Book meme, days 9-11
Day 09 - Best scene ever.
Four words: Liveried Vorkosigan vomit bugs. The choreography is as good as Heyer's best, and it's absolutely excruciating watching everyone's good intentions unfold, with perfect pacing and wit, into howling disaster. But it's not unbearable, because you know (unusually for Bujold) that they're in the sort of book where things turn out happily in the end. Which is also a lovely scene, but less impressive to pull off.
Day 10 - A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving.
Dies the Fire, by S. M. Stirling, which I read only because I'd run out of the Nantucket trilogy and thought it would be better than nothing. (Thank goodness I didn't land on Conquistador. But luckily, due to a past encounter with the Draka, I had a fairly good idea that early Stirling can be a dodgy proposition.) I was feeling vaguely resentful that he was writing Earth Minus Nantucket rather than Moar Nantucket, and thought turning off the electricity was a much less awesome idea than trying to reinvent modern technology in the Bronze Age, but... well, you've seen me capslock about it before. There is farming, and Mike the Midwestern Ex-Marine (I looooove him, and I still do not know how that happened, because Midwestern military types are so very not my demographic), and Fake Scots, and Quasi-Vikings, and lots of lovely inventing, and did I mention the farming? *_*
Messing with the laws of physics turns out to have been a stroke of genius: I've been watching Survivors, which makes it clear that anything that wipes out the social order and most of the population without also wiping out most of the food produces several narrative... not exactly problems, but things that make me less interested. If there are full supermarkets and the necessary transport to get to them, there's no immediate problem of survival, no time pressure to start producing necessities, and (if they find the right camping shop) not even any real need to create adaptive technology, and you end up moving directly past the stuff I like and on to the standoffs with shotguns. Which happen right on schedule in episode 2. Turning off electricity and explosives enforces lots of immediate farming, and lots of problem-solving as they reinvent low-energy technologies. Spending half a book on that puts off the inevitable standoffs, and when they do get there, it's still interesting because mediaeval weaponry is inherently more awesome than shotguns.
Also, I love that the books are clear on the fact that feudalism is a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the people with weapons on the people without. (Now can we have a series of books about how capitalism is a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the people with capital on the people without? :D?) It's much easier to see the mechanisms when it all happens in twenty years (leaving aside whether that's actually plausible, because the books do a reasonable job of selling it) and when you're not inside the theatre of operations being dazzled by the window-dressing.
Day 11 - A book that disappointed you.
The Gypsy, by Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm. I love Brust, and this is the only book I didn't manage to hunt down when I first started reading him, so I was pretty damn excited to come across it in the Whangarei library. And then it turned out to be completely incomprehensible. Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem in itself - I mean, I liked The Sun, the Moon and the Stars - but I also didn't care about any of the characters. I sort of cared a little bit about the cop's relationship with his daughter, or I would have if the daughter had been written like an actual teenage girl instead of someone's inaccurate idea of a teenage girl (I blame Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb for that, partly because I don't like her and partly because the characterisation was lazy and pat in a way Brust usually isn't), but otherwise... meh. And the lyrics they used for epigraphs were facile and sophomoric and added nothing to the experience except an aftertaste of bad filk.
Whole meme.
Also posted at Dreamwidth.
Four words: Liveried Vorkosigan vomit bugs. The choreography is as good as Heyer's best, and it's absolutely excruciating watching everyone's good intentions unfold, with perfect pacing and wit, into howling disaster. But it's not unbearable, because you know (unusually for Bujold) that they're in the sort of book where things turn out happily in the end. Which is also a lovely scene, but less impressive to pull off.
Day 10 - A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving.
Dies the Fire, by S. M. Stirling, which I read only because I'd run out of the Nantucket trilogy and thought it would be better than nothing. (Thank goodness I didn't land on Conquistador. But luckily, due to a past encounter with the Draka, I had a fairly good idea that early Stirling can be a dodgy proposition.) I was feeling vaguely resentful that he was writing Earth Minus Nantucket rather than Moar Nantucket, and thought turning off the electricity was a much less awesome idea than trying to reinvent modern technology in the Bronze Age, but... well, you've seen me capslock about it before. There is farming, and Mike the Midwestern Ex-Marine (I looooove him, and I still do not know how that happened, because Midwestern military types are so very not my demographic), and Fake Scots, and Quasi-Vikings, and lots of lovely inventing, and did I mention the farming? *_*
Messing with the laws of physics turns out to have been a stroke of genius: I've been watching Survivors, which makes it clear that anything that wipes out the social order and most of the population without also wiping out most of the food produces several narrative... not exactly problems, but things that make me less interested. If there are full supermarkets and the necessary transport to get to them, there's no immediate problem of survival, no time pressure to start producing necessities, and (if they find the right camping shop) not even any real need to create adaptive technology, and you end up moving directly past the stuff I like and on to the standoffs with shotguns. Which happen right on schedule in episode 2. Turning off electricity and explosives enforces lots of immediate farming, and lots of problem-solving as they reinvent low-energy technologies. Spending half a book on that puts off the inevitable standoffs, and when they do get there, it's still interesting because mediaeval weaponry is inherently more awesome than shotguns.
Also, I love that the books are clear on the fact that feudalism is a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the people with weapons on the people without. (Now can we have a series of books about how capitalism is a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the people with capital on the people without? :D?) It's much easier to see the mechanisms when it all happens in twenty years (leaving aside whether that's actually plausible, because the books do a reasonable job of selling it) and when you're not inside the theatre of operations being dazzled by the window-dressing.
Day 11 - A book that disappointed you.
The Gypsy, by Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm. I love Brust, and this is the only book I didn't manage to hunt down when I first started reading him, so I was pretty damn excited to come across it in the Whangarei library. And then it turned out to be completely incomprehensible. Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem in itself - I mean, I liked The Sun, the Moon and the Stars - but I also didn't care about any of the characters. I sort of cared a little bit about the cop's relationship with his daughter, or I would have if the daughter had been written like an actual teenage girl instead of someone's inaccurate idea of a teenage girl (I blame Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb for that, partly because I don't like her and partly because the characterisation was lazy and pat in a way Brust usually isn't), but otherwise... meh. And the lyrics they used for epigraphs were facile and sophomoric and added nothing to the experience except an aftertaste of bad filk.
Whole meme.
Also posted at Dreamwidth.