Books 26 - 36
26: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz
This book explored the umwelt, or sensory experience, of being a dog, from the best understanding provided by modern science and where it interacts with the best observations of a loving owner. You cannot imagine the world of a dog without first understanding how a dog understands the world- not only the different ways that a dog's senses differ from our own, but the ways that a dog's awareness, processing, and place in the world differs from our own. A good mix of insight, observation, and informed humanity provide a great insight into the parallel lives living silently and loyally beside our own.
Light, but not dumb, and fairly well grounded in science, with delightful personal details about her own dogs and how she has learned to view them.
page count: 301
27: The Story of Jane: The legendary underground feminist abortion service by Laura Kaplan
In Chicago in 1968, abortion was illegal, as it was throughout the United States. Abortion was illegal even for victims of rape, or for pregnancies that would endanger the mother's life. Birth control was usually only legally available to married women, if then, and good information was scarce.
If you found yourself pregnant and didn't want to be, your choices were few: if you had money, you could travel to one of the countries where abortion was legal. If you didn't, you could ask around until someone knew someone who knew someone who could point you to someone to perform an abortion, perhaps local, perhaps not. Perhaps safe, perhaps not. The providers could charge any price they could get away with, they might not have any actual medical training, they could demand sexual favors, or threaten blackmail, and if you ended up sick or dying from their services, going to the hospital for treatment would mean being questioned by the police. The services might range from the 'catheter ladies' to doctors making a buck on the sly, to sadists who seemed involved in the process mostly to inflict suffering on others.
So slowly, a group of women started changing things. Mostly following their own experiences with illegal abortions, they started building lists of who was safe to go to, and then worked on building a safer system for getting women to and from abortion providers- using safe houses and teams of women to make sure that the patients had someone to convey them to and from the service, that the prices being charged were reasonable, and that it stayed safely hidden. They worked up to assisting in the abortions, and providing some small amount of follow-up care for the patients. They built up names of doctors they could turn to in an emergency, rotated phone service among the group, and distributed information under the code name of "Jane". They found suppliers for the drugs they needed, and developed a feel for when the police were cracking down and when they were turning a blind eye.
The group branched out into an early consciousness-raising group- making sure that women who needed abortion got counseling, education on their bodies, and were involved in the process of taking control of their own reproductive systems. To this end, those who could pay were asked to contribute to help those with less. They added in pap smears as part of the process when they realized that many of their poorer sisters had no other interactions with doctors.
The atmosphere of the time seems hard to imagine today- the patients wore blindfolds when the doctor was in the room, to protect his identity, but in an effort to help women take more control of their bodies, encourage the women to exam their vaginas and cervix with a hand mirror. When abortion reform laws started emerging, they were met with mixed reactions- was this something that would make women safer? Was it framed as a doctor's control over his patient rather than a woman's control over her body?
Throughout this, the group itself struggled with all sorts of issues of power and agency- who should work the phones and who should assist in abortions? Who had the list of contacts, and who was providing a safe house on any given date of procedures? Did abortion need to be a medical procedure performed by doctors, or could women perform it for themselves? How did this issue intersect with the larger issues of gender and society, and where did it overlap with class and race? In a time of rapid social change, what could they do to be part of the change and what did they need to do towards that end?
The book gives a fascinating look into one area of reproductive rights, told by the women who were involved in the experience.
And if you're thinking, wow, things sure were different back then, keep in mind that in four months, Republicans introduces 916 bills against women's right to choose. There are plenty of folks who would love to have it be that way again.
Page count: 292
28: The Tenth Good Thing About Benny by Judith Viorst
Reread. A children's book dealing with the loss of the family pet, Benny, a cat. The young boy who loved him best composes a eulogy listing the best things about his friend, and tries to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. For a short children's book, it covers a good deal in a kid's mourning process, from conducting a burial to debates about what happens to us all, including a beloved cat, after death.
page count: 28
29: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
reread. Sometimes what you need for comfort reading is a witty and sarcastic take on the Pied Piper of Hamlin crossed with Puss in Boots, or what the story would be like if it took place in Discworld, where the rats and the cats are sentient and verbal as the side effect of eating from a magical waste dump, and the stupid looking kid, er, piper, is a young human who has been duped into acting as the front man in their scheme for bilking small towns out of money they were probably going to waste on worthless things, like government, anyway. Then watch what happens when they show up in a town with more thieves and worse troubles than them, and they decide to figure out what's going on and what, or who, they really are.
