Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
| # | Date | Author | Title | Comments |
| April | ||||
| 45 | Apr 1 | Bradley, Marion Zimmer | Hawkmistress! ** | Read in adolescence and loved; coming back to it now, I get the disturbing, slightly sad feeling that I may have outgrown Darkover. This is such an archetypical member of the class 'Plucky talented tomboy heroine forced by family and the world to be squashed down into being a Lady' that it was uncomfortable to read. The world in it is so massively UNFAIR, with no chance for redemption or happy ending, and the writing slams this fact home so many times, that I started crying several times during reading it. |
| 46 | Apr 3 | Daley, Brian | Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds ** | Just as good as I remembered it; had to restrain myself from grabbing its two sequels off the shelf for immediate devouring. :-> Rollicking example of a mismatched buddy-pic, as it were, with a Quest and lots of great alien-culture (some of them human) details. |
| 47 | Apr 4 | Hubbell, Will | Cretaceous Sea | An interesting spin on the 'paleontologist lured to join dodgy time travel enterprise by the possibility of seeing Real Live Dinos' trope: due to various machinations, said paleontologist then has to try to help Plucky Billionaire's Daughter (among others) survive the K/T boundary extinction event. Also refreshing: said paleontologist doesn't make sweeping, unsupported 'We Know This Thing To Be True' statements about dino behavior, color, blah blah fishcakes, instead realizing that what he's seeing with his own eyes trumps any theory created uptime by folks fondling fossilized bones. |
| 48 | Apr 4 | Niven, Larry, and Steven Barnes | Achilles' Choice ** | The title is referring (for you |
| 49 | Apr 8 | Walton, Jo | The King's Peace ** | |
| 50 | Apr 8 | Daley, Brian | Jinx on a Terran Inheritance ** | [Floyt & Fitzhugh, bk 2] |
| 51 | Apr 8 | Sargent, Pamela | Earthseed ** | A variant on 'generation ship seeds the stars with people who don't know there's a non-Ship world,' sort of. I enjoyed it. Distinctly YA feel. Avoids several easy answers in re conflict resolution and designing societies. Relies on several others. :-> |
| 52 | Apr 8 | Pohl, Frederik | The Merchants' War | |
| 53 | Apr 10 | Hyman, Tom | Jupiter's Daughter | A book in the current trend of 'shelve it in Fiction, and call it a thriller, but large chunks of its plot turn on technological points and it has to infodump you about science and worldbuilding' novels. Like Patterson's When the Wind Blows/The Lake House series, which involves bioengineeredly-changed humans WHO HAVE WINGS, but nonetheless 'isn't science fiction.' Hah, I say, and bah and humbug too. This one makes an interesting paired read with Nancy Kress' Beggars series, I think. Its mcguffin is that a Brilliant Geneticist has come up with a way to generate/hack genomes such that you feed in mommy's genes and daddy's genes and it spits out a new printout for baby that is, well, Homo Superior, effectively. Then you somehow turn that back into chromosomes (insert Wayne's World diddly diddly doo diddly finger-waving here), put it back into the three-day-old fertilized embryo (no, I'm NOT kidding! Honest! That's what he said! Also, he got a useful genetic sample off a CUT LOCK of hair!!), and grow the baby in the mommy's womb. Aside from the to-my-eyes laughable lack of attention to making his technobabble authentic and consistent, it's not a bad mcguffin, really. But whereas Kress turned a similar sort of idea into a neat novel of ideas based on what happens when you have a sizable minority of changed children, Hyman instead makes the story all about the infighting and maneuvering around who will control the technology. He seems completely uninterested in what the long-term ramifications of people making kids like this will be. Which says something about him, something about Kress, or something about the current technothriller-that-is-NOT-no-we-mean-it-s |
| 54 | Apr 12 | Tepper, Sheri S. | Grass ** | |
| 55 | Apr 13 | Tepper, Sheri S. | The Gate to Women's Country ** | |
| 56 | Apr 14 | God Stalk | The beginning is almost amateurishly written, the first chapter jammed full of about four novels' worth of Cool Ideas, shoehorned together by mental narration during a pursuit that he says at the beginning of it should end very shortly with the character collapsing of exhaustion and her wounds -- and instead she runs the rest of the night. That said, it does get better, and I liked it, though the feeling that he'd turned an RPG setting into a very thin excuse for a novel continued. I liked the characters, though I found his craft kind of clumsy. | |
