Book Logging
Mar. 4th, 2018 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckBosch, Pseudonymous. Bad Magic - Audiobook read by Joshua Swanson. First book in the series. A kid gets sent a weird and isolated summer camp and finds a lot of puzzling things. The book was only six CDs, and Swanson is excellent at reading books with an adolescent boy as the POV character.
Bosch, Pseudonymous. BAD Luck - Audiobook read by Aaron Landon. Second book in the series. I shouldn’t have started listening to this one immediately after finishing the first as the change in reader was jarring. Landon’s style is to make almost everything sound sarcastic. Scott was around when I started the book and commented on the sarcasm. The first chapter is from the POV of a different character than the one who had the POV through the entire first book. The book then goes back to the character from the first book and connects things, but I thought, for that lengths of time, the book was going to be completely separate. I’m curious about the third book, but the library doesn’t have the audiobook version except via Overdrive (which puts a deadline on finishing that getting the CDs doesn’t). This second book ups the stakes vastly. The first book was all focused on small things, low/personal stakes things, and also ended at a point when the POV character had just crossed the threshold into the unknown.
Chi-chi-chimaera (gestalt1), gestalt1. Twin Sunrise - 300K word Star Wars fic, canon divergent AU in which Vader manages to capture Luke before events of The Empire Strikes Back. Everything goes sideways from canon from there, leading to Vader and Luke starting a war to depose the Emperor. Vader’s intention is to put Luke on the throne. Luke’s intention are considerably more muddled because there’s so much he simply doesn’t know. I enjoyed it a great deal but finished it with a sense that, although many characters talked about Vader still being responsible for every terrible thing that he’d ever done, still having waded in blood to maintain the Empire, the author didn’t really feel it. Or maybe… couldn’t write him with any sympathy while keeping that truth centered? Because, even with the reminders and with Vader being quite willing, still, to do very nasty things, it’s very hard to read him as a person who actually has all of that history. At any rate, if the premise sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy, the story is, in fact, probably going to be a thing you’ll enjoy. Story on AO3.
Collins, Suzanne. Gregor the Overlander - Audiobook read by Paul Boehmer. This was merely okay. I didn’t feel strongly connected to either the characters or the story. I can’t tell how much of that was me getting distracted and how much was that nothing happened that surprised me. I felt like the POV character didn’t change much.
Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising - Audiobook read by Alex Jennings. I’d forgotten a lot of the details of the book, and I found this a less satisfying experience than I remember it having been when I was a child. It’s not so much the knowing how things come out part because, back in elementary school, I found The Silver on the Tree on the new book shelf at the library and ended up reading it first and then searching for the earlier books to see where everything came from. I think that my difficulties here have a lot to do with lack of agency. Most of the elements and characters came across to me as clockwork pieces. Some of that is the power imbalances. Some of that is the way that all times exist at once. The choices Will makes don’t feel like choices, more like steps in an extremely formal and complex dance that he can’t stop or alter, and the choices people who aren’t Old Ones make seem to be pretty uniformly bad because of lack of information. I’m pretty sure, now, that part of me being angry at the ending of The Silver on the Tree is that it felt like theft of agency even though Cooper’s words give me the impression that she thought it was a gift of agency. That is, those characters could only make their own choices if they were severed from their pasts. All of which makes Will’s expected future worse. Will’s future has a hell of a lot in common with Jamie’s from Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, but the text doesn’t seem to get that.
DarthNickels. The Exiled - Star Wars canon divergent AU in which Vader survives Return of the Jedi. 20K words. Leia has tried every other avenue for helping her young son. Seeking out her biological father is an act of genuine desperation. I enjoyed this one. It’s Leia’s POV and leans heavily on the fact that her experiences with Darth Vader stripped away any space for her to imagine him still having good in him (and heaped massive trauma on top of that) and on the likelihood that pretty much every not-Luke person in the known universe would want Darth Vader dead. Story on AO3.