Involves heroic cat math, which I think is the reason I needed to read it.
Page Count: 241
30 What We Know by Mary Oliver
A collection of prose and poems, mostly built around the observations of the woods and lakes near her home, or her home itself.. There were several where lines hit so perfectly right that I had to stop reading for a moment. I love Oliver's ability to pause and observe, and find a gentle net of words to cradle the moment and bring it back to the reader. There's often sorrow, and loss, and the pain of letting the world be itself, but always, also, a sense of wonder, compassion, and the joy of knowing the world through its many faces and seasons.
Some favorite lines:
Sometimes I really believe that I am going to save my life/ a little - The Return
The white stones were mountains, then they went traveling. - stones
they also have resources beyond the flesh; they also try very hard not to die. - clams
take care you don't know anything in this world too quickly or easily. - moonlight (I will have to quote this one in full, some time)
Page count: 68
31: Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers
There was one thing I really wasn't prepared for in this book, so I'm going to spoil readers right now- it's the last official Peter and Harriet novels written and published by Sayers, and the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey books she published. There are others that she partially wrote and which were later finished by others, and there are a few short stories that cover other parts of their lives, but this is really the last of the stories that Sayers finished about her couple and her detectives. That was a bit of a blow- I thought I'd have much more to read after this.
The first part of the book is epistolary - we read the letters sent by various members of the Wimsey clan surrounding the wedding of dear uncle Peter to his shocking bride of Harriet Vane, from the snit-filled letters of sister-in-law Helen to the amusing and loving ones of the dowager duchess. After that, we're off with Harriet and Peter on their honeymoon to a country house, Tallboys, which Peter has bought for her as a wedding gift. There's some confusion at their arrival, for no one seems to have known they were coming or prepared for them, and hasty arrangements must be made to give access to the newlyweds (and their butler, the ever-faithful Bunter).
Turns out the reason that the previous house owner hadn't made proper arrangements because he was suffering from a bad case of being dead, which is enough to trouble the plans of the best of men, which he was not. What follows is an adventure in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else's business, has old grudges, and new plots, and much running about, all at a time when Peter and Harriet would have much rather been working on the rather more positive (but no less complicated) business of learning how to be married to each other.
Quite a lovely book, with all the layers and meanings I've learned to expect from Sayers- the last part of the book, after the mystery is solved and dealing more with the aftermath than any of her previous novels, was painful to read and was a new intimacy in the life of Peter Wimsey, and a fitting one for the reader to learn of with Harriet. As endings go, it's not a bad one, and Sayers manages some lovely bits of bookendings on the series.
Page count: 586
32: Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers
So now I'm reading everything else about Peter Wimsey. This is a short story collection from 1925, which puts it early in the series. A bunch of smaller Lord Peter stories, mostly covering the odd ways he got involved in other murder investigations, from dropping in on an old acquaintance and finding they'd gone 'round the bend, to finding rather unexpected packages in the left luggage office. Most of the stories were reasonably entertaining. As I've said before, short stories really aren't my thing, because if they're good, they usually leave me wanting more. I would also like to mention that I am personally disavowing the final short story from my personal Peter Wimsey canon, on the basis that I pretty much detest conspiracy society themes.
Still, I liked quite a lot of these stories. 'The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach' was quite funny. 'The Bone of Contention' had some great twists. 'The Man with the Copper Fingers' was suitably creepy. Overall, it makes me suspect that it's a bad idea to be friends with someone who investigates murder as a hobby- people seem to die under very strange circumstances around folks like that all the time. It's a much better idea to invite them over only if you already have something weird going on and need it solved in as mad a frolic as possible.
Page count: 317
33: Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
The first book in a series - I have a hazy memory of it being recommended in a discussion about series with good female leads, or maybe about non-white POV characters in SF, but I'm not sure- but I do recall that the recommendation came with the caveat that the series goes downhill a few books in. Based on this book, I won't be reading any further, because I didn't really like this one, and have no interest in finding out what's downhill from here.
I wanted to like it, because the basic premise is not too bad, although it does lend itself a bit too much to the 'and together, they fight crime!' description- in this case, Val Con yos'Phelium is a spy (his own term for his job provides the title, 'Agent of Change') from the world of Liaden, one of the groups humanity has split into after leaving Earth, who has been working to investigate the worlds of Terrans (who tend towards the xenophobic, which includes a dislike of humans who aren't human enough for them) and now must flee, and he teams up with ex-mercenary Miri after he finds her cornered by thugs who are trying to assassinate her. Together, they fight commit crime. They meet up with with members of the alien race referred to as Turtles, who are also family of Val through some convoluted means, and wacky hijinks ensue.