| 57 | April 15 | Heinlein, Robert | Tunnel in the Sky ** | Oddly, as good as I remembered it. Though very much a product of 1955. I can tell you, for a troglodytic no-dear-let-me-carry-that-it's-heavy 1950s man, Heinlein was really quite progressive and egalitarian-minded. That said, ripping yarn, with an interesting twist at the end. But then, I'm totally into the sociological science fiction thing, so I'm easy to please. |
| 58 | April 15 | Heinlein, Robert | Time for the Stars ** | Still my fave Heinlein evah. Stands up quite well despite the changes in our world since its writing (unlike some works from that period). Apparently the same universe as Tunnel in the Sky, though several hundred years earlier. |
| 59 | April 15 | Heinlein, Robert | Citizen of the Galaxy | I don't think this one universe-shares with any of his other books, and somehow I managed never to read it before (these three, btw, I currently own in a single binding under the title Infinite Possibilities, hence why I read all three of them in a row). I liked it. I recognized some of the themes in it that he came back to in bits of Lazarus Long's biography, as it were. In conclusion: the juveniles stand up much better than the later, post-Brain-Eater works. Now if only I can remember that and save myself more disappointed rereading pain. :-> |
| 60 | April 16 | Earth, Air, Water, and Fire | An anthology of short stories about elemental (those four) subjects. Quality variable, but several I quite liked. Will be looking up those authors. | |
| 61 | April 18 | Gloomcookie, Vol 3: Broken Curses | I like the Vol 3 artist MUCH MUCH MUCH better than the Vol 2 one (hatesss it, my preciousss), though, well, my heart still belongs to Naifeh. :-> Writing wasn't so good this time, as it was clearly just wrapping up scads of plot threads from the last volume, but I have hopes for the next. Esp. if she keeps this artist. Vol 2 was painful for me to read. I couldn't follow the story because of the ick bad EYES BLEEDING NOW. | |
| 62 | Apr 19 | Drake, David, and Jim Kjelgaard | The Hunter Returns | Not a sequel, despite the title. Also, I think they need to give whoever wrote the blurb a big dose of Ritalin ... and maybe a Valium. See for yourself:Uh, yeah. So it's a prehistoric thing, kind of like Auel only (a) earlier, i.e. in the Pleistocene, (b) with less sex, and (c) way worse written. I think Drake had Kjelgaard consulting on dog psychology or something, the bits with dogs in feel like his books do. |
| 63 | April 20 | Bill Starr | The Treasure of Wonderwhat | It says it's [A Farstar & Son Novel: #2], which scares me a little. It kept thinking while reading it that this strikes me as the kind of book Terry Pratchett might have written in high school. Silly-concept alien societies (one protagonist, Dawnboy MacCochise, comes from a Scots/Amerind homeworld. No, really), planets named simply for the joke (though at least Pandemo ends up in TWO jokes: the natives are Pandemonians, and there's a nearby navigational channel in space called, naturally, the Pandemo Canal), and madcap action that happens, well, uhm, because the author says it does. There's a lot of Basil Exposition dialogue, only it comes from everyone whenever he needs it to, for no real motivated reason. I guess it was fun, for popcorn, but I also think I'm a little too sophisticated to deal with more than one of it. Like Lucky Starr with a lobotomy, perhaps. |
| 64 | Apr 21 | Kirstein, Rosemary | The Steerswoman | See comment posted below, under 74-76. |
| 65 | Apr 22 | Kay, Guy Gavriel | Sailing to Sarantium | Been in my inpile for literal years (like, more than 3). People keep telling me that (a) it's good and (b) Guy Gavriel Kay is teh writing hotness (as it were). My verdict? Ehh, sokay. I liked its alternate-romans detailing, and its geeking out about making mosaic; I was less than enthralled by the fact that, despite having some really cool characters who drove the whole book, its plot is basically "Ooh, look, I killed the Emperor and made my uncle Emperor. Then I killed him, and now I'm a rilly gud ruler. Watch the political maneuvering from everyone ELSE who wants to depose me!!" Sorry, these are the kinds of plots that before A Civil Campaign (and Miles generally) I'd have flung at the wall without finishing. As it is, it's all right, I suppose, but I desperately wish he'd given those wonderful breathing, living characters something better to do with their screentime. I think I'll skip the sequels, unless I'm stuck in a motel room with nothing but that, the Gideon Bible, or Robert Jordan to read. :-> Something else about it that doesn't square with his 'all that and a big bag of chips' reputation, for me, is his infuriating coyness. Random, fabricated example: On page 6, Jenny looks into a previously-closed box and thinks to herself (on-camera), "My, that's interesting." She then closes the box and puts it away, without the author once telling us WHY. Four pages later, offhandedly, he says something like, "And the entire thread of thoughts she's been having is, of course, because what was in the box was a small china golden retriever." Maybe some of you like this, but he did it over and over and OVER again and it got very firmly up my nose. At least the *way* he did it. Supercilious, coy, and "Ha, ha, I am the omnipotent author and I know all, I see all! You, reader worm, must wait upon my pleasure! Squeal like a piggy nicely enough, and maybe I shall be pleased to let you in on the joke." |
