ways to do the right thing, and I wanted to stay watching them until the words ran out. I gave the first book five and a quarter stars; the second one is only five stars, and the third might be down to four and three quarters.
84K (by Claire North) I liked two other books of North's that I have read, so I got this on audiobook. The narrator was very good - there's a lot of stream of consciouness jumpiness, and cross-cutting dialogue, and he made it seem natural and easy to follow. North is an amazing writer. But I couldn't finish it. I could barely start it. It's a plausible near-future dystopia, horribly, terribly plausible. Barely different from the real world, the more I listened. I couldn't distance myself, and it was wrecking me.
Winter Tide (by Ruthanne Emrys) There's a bit of a prequel to this novel, a short story called The Litany of Earth, that I hadn't read. It's not really needed to understand, but I suspect it fleshes out the relationships that the main character begins with. Anyway. This is a delicate, thoughtful, feminist and feminine version of Lovecraft, that doesn't actually invalidate the stories I find interesting in the original. It seems an impossible task, to write something true to Lovecraft that stares unflinchingly at the racism and then lets it go, but it works. Canonically, at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the government raids Innsmouth and bombs Devil's Reef, and vanishes all the inhabitants, to rumored concentration camps. Aphra Marsh was a child when Innsmouth was raided, and most of her relatives perished in the harsh dry deserts of the California camps; she and her brother were adopted by one of the Japanese families that were put in the camps later, and when the story opens she lives in San Francisco where the rest of her new family is as well. Now it's the Cold War, and Aphra and friends and adopted sister are headed back to the East Coast, where among other things, she is trying to get her family's books back from Miskatonic University, where they were sent from the Innsmouth raid. The actual bones of the plot are less relevant than the conversations and the atmosphere, which is about trust and paranoia and loss of family and gaining of new family and what monsters are and are not.
I have been recently polishing some of my family's old silver, including some glass bowls with complicated silverwork. The act of painting the tarnish with silver polish, making it still the same thing but bright and gleaming instead of dark, feels metaphorically similar to how Emrys paints Lovecraft - still the same thing but rubbing off the corruption. Four and a half stars; if it had been in its own setting, it might have had a star less for being slow-moving, but it gains a star for the miracle it performs on Lovecraft.
Stardust (by Neil Gaiman) One of my comfort reads, this time as audiobook, read by the author. Being a good author is not always the same as a good narrator (I don't quite like Peter Beagle reading the Last Unicorn), but Mr. Gaiman's voice is like a thick furry British blanket, which works particularly well for comfort reads. :)
The Synapse Sequence (by Daniel Godfrey) The technological premise - synthesize an investigateable setting from the memories of witnesses - is neat. In some ways it's interesting, with some Inception-y levels of flashbacks and flashforwards. In some ways it's unsatisfying - not quite enough meat to the plot, too much distraction, and in the end, society is a little worse. I want more closure, either in a positive or negative direction, from my fiction. Three stars.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (by Helen Simonson) I like British cozy mysteries (they will be a posting of their own once I have tired of my current audiobook spree). This is much like one, except that it's not a murder, it's a romance, and it gives something of a side-eye to the issues of class and race that are just part of the background in the old mysteries. Charming and thoughtful and I have no recollection of how I picked it up. He smiled wryly to hear himself repeating Grace's words as his own. Here he was dispensing them as advice when he had only just taken them in as revelation. So, he thought, do all men steal and display the shiny jackdaw treasure of other people's ideas.
(He's not doing the "repeat the thing she just said in order to have it head", it's a later conversation). Four stars
Tell the Machine Goodnight (by Katie Williams) I swear, this was written by someone who wanted to have written Machine of Death. That was a book of short stories in which there is a machine that tells you (sometimes in cryptic prophecy) how you are going to die. This is an episodic novel in which there is a machine that tells you what to do to be happier (but not like self-help advice, but slightly more cryptic things like "eat tangerines regularly" and "amputate a bit of your finger". The machines are clearly made by the same company, at least. The episodes are interesting, but by the time they looped back to the original main story I had forgotten what the arc plot was. I guess there wasn't really an arc plot. It kind of meanders to a halt, also - like the book two up, I want more closure. I did really like this description, of choosing the right actor/bodyguard to play your boyfriend for your public persona. His smile curled one side of his mouth and a nostril. Pretty with a sneer. Marilee had let Calla pick him. They'd auditioned fifty actors, half guys, half girls, all with martial arts or fight training, all of whom thought they were trying out for a featured stunt role in Calla's next movie. Forty-nine of them still thought that. Calla hadn't chosen this one because of his elbow strikes or kiais, but because of his sneer. She knew a cultivated expression when she saw one, and she could tell that he had practiced the look in the mirror. And if you have to practice a sneer, she'd reasoned, you are not a natural sneerer.