Greenwood, Kerry. Cocaine Blues - Audiobook read by Stephanie Daniel. This was a reread. I wanted to see how the audiobook versions were. The reading wasn’t terrible but also wasn’t spectacular. I could only tell the characters apart if the reader was using different accents for them, so Cec and Bert blurred, and the trio of Russians were hard to tell apart if more than one was present. The story didn’t seem all that different as an audiobook. I remembered more than I had thought I did. I still can’t reconcile Jack Robinson from the show with Jack Robinson in the books, but I read the books before the show started airing, so I’m comfortable with the book version and took a while to warm up to the show version.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. Promise Not to Tell - In this case, the fact that this is the same book that Krentz always writes is a feature for me rather than a bug because it meant zero mental work required to get to the end of it. I did discover that there’s a point at which I hit my suspension of disbelief limit and get annoyed with handwaving. That point is an early morning jogger discovering a body on the far end of a private dock attached to the lot of an empty house. Having it be a jogger was silly. A jogger wouldn’t be likely to come close enough to the dock to see a body on the end of it, not even if the house was somehow positioned so that it didn’t block view of the dock from the street.
Lorata. Impossible Magic - 20K words Enchanted Forest Chronicles canon divergent AU with time travel. This is Cimorene’s plan for not having to wait almost two decades before she can see her husband again, and it works beautifully as something she would do and as something that doesn’t quite work the way she thought it would. (Wrede wrote the fourth book, in terms of in universe chronological, before she wrote the first three. That fourth book had a set up that required a very long separation for the main character’s parents as part of the backstory. That gap becomes less acceptable to readers who start with book one and spend three books seeing where the character’s parents come from.) Recommended. Story on AO3.
Mass, Wendy. The Candymakers - Audiobook read by Mark Turetsky. I think I’m just too old for this book. I liked the characters and believed in their goals. I didn’t believe in the world around them or in the adults. Even once I accept the idea that the POV characters simply don’t perceive a lot of things, I can’t quite make the world around them seem functional/consistent. It doesn’t take away from the urgency that the characters feel or from the growing friendships between them, and I can definitely see why Cordelia loved the book when she was ten.
McGuire, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky - I thought this was better structured/plotted than the first book in the series (Every Heart a Doorway), and unlike book two, I actually finished this one. I’m pretty sure that not finishing book two had as much to do with it being focused on tropes that I don’t enjoy as it did with my brain not wanting to deal with reading fiction, but this one was much more my sort of thing. It’s still thin because it’s a novella, but it managed not to make me feel as if the plot were insulting my intelligence. I’m still more interested in the meta idea than in the book itself, but I’ll follow along and see where the series goes.
Millard, Candice. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. I mainly stuck this one out because I know very little about the Boer War. Winston Churchill comes across in the text as incredibly self-absorbed in a way that makes his successes more about the world-- by chance-- intersecting with his assumptions about who he was and what the British Empire was than with him actually understanding people and the world particularly well.
Proud Knight, Fair Lady: the Twelve Lais of Marie de France (translated by Naomi Lewis) - For some reason, I thought these were going to be poems, but they’re prose translations of twelfth century stories that were half poetry and half prose and may have had musical accompaniment. They’re very much in fairy tale style in terms of both the story elements and the style of the prose. The library copy I read was missing four pages so I lost the ending of one story and the beginning of another. It’s the only copy the library owns, so I’d have to use interlibrary loan to get another copy. I’m not sufficiently interested.
Sunstone 2 - This volume includes some traumatic backstory in the form of self-bondage gone wrong from the POV of the character who found the person and had to get them help. I wasn’t expecting angst/trauma here. I suppose that some sort of plot complication is necessary to keep the story going, but I was wanting more of v.1. The library doesn’t have any further volumes, so I’m not likely to read more any time soon.