| 66 | Apr 24 | Winchester, Simon | The Professor and the Madman | Is this my first nonfiction this year? How bizarre. If so, it definitely displays the bias of my inpile more than my own preferences. |
| 67 | Apr 29 | Butcher, Jim | Blood Rites | [Dresden Files, bk 6]Love these. Love Jim Butcher's writing. How/why do I love him? Ahem. Let me show you a few (non-spoiler, I think) examples. :->
I'll forgive a lot when fun headlong writing like that combines with an author who is neither afraid to put main characters in serious jeopardy of their lives, nor finds it absotively required to keep adding stupid power-ups to the protagonist every damn book so that eventually they're killing Gods three times a week, and twice on Saturdays. Harry Dresden at the end of this book is exactly as easy to kill as at the beginning of the first. And he knows it. Which is refreshing. And he still heads out to try to save the world ... and maybe make a living, if he can. |
| 68 | Apr 28 | Blyton, Enid | Five Go Off In A Caravan ** | [Famous Fives, bk 5] |
| 69 | Apr 29 | Lovejoy, Jack | The Hunters ** | I have a long and wistful history with this book. I found it randomly in the SF shelves of a used bookstore in adolescence, read it, liked it. At some later point I sold it back for credit, gave it away, or lost it -- I no longer had a copy when I got into college. Several years ago I began to consciously seek out the books I remembered most strongly from this period of my reading, to see if they are still/were ever *that* good, or if, y'know, I was just eleven (see comments on Hawkmistress above, inter multi alia). The main problem is that authors' names didn't start sticking in my head regularly until I was about 23. Bandnames and titles of songs or books either, for the most part. It's a cognitive thing. Needless to say, this makes tracking the books in question down for rereads harder. Rec.arts.sf.fandom helped with some of them (After Man, among a few others), but more often I'd post what details I remembered and get several plausible-but-wrong suggestions back. In the case of what turned out to be this book, here's what I posted to rassef almost precisely four years ago: Aliens invaded Earth at least a generation ago. They took over, and made most of Earth into farms or hunting preserves. The farms are tended by machines. They captured some humans and rebred them into specialized physiological forms - greyhoundlike, gorillalike, etc.A few things I got wrong: his name's Thelon, not Theron, and it was over 400 years from alien invasion to 'present day'. People kept suggesting 'Puppies of Terra,' even when I said in the request that that wasn't it. However, nobody suggested The Hunters. I only ended up finding the book at all because of sheer random chance, combined with the odd visual way my memory works. I *did* have a clear mental image of the cover art, mostly. And when The Stars Our Destination (now-defunct Chicago sf-focussed bookstore run by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} alicebentley) was going out of business, I naturally went to go browse the books at bargain-basement prices. Running my eyes along the shelves, I saw a cluster of maple leaves on a spine that looked like the same artist as the cover in my head. It never occurred to me that it'd be THE book, just that perhaps I could add an artist's name to the search profile (for the record: Thomas Kidd). I took it off the shelf and squeed hard enough that John poked his head in from the other room to see what'd gotten me so excited.I love serendipity. I sometimes think that (to paraphrase; my apologies to the original artist) if it wasn't for dumb luck, I just wouldn't have no luck at all. So, I now own it again, and after several years of letting it sit in my inpile, I've now read it 'as an adult'. And I like it. A lot. It's charming, it moves along well, it utilizes Diary From The Past to infodump the main character on the world, and everyone acts very believably. And it's fun to read, which counts for a lot. |
| May | ||||