Witchmark (by C. L. Polk) It has a dramatic bicycle chase! Two, even! It reminded me a bit of An Unkindness of Magicians, but less modern, and less high-octane. I spent a lot of time frustrated by what seemed to me to be unreasonably exaggerated oppression, but did appreciate the conversations between the character raging against his chains, and the character trying to assure him that the chains would be made as comfortable as possible and if he could just put up with them for a little while, it would put them in a position to actually fix things, as opposed to if he kicks over the applecart early. It's always nice when both sides of a moral argument are plausiuble. Three and a half stars.
(comments disabled on LJ; enabled on DW) https://firstfrost.dreamwidth.org/250025.html
The Alchemy Wars: The Mechanical, The Rising, and The Liberation (by Ian Tregillis) I bought the first in audiobook when it first came out, but didn't get around to listening to it until the rest had come out. Probably a good thing, because Tregillis tends to go really dark in the middle of his series. (I need to go back to Milkweed now that *it* is all out, and I think I know how the third book is going to recover; I wonder if I am right.). Anyway. This is set in an early 20th-century steampunk-ish setting, where the Dutch Empire rests on the back of its golem/robot servant/soldiers (invented by Christiaan Huygens). There's a simmering cease-fired war between the Protestant Netherlands and the Catholic France-in-exile in Canada as the backdrop, and the main-est characters of The Mechanical are a mechanical servitor (Jax) and the French spymaster Talleyrand (her title, not her name). The mechanicals are controlled by alchemical geasa and meta-geasa; the latter are much like Asimov's three laws, but the cruelty of the laws written from the inside as compulsion, makes Asimov's stories retroactively into screaming horror.
As you might guess from the titles, there is a big enough Robot Apocalypse Uprising to warm Marleigh's heart; the plot escalates quite a lot (as well as meandering), but never really loses its way. Tregillis is maybe not an eloquent writer - I would have cut out about half of his metaphors, myself - but he is a darned good plotter. And possibly some of the swearing reaches high levels of poetry. Berenice (Talleyrand) curses like a very lapsed Catholic who has been living in a sewer. The non-lapsed Catholic soldier curses like a drill sergeant, just as creatively but staying clear of blasphemy. Comparing their two swearing styles was entertainment all by itself.
(Audiobook notes - the narrator is the same through all three books, but he changes some of his pronunciations between books one and two. Oddly, it's as if someone has given him notes to dumb it down - some of the French names are no longer pronounced with a French accent (Longchamp becomes the obvious English pronunciation, but Montreal is stil Mon-reyal), and "geas" goes from "gesh" to "gees". Of course, it was the Laundry series audiobooks that taught me "gesh" in the first place...)
Four and a half stars.
Carousel Tides, Carousel Seas, Carousel Sun (by Sharon Lee)
mathhobbit suggested these since I didn't so much care for Liaden. I admit I liked them better than that, sufficient to read the main triology but not enough to pick up the more extended series. I did notice that I fell into my traditional blind spot of not examining the morality of the premise very hard - "the weird shit locals in a small town in Maine have been tasked by Faerie to keep a set of fairy prisoners bound into the carousel horses" being the premise, which slowly subverts into "exactly why is it our job to do this, and why are they prisoners anyway?" If the characters hadn't started asking those questions in book two, I would have just taken it all for granted. I really didn't care very much about the Faerie politics back story, though, and I often wanted to shake the main character. Anyway. I think Lee is like CJ Cherryh for me - I'm not criticicizing her craft, and Liaden is clearly very popular with a lot of people. But she's like blueberries - I'll eat them, and I know a lot of people think they're awesome, but pretty much every other fruit is more to my taste.
City of Stairs, City of Blades, City of Miracles (by Robert Jackson Bennett) I read the first of this series a while ago but after the second two came out, I reread the whole series. The first one is still my favorite - you can only pull off "Hey! There's still divinities lurking around!" as a revelation the first time. In contrast to the previous two trilogies, this one is definitely three stand-alone books. A lot of time passes between them, and the baton gets passed to a new main character each time (though, hilariously, both of the characters in the second two books spend a lot of time thinking 'what would the main character in book one have done here?'). But everything I liked about the first book is pretty solidly there in the second two - the sense of place is very strong, and the City of Blades setting is very different and just as place-ful as the first book. Then in City of Miracles we're back to the first city of Bulikov, but a lot of time has passed, and that's interesting too. The main characters are very different, both in voice and outlook and how they solve problems. Shara is the thoughtful spymaster; Turyn is the classic wielder of the conversational broadsword; Sigrud is the big guy who is first in warfare and endurance and at a loss for anything that doesn't use one of those two stats. And they're all deeply flawed people, trying in very different ways to do the right thing, and I wanted to stay watching them until the words ran out. I gave the first book five and a quarter stars; the second one is only five stars, and the third might be down to four and three quarters.
84K (by Claire North) I liked two other books of North's that I have read, so I got this on audiobook. The narrator was very good - there's a lot of stream of consciouness jumpiness, and cross-cutting dialogue, and he made it seem natural and easy to follow. North is an amazing writer. But I couldn't finish it. I could barely start it. It's a plausible near-future dystopia, horribly, terribly plausible. Barely different from the real world, the more I listened. I couldn't distance myself, and it was wrecking me.