My problems with the story had a few main points; first was that the Sue-O-Meter was turned up a bit high, and the characters felt a bit more like caricatures- he has unlimited resources and deadly fighting ability, unexpected relationship with a powerful and mysterious species, she has a snappy comeback for everything and a murky past, and I just didn't feel they were particularly realistic. A bit too much of the interactions were him being deadly and her being clueless, which just bored me. Second was the related lack of internal insight by the character- they were mostly just doing stuff while the reader watched, and there wasn't much of a sense of internal thought or tension (granted, having read a lot of Sayers recently may have spoiled me on this front, but I found myself mystified as to character motivation beyond 'dragged along behind the plot' for much of the actions in the story). Third was a few bad cases of future decay (the book was written in 1988), such as an age with interstellar travel but where people still send faxes as a primary communication tool (this may also explain some of the character interaction that I found grating. The male-female dynamic is a bit dated and feels a bit too much like Wacky Sidekick female rather than Full Partner female).
Anyway, it felt like watching a show from someone else's childhood. If I'd seen it as a kid myself, I might have loved it, but watching it now, all I notice is that the set wobbles a bit and the spacesuits still have the women walking in heels for some reason.
Page Count: 320
34 WWW: Wonder by Robert J Sawyer
Third and final book in the WWW series. Worth reading and a good conclusion for the series, but I still came away feeling that I knew a little more about Sawyer than I wanted to, and suffering from the same sorts of problems as the other books of his I've read. A good play, but you can see the crew moving the set around a bit too much.
Sawyer's series deals with the emergence of an artificial intelligence from the data of the internet, self-named WebMind, triggered by the interaction with a young girl from Canada whose artificial eyesight interface, eyePod, becomes his window into the human world and cascading event into his development of complexity and consciousness. The first book in the series, WWW:Wake, dealt with the emergence of WebMind and the realization by Caitlin, the young girl, of his existence. The second book, WWW:Watch, handled WebMind reaching out to reveal his existence to the rest of the world with Caitlin as his ambassador. This final book, WWW:Wonder, deals with him integrating himself into the human experience and both he and Caitlin reaching a kind of adulthood.
It's not a bad book- Sawyer is pretty good at keeping multiple plotlines running at once, and having good overall story arcs, and I actually really did like the way the story ended, but the major problem with this book is that is isn't a great book. I've given up on other series by Sawyer on the basis that the ideas are great, but that they just seem to be lacking some level of complexity. There's too much exposition (the old "as you know, Bob," problem) and he too often seems to take a painfully unnuanced approach to problems- wouldn't it be great if everyone just stood up to bullies? Wouldn't it be neat if an animal addressed the UN? Wouldn't human rights problems be solved by crowdsourcing government? He has some lovely scenes, some great moments, and some really, really wonderful hopes for people, but I found myself in the same position I'd been in with his previous books; that of wanting to yell It's more complicated than that! It doesn't work that way!. He's the rare author that I feel I could love more if he was a bit more horrible and dark I feel like he really believes that people just need to be sensible and talk about things to solve their problems, and as a result I end up frustrated, feeling slightly patronized by someone who seems to have missed the point.
That said, I loved the epilogue and thought it was a wonderful view of one possibility for humanity. I just wish he had a better grasp of what we're really like now.
Page Count: 352
35: The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
So, not news, I'm a geek. I come from a line of geeks. Enough of a line of geeks that stories about the great figures in chemistry and physics are names I grew up reading about. Plus I was a biochem major, and had large portions of the periodic table memorized at one point, so talk about electron shells, valances, radicals, and Lewis Acids were not new ones for me. I really liked this book.
This book is about two things; people and elements. The elements are probably the easier part to understand, given that they obey various laws of physics in their constitution, and display repeating patterns of behavior in their actions. Once you've figured out the patterns (through, say, constructing a chart that organized them by particular characteristics), you can even make predictions about what the elements might do and where you can find them. This is rarely true of people.
Thing is, most of this is gossip, in the way that good history is gossip. The book is the stories of the way different elements have interlaced with human history- from the industry and explorations they drove, to the odd personalities involved in the science of discovering them and characterizing them. There are stories about the role of tungsten in the second world war, how to discover -and then die of- radiation, the odd lines between chemistry and alchemy, the personalities involved in the politics of Nobel prizes and element discovery, and many more surprising ways that the cataloging of, predictions about, and sometimes creation of elements ties into the history of what we, a rather curious species of ape, get up to when we explore the world and try to shape it to make sense and be of use to us.