| 70 | May 1 | Coulson, Juanita | Tomorrow's Heritage | Not a bad nearish-future extrapolation around nasty political backbiting, First Contact, and alternate history. Though at a distance of twenty years or so, some of the extrapolations ring wrong or disturbing (a nation develops called the 'United Ghetto States,' that is apparently all or mostly black, for example). Also, and I'm not sure how to characterize this exactly, but it flogs dead horses, prosewise. I tell ya, reading limyaael has changed how I read books forever. :-> |
| 71 | May 2 | Bull, Emma | Finder | |
| 72 | May 6 | Turtledove, Harry, and Martin Greenberg | Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century | Short stories, obviously. Several knocked my socks off (most especially 'The Winterberry', by Nick DiChario). The last one ('The Death of Captain Future') did not, as far as I can tell, belong in this volume, as it wasn't particularly alternate history. Other than 'what if we went into space and had colonies in the asteroids?', which includes almost all rocketship-based scifi out there. |
| 73 | May 10 | Tepper, Sheri S. | A Plague of Angels | |
| 74 | May 12 | Kirstein, Rosemary | Outskirter's Secret | I don't just like this series, I have a massive emotional relationship with it. I feel like getting up perky in the morning to make it homemade cinnamon rolls and breakfast in bed. If you'll let me stretch the metaphor until it snaps. :-> That said, it's a lovely lovely lovely quest-for-secrets-of-our-world fantasy novel that is also a very good [Spoiler: terraforming, colonization, and lost-technology] novel. It illustrates perfectly the what-if of having a, well, you can think of them almost as a secular religious order, in the medieval sense, whose entire formal vow and rule is, "If someone asks you a question, answer it with the truth. Unless they refuse to answer YOUR questions, or lie to you, in which case your entire order will shun/'ban' them, and nobody in it will ever answer your questions again." It's wonderfully subversively cool. As a side effect, the kind of people who join are, self-selectedly, lovers of knowledge and learning, and are independently inventing entire branches of math to try to answer questions that interest them. So the protagonist is of 'my tribe,' firstly. And secondly, all the things relating to what I've spoiler-spaced up above just geek me out to my toenails, most especially how totally realistically the protagonist's interaction with and discovery of them are portrayed. That's *hard*. Very hard. But it's done near-perfectly, by my lights. Oh, and the protagonist isn't a spotless perfect avatar of humanity, either; she screws up, sometimes really badly, she jumps to conclusions (even though she's been trained in how to avoid such leaps) and causes harm thereby, and all kinds of other wonderful lovable-and-bad-for-her-long-term-goals things. Want more. Now. :-> |
| 75 | May 12 | Kirstein, Rosemary | The Lost Steersman | |
| 76 | May 13 | Kirstein, Rosemary | The Language of Power | |
| 77 | May 13 | Ibsen, Henrik | A Doll's House | Yes, the play. Goodman is doing a highly-adapted inspired-by-the-back-cover version starting in June, so a coworker lent me the original. Took me about half an hour to read. Very, ah, Victorian. |
| 78 | May 15 | Key, Alexander | Escape to Witch Mountain | Movie novelization, therefore, uhm, not so much with the amazingly, life-changingly well-written. Novelization of a not-particularly-well-written Disney movie, at that, so, um. |
| 79 | May 16 | Key, Alexander | Return to Witch Mountain | See previous comment, added on that this is the novelization of a very thinly-explained unnecessary sequel with a bad setup. They did what? Why? Oh. Because Disney wanted a sequel. Ok, I can buy that. It says something that the telepathic goat (I am NOT making this up) has most of the best lines. Including the last line of the book. |
| 80 | May 21 | Tepper, Sheri S | Singer from the Sea ** | Part school-days tale, part coming-of-age story, part revealing-lost-secrets-of-family-history, I'm starting to get a handle on what 'Tepperian weirdness' is: a tale of wonder that is also clearly a well-thought-out, well-worldbuilt, distinctly scientific universe, that suddenly takes a bizarre left turn into mysticism that's never quite ever explained to the satisfaction of someone misled by the preceding into thinking this might be hard SF. |
| 81 | May 21 | Spencer, Si, and Dean Ormston | Books of Magick: Life During Wartime (book 1) | I would have liked it a lot more if it weren't so soaked in gore, vulgarity, and ugliness. Also if they explained what the various sides of the war STAND for, instead of just that they are at war and it's three-sided and everyone's being a bastard to their 'enemies'. I'm not sure whether I'm going to look for later volumes or not, despite my usual "Tim Hunter, rah rah rah!" viewpoint. |