Tomaszewski, Z.G. All Things Dusk - Book of poetry. The author likes birds a lot and also spiders. One of the first few poems focuses on a child’s death. I’m still only vaguely mentally ready for poetry, so I can’t even tell if I disliked this so much as that most of the imagery was focused on things that I either don’t get or don’t want.
Tryslora. The Fires of the Abyss - 15K word Chronicles of Amber fic. Random’s POV with excellent character voice. Set after the Merlin books and addressing some dangling plot threads. Recommended. Story on AO3.
The Wallflower 21-27 - Silliness. Metric tons of silliness. I keep losing track of how old the characters are supposed to be, and I’m pretty sure I’m assuming they’re older than they’re supposed to be. The library doesn’t have v.28, so I won’t necessarily go on with this. I suppose it will depend on whether or not I remember it when we finally get interlibrary loan back.
Willingham, Katie. Unlikely Designs - A short book of poetry. Most of the poems have technological and programming references and similes. I’m not sure if they’d work better if I knew the terminology or not.
Started but not finished:
Armitage, Simon. The Unaccompanied - Book of poetry. I simply couldn’t focus enough to read this.
Goldie Vance 1 - I hit this at a point when I wanted SF/fantasy and ended up bouncing off this book. There was a hold on it, so I couldn’t renew it. I suspect that someone looking for a book more in the mystery direction would like this better. The title character is a black girl who investigates mysteries in the hotel her father manages.
Gallagher, Tess. Moon Crossing Bridge - The poems here are all centered on grieving for a recently deceased partner. I simply reached a point where I found the book indigestible as something read all at once.
Harrison, Leslie. The Book of Endings - stream of consciousness poetry with the phrases overlapping in by having the last one or two of each start the next. I find this sort of thing kind of exhausting to read because my mind keeps trying to stick in punctuation and force something linear to happen. I don’t think this is something I can actually adapt to. My poetry selections from the library are mostly based on the page count and what I stumble on in the catalog. It’s interesting to see what’s out there. I don’t know that I appreciate/understand any of it more than I did before I started trying to read more poetry, but… maybe?
Bosch, Pseudonymous. BAD Luck - Audiobook read by Aaron Landon. Second book in the series. I shouldn’t have started listening to this one immediately after finishing the first as the change in reader was jarring. Landon’s style is to make almost everything sound sarcastic. Scott was around when I started the book and commented on the sarcasm. The first chapter is from the POV of a different character than the one who had the POV through the entire first book. The book then goes back to the character from the first book and connects things, but I thought, for that lengths of time, the book was going to be completely separate. I’m curious about the third book, but the library doesn’t have the audiobook version except via Overdrive (which puts a deadline on finishing that getting the CDs doesn’t). This second book ups the stakes vastly. The first book was all focused on small things, low/personal stakes things, and also ended at a point when the POV character had just crossed the threshold into the unknown.
Chi-chi-chimaera (gestalt1), gestalt1. Twin Sunrise - 300K word Star Wars fic, canon divergent AU in which Vader manages to capture Luke before events of The Empire Strikes Back. Everything goes sideways from canon from there, leading to Vader and Luke starting a war to depose the Emperor. Vader’s intention is to put Luke on the throne. Luke’s intention are considerably more muddled because there’s so much he simply doesn’t know. I enjoyed it a great deal but finished it with a sense that, although many characters talked about Vader still being responsible for every terrible thing that he’d ever done, still having waded in blood to maintain the Empire, the author didn’t really feel it. Or maybe… couldn’t write him with any sympathy while keeping that truth centered? Because, even with the reminders and with Vader being quite willing, still, to do very nasty things, it’s very hard to read him as a person who actually has all of that history. At any rate, if the premise sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy, the story is, in fact, probably going to be a thing you’ll enjoy. Story on AO3.
Collins, Suzanne. Gregor the Overlander - Audiobook read by Paul Boehmer. This was merely okay. I didn’t feel strongly connected to either the characters or the story. I can’t tell how much of that was me getting distracted and how much was that nothing happened that surprised me. I felt like the POV character didn’t change much.
Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising - Audiobook read by Alex Jennings. I’d forgotten a lot of the details of the book, and I found this a less satisfying experience than I remember it having been when I was a child. It’s not so much the knowing how things come out part because, back in elementary school, I found The Silver on the Tree on the new book shelf at the library and ended up reading it first and then searching for the earlier books to see where everything came from. I think that my difficulties here have a lot to do with lack of agency. Most of the elements and characters came across to me as clockwork pieces. Some of that is the power imbalances. Some of that is the way that all times exist at once. The choices Will makes don’t feel like choices, more like steps in an extremely formal and complex dance that he can’t stop or alter, and the choices people who aren’t Old Ones make seem to be pretty uniformly bad because of lack of information. I’m pretty sure, now, that part of me being angry at the ending of The Silver on the Tree is that it felt like theft of agency even though Cooper’s words give me the impression that she thought it was a gift of agency. That is, those characters could only make their own choices if they were severed from their pasts. All of which makes Will’s expected future worse. Will’s future has a hell of a lot in common with Jamie’s from Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, but the text doesn’t seem to get that.
DarthNickels. The Exiled - Star Wars canon divergent AU in which Vader survives Return of the Jedi. 20K words. Leia has tried every other avenue for helping her young son. Seeking out her biological father is an act of genuine desperation. I enjoyed this one. It’s Leia’s POV and leans heavily on the fact that her experiences with Darth Vader stripped away any space for her to imagine him still having good in him (and heaped massive trauma on top of that) and on the likelihood that pretty much every not-Luke person in the known universe would want Darth Vader dead. Story on AO3.
Greenwood, Kerry. Cocaine Blues - Audiobook read by Stephanie Daniel. This was a reread. I wanted to see how the audiobook versions were. The reading wasn’t terrible but also wasn’t spectacular. I could only tell the characters apart if the reader was using different accents for them, so Cec and Bert blurred, and the trio of Russians were hard to tell apart if more than one was present. The story didn’t seem all that different as an audiobook. I remembered more than I had thought I did. I still can’t reconcile Jack Robinson from the show with Jack Robinson in the books, but I read the books before the show started airing, so I’m comfortable with the book version and took a while to warm up to the show version.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. Promise Not to Tell - In this case, the fact that this is the same book that Krentz always writes is a feature for me rather than a bug because it meant zero mental work required to get to the end of it. I did discover that there’s a point at which I hit my suspension of disbelief limit and get annoyed with handwaving. That point is an early morning jogger discovering a body on the far end of a private dock attached to the lot of an empty house. Having it be a jogger was silly. A jogger wouldn’t be likely to come close enough to the dock to see a body on the end of it, not even if the house was somehow positioned so that it didn’t block view of the dock from the street.
Lorata. Impossible Magic - 20K words Enchanted Forest Chronicles canon divergent AU with time travel. This is Cimorene’s plan for not having to wait almost two decades before she can see her husband again, and it works beautifully as something she would do and as something that doesn’t quite work the way she thought it would. (Wrede wrote the fourth book, in terms of in universe chronological, before she wrote the first three. That fourth book had a set up that required a very long separation for the main character’s parents as part of the backstory. That gap becomes less acceptable to readers who start with book one and spend three books seeing where the character’s parents come from.) Recommended. Story on AO3.
Mass, Wendy. The Candymakers - Audiobook read by Mark Turetsky. I think I’m just too old for this book. I liked the characters and believed in their goals. I didn’t believe in the world around them or in the adults. Even once I accept the idea that the POV characters simply don’t perceive a lot of things, I can’t quite make the world around them seem functional/consistent. It doesn’t take away from the urgency that the characters feel or from the growing friendships between them, and I can definitely see why Cordelia loved the book when she was ten.