One aspect that stood out for me was the running thread of the disappearance of female sciences from the history- I recognized a lot more of the male names in these stories than I did of the female ones. Some of it is almost laughable (even if the laugh is rather painful) now, such as Maria Goeppert-Meyer, after years of struggling to receive an education, working without pay because schools couldn't bare to officially employee a female chemist, and when she received a Nobel prize for her works, having headlines read "San Diego Mother Wins Nobel Prize".
Page Count: 376
36: Graceling by Kristin Cashore
This is a book I only ended up reading because
jazzfish was giving away his copy as part of prep for moving across the continent. At the house cooling party he and
uilos threw, I saw the book on the shelf and asked "Did you enjoy it? I've seen it recommended, but never got past the first chapter when I tried to read it. The main character seems like a bit of a Sue." and
jazzfish said it was not bad, but not so great that he wanted to move it just to keep his copy. So I got a free copy of a book, and I read it.
Which is about right. It's a good enough read, and I liked it, but I was also irritated with parts of it. Maybe I'm just cranky (the fiction works aren't getting off very well in this set of reviews, are they?). It was better the less I thought about it. It's a very good first novel, and I hope the author will become a great writer as she gets older. Maybe I'm just being too harsh on YA settings, which are often a bit thin.
Graceling is a YA novel set in a medieval fantasy setting were some people have 'graces', or special powers. They may be anything from the power of skilled fighting to composing poetry. People born with Graces always have odd-colored eyes, so they're easy to spot, and pop up randomly throughout the population. Katsa is a young woman whose grace manifested when she was eight years old and killed a man who threatened her, and now she's the court assassin for her uncle, the king of the Midluns. She does not like her grace very much, or any of the kingdoms of the region, which are always engaging in petty squabbling and exploitation of the working class, and so has organized a secret council to help people out when they can. At the opening of the story, she helps rescue the grandfather of the king of Lienid kingdom, an island nation, and soon after meets Po, the youngest prince of that Isle, as he goes exploring the kingdoms in search of his grandfather's kidnappers. Mystery and intrigue follow.
What I liked about this novel: The story arc was actually pretty good- I liked the pacing of the novel. I was rather surprised to find a good deal more depth in the romance than I'd expected- Katsa's struggle to balance out the desire for romance and the desire to never belong to anyone felt truer than almost anything else in the story, and redeemed any number of other faults. I like the twists of the graces in the main characters, and there were interactions between characters that showed good complexity with only a few lines and hints, which I liked.
What I didn't like: There were just too many things that were broad stroked. I felt like gnashing my teeth every time they mentioned the names of the countries, which were basically North, South, East, West, and Middle, which felt like sloppy placeholders that stuck. Plus the main character really was a bit of a Sue (I hear this gets worse in the next book). The book also hit a number of the sore points for me in reading quasi-feudal settings- I once heard the criticism by a scholar of a modern book set in Default Quasi-Medieval Fantasyland that 'everyone moves around like North Americans', meaning that, well, no one seems to think twice about just hopping over a border and running around the countryside. Mountain passes through thick forests aren't all that difficult, and the horses are purely background objects needing little mention in that sort of travel (hint: no, really, they aren't. Really, really not. Apart from anything else, where the hell was their food?). Which might be asking a bit much realism for a YA novel, but I've gone past the point at which I enjoy books set in a generic fantasy world that serves only as a background for really modern characters just running about.
(writing out this rant makes me think that the main reason I have a soft spot for post apocalyptic settings is that it seems like a more legitimate way to have very modern characters running around without modern conveniences. Bad medieval settings annoy me.)
Anyway, I have the second book, and I'll read it too, because it's good fluff if I can just turn my brain off a bit more when I'm reading it.
Page Count: 471
Pages this batch: 3352
Total pages: 11797
[As a end note, I've added page counts to this year's books, as a way to give a feel for how long each book is (this helps me deal with my guilt over listing children's books, which otherwise sometimes feels like cheating), although page count is only slightly meaningful- the same book may have widely different page counts between trade paperback, hardcover, and big print editions. In cases of books with sizeable bibliographies and indexes, I have given a page count up to the end of the main body or main body + end notes, where possible, so I'm not counting pages I didn't actually read.]