Winter Tide (by Ruthanne Emrys) There's a bit of a prequel to this novel, a short story called The Litany of Earth, that I hadn't read. It's not really needed to understand, but I suspect it fleshes out the relationships that the main character begins with. Anyway. This is a delicate, thoughtful, feminist and feminine version of Lovecraft, that doesn't actually invalidate the stories I find interesting in the original. It seems an impossible task, to write something true to Lovecraft that stares unflinchingly at the racism and then lets it go, but it works. Canonically, at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the government raids Innsmouth and bombs Devil's Reef, and vanishes all the inhabitants, to rumored concentration camps. Aphra Marsh was a child when Innsmouth was raided, and most of her relatives perished in the harsh dry deserts of the California camps; she and her brother were adopted by one of the Japanese families that were put in the camps later, and when the story opens she lives in San Francisco where the rest of her new family is as well. Now it's the Cold War, and Aphra and friends and adopted sister are headed back to the East Coast, where among other things, she is trying to get her family's books back from Miskatonic University, where they were sent from the Innsmouth raid. The actual bones of the plot are less relevant than the conversations and the atmosphere, which is about trust and paranoia and loss of family and gaining of new family and what monsters are and are not.
I have been recently polishing some of my family's old silver, including some glass bowls with complicated silverwork. The act of painting the tarnish with silver polish, making it still the same thing but bright and gleaming instead of dark, feels metaphorically similar to how Emrys paints Lovecraft - still the same thing but rubbing off the corruption. Four and a half stars; if it had been in its own setting, it might have had a star less for being slow-moving, but it gains a star for the miracle it performs on Lovecraft.
Stardust (by Neil Gaiman) One of my comfort reads, this time as audiobook, read by the author. Being a good author is not always the same as a good narrator (I don't quite like Peter Beagle reading the Last Unicorn), but Mr. Gaiman's voice is like a thick furry British blanket, which works particularly well for comfort reads. :)
The Synapse Sequence (by Daniel Godfrey) The technological premise - synthesize an investigateable setting from the memories of witnesses - is neat. In some ways it's interesting, with some Inception-y levels of flashbacks and flashforwards. In some ways it's unsatisfying - not quite enough meat to the plot, too much distraction, and in the end, society is a little worse. I want more closure, either in a positive or negative direction, from my fiction. Three stars.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (by Helen Simonson) I like British cozy mysteries (they will be a posting of their own once I have tired of my current audiobook spree). This is much like one, except that it's not a murder, it's a romance, and it gives something of a side-eye to the issues of class and race that are just part of the background in the old mysteries. Charming and thoughtful and I have no recollection of how I picked it up. He smiled wryly to hear himself repeating Grace's words as his own. Here he was dispensing them as advice when he had only just taken them in as revelation. So, he thought, do all men steal and display the shiny jackdaw treasure of other people's ideas.
(He's not doing the "repeat the thing she just said in order to have it head", it's a later conversation). Four stars
Tell the Machine Goodnight (by Katie Williams) I swear, this was written by someone who wanted to have written Machine of Death. That was a book of short stories in which there is a machine that tells you (sometimes in cryptic prophecy) how you are going to die. This is an episodic novel in which there is a machine that tells you what to do to be happier (but not like self-help advice, but slightly more cryptic things like "eat tangerines regularly" and "amputate a bit of your finger". The machines are clearly made by the same company, at least. The episodes are interesting, but by the time they looped back to the original main story I had forgotten what the arc plot was. I guess there wasn't really an arc plot. It kind of meanders to a halt, also - like the book two up, I want more closure. I did really like this description, of choosing the right actor/bodyguard to play your boyfriend for your public persona. His smile curled one side of his mouth and a nostril. Pretty with a sneer. Marilee had let Calla pick him. They'd auditioned fifty actors, half guys, half girls, all with martial arts or fight training, all of whom thought they were trying out for a featured stunt role in Calla's next movie. Forty-nine of them still thought that. Calla hadn't chosen this one because of his elbow strikes or kiais, but because of his sneer. She knew a cultivated expression when she saw one, and she could tell that he had practiced the look in the mirror. And if you have to practice a sneer, she'd reasoned, you are not a natural sneerer.
Witchmark (by C. L. Polk) It has a dramatic bicycle chase! Two, even! It reminded me a bit of An Unkindness of Magicians, but less modern, and less high-octane. I spent a lot of time frustrated by what seemed to me to be unreasonably exaggerated oppression, but did appreciate the conversations between the character raging against his chains, and the character trying to assure him that the chains would be made as comfortable as possible and if he could just put up with them for a little while, it would put them in a position to actually fix things, as opposed to if he kicks over the applecart early. It's always nice when both sides of a moral argument are plausiuble. Three and a half stars.
(comments disabled on LJ; enabled on DW) https://firstfrost.dreamwidth.org/250025.html