| 82 | May 21 | Willingham, Bill, Paul Guinan, and Ron Randall | Proposition Player | Recommended without any reservations at all to anyone with a sense of humor. If I hadn't known ahead of time that Willingham was responsible for Fables, I'd have been suspecting it by the end. Brief description for those still curious: imagine what would happen if a small-time poker player acquired clear title to 32 human souls (because of a silly bar joke). Now imagine Heaven and Hell sending representatives to try to bargain them out of his posession and into theirs. And that's only the initial setup. :-> |
| 83 | May 27 | Tepper, Sheri S. | The Family Tree | The single most satisfying work of fiction I've ever read. More later. |
| 84 | May 28 | The Worm Re-Turns | Compendium of reprints from a neeeeeet college-bio-department semi-spoof publication. Adore many of the bits. Wish to seek to reprint them in fanzines so others will Know The Coolness. | |
| 85 | May 29 | Daley, Brian | Fall of the White Ship Avatar ** | Floyt & Fitzhugh 3 |
| 86 | May 30 | The Design of Everyday Things | ||
| 87 | May 30 | Blyton, Enid | Five Go Off to Camp | I'm starting to wonder if ALL the 'Famous Fives' books (this is #7) involve discovering rings of black-marketeers and thieves. :-> |
| June | ||||
| 88 | June 2 | Kellerman, Faye | The Forgotten | Semi-standard cop-protagonist thriller/mystery, only the principal characters are all orthodox Jewish, and also it's a little less Hollywoody and more realistic about how much of what kind of work is involved in crime-solving. |
| 89 | June 3 | Jarvis, Robin | The Crystal Prison | Deptford Mice 2 |
| 90 | June 5 | Garwood, Julie | Heartbreaker | Serial-killer thriller, but a well-done one, esp. for the INSANELY SAPPY AND CUTE and very well-written love story. Imagine what happens when a girl and the FBI agent assigned to protect her start posing as engaged and in love to lure out the killer ... and then fall in love for real? Yes. Like that. And the end had me giggling and crying, all at once. Highly recommended, if you can take tension, real jeopardy for the characters you care about, and glimpses inside a completely ickycrazy killer's head. |
| 91 | June 6 | Bujold, Lois McMaster | Komarr ** | A comfort-read, and baldly acknowledged as such. :-> |
| 92 | June 8 | Brontë, Anne | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Though I've always maintained that I hate to the point of not-being-able-to-get-very-far Victorian country house and romance garbage books, now I've read one. And I even enjoyed it. Though it still (to my raised-on-modern-lit eye) reads like she swallowed three thesauruses and puked them up on the page repeatedly. My inner editor kept wanting to tighten it up and un-redundantify (?) it. But the story itself was enchanting, and made a very interesting contrast to Komarr (they both show bad marriages from the woman's point of view, and involve her needing to protect her son from her husband). Bought originally because I saw the trailers for a PBS on-screen version, and it seemed kind of a neat story, so when I saw it in a cheap-books bin I thought what the heck and grabbed it. Kind of glad I did. Maybe now (in some moods) I can put up with that style, now, just as I grew into being able to read (when in the right mood) Tolkien without flinging it at the wall. |
| 93 | June 18 | Bujold, Lois McMaster | Curse of Chalion ** | This hiatus between finishings is mostly due to catching up on several weeks of neglected magazines. I knew I'd read this, but couldn't remember anything about its plot or style, save that I remembered the god system was interesting. And it is. And this time I think I'll remember it. However, whoever wrote the blurb needs to be SHOT. I bought it because, hey, new Bujold! And then I waited eight months to read it because the blurb had me terrified it was a bad Robert Jordan knockoff. |
| 94 | June 19 | Bujold, Lois McMaster | Paladin of Souls | Sequel to Curse of Chalion. |
| 95 | June 23 | Kress, Nancy | Probability Sun | Apparently the middle book of a series; I don't think I'll bother hunting them down. Interesting premise (Big Seekrit Kewl Technology left behind by the Unknowable Ancients is necessary in a war; but there are ethical issues raised because of interactions with a native species), but clunkily written, IMHO. Liked the aliens a lot. |
| 96 | June 24 | Tepper, Sheri S. | Beauty | |
| 97 | June 30 | Cherryh, C.J. | Downbelow Station | |
- Mood:bookish and methodical
Comments
-- Dagonell
P.S. I started a "Year of Books" June 2004 - June 2005, then started Grad school. My reading rate is *way* down from previous years. You've read more books starting since January than I have starting since last June.