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This book explored the umwelt, or sensory experience, of being a dog, from the best understanding provided by modern science and where it interacts with the best observations of a loving owner. You cannot imagine the world of a dog without first understanding how a dog understands the world- not only the different ways that a dog's senses differ from our own, but the ways that a dog's awareness, processing, and place in the world differs from our own. A good mix of insight, observation, and informed humanity provide a great insight into the parallel lives living silently and loyally beside our own.
Light, but not dumb, and fairly well grounded in science, with delightful personal details about her own dogs and how she has learned to view them.
page count: 301
27: The Story of Jane: The legendary underground feminist abortion service by Laura Kaplan
In Chicago in 1968, abortion was illegal, as it was throughout the United States. Abortion was illegal even for victims of rape, or for pregnancies that would endanger the mother's life. Birth control was usually only legally available to married women, if then, and good information was scarce.
If you found yourself pregnant and didn't want to be, your choices were few: if you had money, you could travel to one of the countries where abortion was legal. If you didn't, you could ask around until someone knew someone who knew someone who could point you to someone to perform an abortion, perhaps local, perhaps not. Perhaps safe, perhaps not. The providers could charge any price they could get away with, they might not have any actual medical training, they could demand sexual favors, or threaten blackmail, and if you ended up sick or dying from their services, going to the hospital for treatment would mean being questioned by the police. The services might range from the 'catheter ladies' to doctors making a buck on the sly, to sadists who seemed involved in the process mostly to inflict suffering on others.
So slowly, a group of women started changing things. Mostly following their own experiences with illegal abortions, they started building lists of who was safe to go to, and then worked on building a safer system for getting women to and from abortion providers- using safe houses and teams of women to make sure that the patients had someone to convey them to and from the service, that the prices being charged were reasonable, and that it stayed safely hidden. They worked up to assisting in the abortions, and providing some small amount of follow-up care for the patients. They built up names of doctors they could turn to in an emergency, rotated phone service among the group, and distributed information under the code name of "Jane". They found suppliers for the drugs they needed, and developed a feel for when the police were cracking down and when they were turning a blind eye.
The group branched out into an early consciousness-raising group- making sure that women who needed abortion got counseling, education on their bodies, and were involved in the process of taking control of their own reproductive systems. To this end, those who could pay were asked to contribute to help those with less. They added in pap smears as part of the process when they realized that many of their poorer sisters had no other interactions with doctors.
The atmosphere of the time seems hard to imagine today- the patients wore blindfolds when the doctor was in the room, to protect his identity, but in an effort to help women take more control of their bodies, encourage the women to exam their vaginas and cervix with a hand mirror. When abortion reform laws started emerging, they were met with mixed reactions- was this something that would make women safer? Was it framed as a doctor's control over his patient rather than a woman's control over her body?
Throughout this, the group itself struggled with all sorts of issues of power and agency- who should work the phones and who should assist in abortions? Who had the list of contacts, and who was providing a safe house on any given date of procedures? Did abortion need to be a medical procedure performed by doctors, or could women perform it for themselves? How did this issue intersect with the larger issues of gender and society, and where did it overlap with class and race? In a time of rapid social change, what could they do to be part of the change and what did they need to do towards that end?
The book gives a fascinating look into one area of reproductive rights, told by the women who were involved in the experience.
And if you're thinking, wow, things sure were different back then, keep in mind that in four months, Republicans introduces 916 bills against women's right to choose. There are plenty of folks who would love to have it be that way again.
Page count: 292
28: The Tenth Good Thing About Benny by Judith Viorst
Reread. A children's book dealing with the loss of the family pet, Benny, a cat. The young boy who loved him best composes a eulogy listing the best things about his friend, and tries to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. For a short children's book, it covers a good deal in a kid's mourning process, from conducting a burial to debates about what happens to us all, including a beloved cat, after death.
page count: 28
29: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
reread. Sometimes what you need for comfort reading is a witty and sarcastic take on the Pied Piper of Hamlin crossed with Puss in Boots, or what the story would be like if it took place in Discworld, where the rats and the cats are sentient and verbal as the side effect of eating from a magical waste dump, and the stupid looking kid, er, piper, is a young human who has been duped into acting as the front man in their scheme for bilking small towns out of money they were probably going to waste on worthless things, like government, anyway. Then watch what happens when they show up in a town with more thieves and worse troubles than them, and they decide to figure out what's going on and what, or who, they really are.