McGuire, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky - I thought this was better structured/plotted than the first book in the series (Every Heart a Doorway), and unlike book two, I actually finished this one. I’m pretty sure that not finishing book two had as much to do with it being focused on tropes that I don’t enjoy as it did with my brain not wanting to deal with reading fiction, but this one was much more my sort of thing. It’s still thin because it’s a novella, but it managed not to make me feel as if the plot were insulting my intelligence. I’m still more interested in the meta idea than in the book itself, but I’ll follow along and see where the series goes.
Millard, Candice. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. I mainly stuck this one out because I know very little about the Boer War. Winston Churchill comes across in the text as incredibly self-absorbed in a way that makes his successes more about the world-- by chance-- intersecting with his assumptions about who he was and what the British Empire was than with him actually understanding people and the world particularly well.
Proud Knight, Fair Lady: the Twelve Lais of Marie de France (translated by Naomi Lewis) - For some reason, I thought these were going to be poems, but they’re prose translations of twelfth century stories that were half poetry and half prose and may have had musical accompaniment. They’re very much in fairy tale style in terms of both the story elements and the style of the prose. The library copy I read was missing four pages so I lost the ending of one story and the beginning of another. It’s the only copy the library owns, so I’d have to use interlibrary loan to get another copy. I’m not sufficiently interested.
Sunstone 2 - This volume includes some traumatic backstory in the form of self-bondage gone wrong from the POV of the character who found the person and had to get them help. I wasn’t expecting angst/trauma here. I suppose that some sort of plot complication is necessary to keep the story going, but I was wanting more of v.1. The library doesn’t have any further volumes, so I’m not likely to read more any time soon.
Tomaszewski, Z.G. All Things Dusk - Book of poetry. The author likes birds a lot and also spiders. One of the first few poems focuses on a child’s death. I’m still only vaguely mentally ready for poetry, so I can’t even tell if I disliked this so much as that most of the imagery was focused on things that I either don’t get or don’t want.
Tryslora. The Fires of the Abyss - 15K word Chronicles of Amber fic. Random’s POV with excellent character voice. Set after the Merlin books and addressing some dangling plot threads. Recommended. Story on AO3.
The Wallflower 21-27 - Silliness. Metric tons of silliness. I keep losing track of how old the characters are supposed to be, and I’m pretty sure I’m assuming they’re older than they’re supposed to be. The library doesn’t have v.28, so I won’t necessarily go on with this. I suppose it will depend on whether or not I remember it when we finally get interlibrary loan back.
Willingham, Katie. Unlikely Designs - A short book of poetry. Most of the poems have technological and programming references and similes. I’m not sure if they’d work better if I knew the terminology or not.
Started but not finished:
Armitage, Simon. The Unaccompanied - Book of poetry. I simply couldn’t focus enough to read this.
Goldie Vance 1 - I hit this at a point when I wanted SF/fantasy and ended up bouncing off this book. There was a hold on it, so I couldn’t renew it. I suspect that someone looking for a book more in the mystery direction would like this better. The title character is a black girl who investigates mysteries in the hotel her father manages.
Gallagher, Tess. Moon Crossing Bridge - The poems here are all centered on grieving for a recently deceased partner. I simply reached a point where I found the book indigestible as something read all at once.
Harrison, Leslie. The Book of Endings - stream of consciousness poetry with the phrases overlapping in by having the last one or two of each start the next. I find this sort of thing kind of exhausting to read because my mind keeps trying to stick in punctuation and force something linear to happen. I don’t think this is something I can actually adapt to. My poetry selections from the library are mostly based on the page count and what I stumble on in the catalog. It’s interesting to see what’s out there. I don’t know that I appreciate/understand any of it more than I did before I started trying to read more poetry, but… maybe?
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Date: 2018-03-05 07:26 pm (UTC)Every Heart A Doorway and the first sequel (the Jack and Jill one) had some of the same feel of formal dance, limited agency. Only I'm less interested in hanging out at this party and watching this dance.