-- D
That last is notable because Floyt manages to use their enemies' having read the Bombastico Herdman penny-dreadfuls about them in a chase sequence, to the advantage of Our Heroes. :->
I've been thinking a lot lately while rereading that they're VERY cinematic books, paced like action movies.
I also see you "restrained yourself" from grabbing a sequel for a whole four days. :-> Not that I blame you, as I'll probably be rereading them myself next month, along with The King's Peace, The King's Name, and The Prize in the Game -- I've designated May "series month," as opposed to April, which is "no rereads."
I'm assuming that you were reading numbers 48-52 concurrently if you finished all four in one day; or maybe that's a typo?
After disappointingly low numbers the past two years, I'm pleased that watching your list grow has inspired me to keep up my reading pace this year; perhaps I'll manage to get my "to be read" pile whittled down somewhat from the seven shelves it currently occupies...
The gap was due to some weird undisplayed character being appended all over and interpreted as a <br> tag. I only finally managed to diagnose it by cutpasting entire text into an editor, saving as rich-text, changing the extension to .txt, and reediting it AGAIN. My guess is that LJ doesn't like it when you edit the same entry a lot lot lot, and this is what happens when you try. So I'll limit the size, and if necessary plow it back through the .rtf, .txt, repaste thing if it starts doing it on this entry.
I don't have The King's Name or the other yet, though I do want to read them. And even more do I want to read Tooth and Claw, sheerly based upon what she's written about its culture in her livejournal. :->
Good things about 'going shopping for books' in my basement because of my cataloging project:
Bad thing about same: not really getting any further with the 'less blatantly attractive' books in my previously organized inpile, because suddenly there's a lot more bright shiny low-hanging fruit mixed in to distract me from them.
Expect a lot more ** tags showing up in the table soonish, because of that.
We can also loan you Dark of the Gods, an omnibus that comprises God Stalk, the sequel Dark of the Moon, and an interstitial short story Bones. We also have Seeker's Mask, which is book 3, and Blood and Ivory, which is a short-story collection containing some Jame and some proto-Jame stories. Book 4, currently titled To Ride a Rathorn is due out from Meisha Merlin in 2006. (PC Hodgell is a she, btw). The books get more interesting, and denser, and weirder. In the subsequent books she gets back into the lands held by her people and we start seeing the culture that shaped Jame and the rest of her family.
Things happen because she says they happen, and there's very little ... uhm. Craft. Though I do like the stuff she's writing *about*, and because of that will probably get to the rest of the books eventually. Despite the fact that I think I could describe in detail the Big Seeeekrit Thing with the knife-and-cape-and-book that Jame keeps having Big Seeeeekrit flashbacks about. The foreshadowings? Not so much with the subtle.
So, when shall we three (or maybe four, depending on
this interview.
One thing I've found frustrating about the series is how difficult it is to discuss anything without spoilering the books -- those moments when you figure out what it is Rowan is really seeing, but doesn't yet understand, are just such a rush I don't want to ruin any of them for someone who hasn't read the books yet. I inadvertently annoyed