Involves heroic cat math, which I think is the reason I needed to read it.
Page Count: 241
30 What We Know by Mary Oliver
A collection of prose and poems, mostly built around the observations of the woods and lakes near her home, or her home itself.. There were several where lines hit so perfectly right that I had to stop reading for a moment. I love Oliver's ability to pause and observe, and find a gentle net of words to cradle the moment and bring it back to the reader. There's often sorrow, and loss, and the pain of letting the world be itself, but always, also, a sense of wonder, compassion, and the joy of knowing the world through its many faces and seasons.
Some favorite lines:
Sometimes I really believe that I am going to save my life/ a little - The Return
The white stones were mountains, then they went traveling. - stones
they also have resources beyond the flesh; they also try very hard not to die. - clams
take care you don't know anything in this world too quickly or easily. - moonlight (I will have to quote this one in full, some time)
Page count: 68
31: Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers
There was one thing I really wasn't prepared for in this book, so I'm going to spoil readers right now- it's the last official Peter and Harriet novels written and published by Sayers, and the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey books she published. There are others that she partially wrote and which were later finished by others, and there are a few short stories that cover other parts of their lives, but this is really the last of the stories that Sayers finished about her couple and her detectives. That was a bit of a blow- I thought I'd have much more to read after this.
The first part of the book is epistolary - we read the letters sent by various members of the Wimsey clan surrounding the wedding of dear uncle Peter to his shocking bride of Harriet Vane, from the snit-filled letters of sister-in-law Helen to the amusing and loving ones of the dowager duchess. After that, we're off with Harriet and Peter on their honeymoon to a country house, Tallboys, which Peter has bought for her as a wedding gift. There's some confusion at their arrival, for no one seems to have known they were coming or prepared for them, and hasty arrangements must be made to give access to the newlyweds (and their butler, the ever-faithful Bunter).
Turns out the reason that the previous house owner hadn't made proper arrangements because he was suffering from a bad case of being dead, which is enough to trouble the plans of the best of men, which he was not. What follows is an adventure in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else's business, has old grudges, and new plots, and much running about, all at a time when Peter and Harriet would have much rather been working on the rather more positive (but no less complicated) business of learning how to be married to each other.
Quite a lovely book, with all the layers and meanings I've learned to expect from Sayers- the last part of the book, after the mystery is solved and dealing more with the aftermath than any of her previous novels, was painful to read and was a new intimacy in the life of Peter Wimsey, and a fitting one for the reader to learn of with Harriet. As endings go, it's not a bad one, and Sayers manages some lovely bits of bookendings on the series.
Page count: 586
32: Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers
So now I'm reading everything else about Peter Wimsey. This is a short story collection from 1925, which puts it early in the series. A bunch of smaller Lord Peter stories, mostly covering the odd ways he got involved in other murder investigations, from dropping in on an old acquaintance and finding they'd gone 'round the bend, to finding rather unexpected packages in the left luggage office. Most of the stories were reasonably entertaining. As I've said before, short stories really aren't my thing, because if they're good, they usually leave me wanting more. I would also like to mention that I am personally disavowing the final short story from my personal Peter Wimsey canon, on the basis that I pretty much detest conspiracy society themes.
Still, I liked quite a lot of these stories. 'The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach' was quite funny. 'The Bone of Contention' had some great twists. 'The Man with the Copper Fingers' was suitably creepy. Overall, it makes me suspect that it's a bad idea to be friends with someone who investigates murder as a hobby- people seem to die under very strange circumstances around folks like that all the time. It's a much better idea to invite them over only if you already have something weird going on and need it solved in as mad a frolic as possible.
Page count: 317
33: Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
The first book in a series - I have a hazy memory of it being recommended in a discussion about series with good female leads, or maybe about non-white POV characters in SF, but I'm not sure- but I do recall that the recommendation came with the caveat that the series goes downhill a few books in. Based on this book, I won't be reading any further, because I didn't really like this one, and have no interest in finding out what's downhill from here.
I wanted to like it, because the basic premise is not too bad, although it does lend itself a bit too much to the 'and together, they fight crime!' description- in this case, Val Con yos'Phelium is a spy (his own term for his job provides the title, 'Agent of Change') from the world of Liaden, one of the groups humanity has split into after leaving Earth, who has been working to investigate the worlds of Terrans (who tend towards the xenophobic, which includes a dislike of humans who aren't human enough for them) and now must flee, and he teams up with ex-mercenary Miri after he finds her cornered by thugs who are trying to assassinate her. Together, they fight commit crime. They meet up with with members of the alien race referred to as Turtles, who are also family of Val through some convoluted means, and wacky hijinks ensue.
My problems with the story had a few main points; first was that the Sue-O-Meter was turned up a bit high, and the characters felt a bit more like caricatures- he has unlimited resources and deadly fighting ability, unexpected relationship with a powerful and mysterious species, she has a snappy comeback for everything and a murky past, and I just didn't feel they were particularly realistic. A bit too much of the interactions were him being deadly and her being clueless, which just bored me. Second was the related lack of internal insight by the character- they were mostly just doing stuff while the reader watched, and there wasn't much of a sense of internal thought or tension (granted, having read a lot of Sayers recently may have spoiled me on this front, but I found myself mystified as to character motivation beyond 'dragged along behind the plot' for much of the actions in the story). Third was a few bad cases of future decay (the book was written in 1988), such as an age with interstellar travel but where people still send faxes as a primary communication tool (this may also explain some of the character interaction that I found grating. The male-female dynamic is a bit dated and feels a bit too much like Wacky Sidekick female rather than Full Partner female).
Anyway, it felt like watching a show from someone else's childhood. If I'd seen it as a kid myself, I might have loved it, but watching it now, all I notice is that the set wobbles a bit and the spacesuits still have the women walking in heels for some reason.
Page Count: 320
34 WWW: Wonder by Robert J Sawyer
Third and final book in the WWW series. Worth reading and a good conclusion for the series, but I still came away feeling that I knew a little more about Sawyer than I wanted to, and suffering from the same sorts of problems as the other books of his I've read. A good play, but you can see the crew moving the set around a bit too much.
Sawyer's series deals with the emergence of an artificial intelligence from the data of the internet, self-named WebMind, triggered by the interaction with a young girl from Canada whose artificial eyesight interface, eyePod, becomes his window into the human world and cascading event into his development of complexity and consciousness. The first book in the series, WWW:Wake, dealt with the emergence of WebMind and the realization by Caitlin, the young girl, of his existence. The second book, WWW:Watch, handled WebMind reaching out to reveal his existence to the rest of the world with Caitlin as his ambassador. This final book, WWW:Wonder, deals with him integrating himself into the human experience and both he and Caitlin reaching a kind of adulthood.
It's not a bad book- Sawyer is pretty good at keeping multiple plotlines running at once, and having good overall story arcs, and I actually really did like the way the story ended, but the major problem with this book is that is isn't a great book. I've given up on other series by Sawyer on the basis that the ideas are great, but that they just seem to be lacking some level of complexity. There's too much exposition (the old "as you know, Bob," problem) and he too often seems to take a painfully unnuanced approach to problems- wouldn't it be great if everyone just stood up to bullies? Wouldn't it be neat if an animal addressed the UN? Wouldn't human rights problems be solved by crowdsourcing government? He has some lovely scenes, some great moments, and some really, really wonderful hopes for people, but I found myself in the same position I'd been in with his previous books; that of wanting to yell It's more complicated than that! It doesn't work that way!. He's the rare author that I feel I could love more if he was a bit more horrible and dark I feel like he really believes that people just need to be sensible and talk about things to solve their problems, and as a result I end up frustrated, feeling slightly patronized by someone who seems to have missed the point.
That said, I loved the epilogue and thought it was a wonderful view of one possibility for humanity. I just wish he had a better grasp of what we're really like now.
Page Count: 352
35: The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
So, not news, I'm a geek. I come from a line of geeks. Enough of a line of geeks that stories about the great figures in chemistry and physics are names I grew up reading about. Plus I was a biochem major, and had large portions of the periodic table memorized at one point, so talk about electron shells, valances, radicals, and Lewis Acids were not new ones for me. I really liked this book.
This book is about two things; people and elements. The elements are probably the easier part to understand, given that they obey various laws of physics in their constitution, and display repeating patterns of behavior in their actions. Once you've figured out the patterns (through, say, constructing a chart that organized them by particular characteristics), you can even make predictions about what the elements might do and where you can find them. This is rarely true of people.
Thing is, most of this is gossip, in the way that good history is gossip. The book is the stories of the way different elements have interlaced with human history- from the industry and explorations they drove, to the odd personalities involved in the science of discovering them and characterizing them. There are stories about the role of tungsten in the second world war, how to discover -and then die of- radiation, the odd lines between chemistry and alchemy, the personalities involved in the politics of Nobel prizes and element discovery, and many more surprising ways that the cataloging of, predictions about, and sometimes creation of elements ties into the history of what we, a rather curious species of ape, get up to when we explore the world and try to shape it to make sense and be of use to us.
One aspect that stood out for me was the running thread of the disappearance of female sciences from the history- I recognized a lot more of the male names in these stories than I did of the female ones. Some of it is almost laughable (even if the laugh is rather painful) now, such as Maria Goeppert-Meyer, after years of struggling to receive an education, working without pay because schools couldn't bare to officially employee a female chemist, and when she received a Nobel prize for her works, having headlines read "San Diego Mother Wins Nobel Prize".
Page Count: 376
36: Graceling by Kristin Cashore
This is a book I only ended up reading because
jazzfish was giving away his copy as part of prep for moving across the continent. At the house cooling party he and
uilos threw, I saw the book on the shelf and asked "Did you enjoy it? I've seen it recommended, but never got past the first chapter when I tried to read it. The main character seems like a bit of a Sue." and
jazzfish said it was not bad, but not so great that he wanted to move it just to keep his copy. So I got a free copy of a book, and I read it.
Which is about right. It's a good enough read, and I liked it, but I was also irritated with parts of it. Maybe I'm just cranky (the fiction works aren't getting off very well in this set of reviews, are they?). It was better the less I thought about it. It's a very good first novel, and I hope the author will become a great writer as she gets older. Maybe I'm just being too harsh on YA settings, which are often a bit thin.
Graceling is a YA novel set in a medieval fantasy setting were some people have 'graces', or special powers. They may be anything from the power of skilled fighting to composing poetry. People born with Graces always have odd-colored eyes, so they're easy to spot, and pop up randomly throughout the population. Katsa is a young woman whose grace manifested when she was eight years old and killed a man who threatened her, and now she's the court assassin for her uncle, the king of the Midluns. She does not like her grace very much, or any of the kingdoms of the region, which are always engaging in petty squabbling and exploitation of the working class, and so has organized a secret council to help people out when they can. At the opening of the story, she helps rescue the grandfather of the king of Lienid kingdom, an island nation, and soon after meets Po, the youngest prince of that Isle, as he goes exploring the kingdoms in search of his grandfather's kidnappers. Mystery and intrigue follow.
What I liked about this novel: The story arc was actually pretty good- I liked the pacing of the novel. I was rather surprised to find a good deal more depth in the romance than I'd expected- Katsa's struggle to balance out the desire for romance and the desire to never belong to anyone felt truer than almost anything else in the story, and redeemed any number of other faults. I like the twists of the graces in the main characters, and there were interactions between characters that showed good complexity with only a few lines and hints, which I liked.
What I didn't like: There were just too many things that were broad stroked. I felt like gnashing my teeth every time they mentioned the names of the countries, which were basically North, South, East, West, and Middle, which felt like sloppy placeholders that stuck. Plus the main character really was a bit of a Sue (I hear this gets worse in the next book). The book also hit a number of the sore points for me in reading quasi-feudal settings- I once heard the criticism by a scholar of a modern book set in Default Quasi-Medieval Fantasyland that 'everyone moves around like North Americans', meaning that, well, no one seems to think twice about just hopping over a border and running around the countryside. Mountain passes through thick forests aren't all that difficult, and the horses are purely background objects needing little mention in that sort of travel (hint: no, really, they aren't. Really, really not. Apart from anything else, where the hell was their food?). Which might be asking a bit much realism for a YA novel, but I've gone past the point at which I enjoy books set in a generic fantasy world that serves only as a background for really modern characters just running about.
(writing out this rant makes me think that the main reason I have a soft spot for post apocalyptic settings is that it seems like a more legitimate way to have very modern characters running around without modern conveniences. Bad medieval settings annoy me.)
Anyway, I have the second book, and I'll read it too, because it's good fluff if I can just turn my brain off a bit more when I'm reading it.
Page Count: 471
Pages this batch: 3352
Total pages: 11797
[As a end note, I've added page counts to this year's books, as a way to give a feel for how long each book is (this helps me deal with my guilt over listing children's books, which otherwise sometimes feels like cheating), although page count is only slightly meaningful- the same book may have widely different page counts between trade paperback, hardcover, and big print editions. In cases of books with sizeable bibliographies and indexes, I have given a page count up to the end of the main body or main body + end notes, where possible, so I'm not counting pages I didn't actually read.]
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