Books from april
May. 7th, 2013 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateCity of Ice- Laurence Yep. Still pretty good, though I liked the first one better. A little slow to start, but I'm not actually sure why I think that. Besides the continuing adventures of the cast from City of Fire, we have various denizens of the frozen north from polar bears to (incidental) mounties riding giant owls. And further evidence that this world's Asia is full of historically-inspired empires that most people haven't heard of before.
Wonders of the Invisible World- Patricia McKillip. Short stories; these fell into three categories: a few that were modern or futuristic and utterly not my thing (the title story, the one with the cruise ship), some that were very classic McKillip and which I quite liked but wished they were novels, and some that occupied a sort of in-between space and were a bit variable but mostly good. Recommended for those who like fantasy in strange and slightly dreamy worlds.
Human Chain- Seamus Heaney. More poems, still haven't found the one that started me reading his work. Not bad, but there wasn't anything in here that particularly spoke to me, either.
The Virtu/ The Mirador/ Corambis- Sarah Monette. Um. Yes. Apparently I liked these, as the three together had more words and got finished faster than everything else in the last month including the many books I haven't finished yet. Dead gods and labyrinths, spies, complex plots seen from various directions, characters who do eventually work through some of their issues one pint of blood at a time. I loved Mildmay's voice (though one slowly comes to realize that the reader is the only one who gets the chance to see him that way) and the way the traces of ancient civilizations have a realistic weight-- some puzzles get sorted out and some are just there, continuing to be puzzling. Warning labels: there's a lot of sex, and it's the awful bits that are described in detail (though neither pregnancy nor STDs are a thing); Bad Things of other sorts happen to a lot of people; the main POV characters take all four books to sort out how mostly not to keep kicking each other in the brains.
The Secret Country- Pamela Dean. Pamela Dean does this thing where her fiction goes off tangentially to the normal fantasy set of assumptions in just enough of a different direction than I do that I get all confused and tend to stare at her endings going, "wait, what?" It's not that her things are actively weird, and they're full of excellent turns of phrase and all that, but they're just familiar enough that I expect I know where she's going and that isn't it. Anyway, this isn't nearly as bad on that front as Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary, but enough so that the last time I read it I didn't go on and read the second one, despite having picked them up on the same used book store run. This probably doesn't tell anybody anything useful... The premise is that a bunch of children have been play-acting a story that takes place in the Secret Country, and suddenly find their way there. Only it's not quite the same place they thought it was, and the story they've been playing sounds all very fine when it's not happening to anybody you know. And there's dissent amongst the children as to whether this place they've got to is real, anyway. Some of the decisions they make are things that make me vaguely uncomfortable in that "wait, why are you ignoring X?" sort of way, but on the whole they're logically consistent from a character perspective. On the whole an interesting story, with some nod to the Nesbit/Eager tradition of cousinly summer adventures and probably more Shakespeare references than I caught.
Wonders of the Invisible World- Patricia McKillip. Short stories; these fell into three categories: a few that were modern or futuristic and utterly not my thing (the title story, the one with the cruise ship), some that were very classic McKillip and which I quite liked but wished they were novels, and some that occupied a sort of in-between space and were a bit variable but mostly good. Recommended for those who like fantasy in strange and slightly dreamy worlds.
Human Chain- Seamus Heaney. More poems, still haven't found the one that started me reading his work. Not bad, but there wasn't anything in here that particularly spoke to me, either.
The Virtu/ The Mirador/ Corambis- Sarah Monette. Um. Yes. Apparently I liked these, as the three together had more words and got finished faster than everything else in the last month including the many books I haven't finished yet. Dead gods and labyrinths, spies, complex plots seen from various directions, characters who do eventually work through some of their issues one pint of blood at a time. I loved Mildmay's voice (though one slowly comes to realize that the reader is the only one who gets the chance to see him that way) and the way the traces of ancient civilizations have a realistic weight-- some puzzles get sorted out and some are just there, continuing to be puzzling. Warning labels: there's a lot of sex, and it's the awful bits that are described in detail (though neither pregnancy nor STDs are a thing); Bad Things of other sorts happen to a lot of people; the main POV characters take all four books to sort out how mostly not to keep kicking each other in the brains.
The Secret Country- Pamela Dean. Pamela Dean does this thing where her fiction goes off tangentially to the normal fantasy set of assumptions in just enough of a different direction than I do that I get all confused and tend to stare at her endings going, "wait, what?" It's not that her things are actively weird, and they're full of excellent turns of phrase and all that, but they're just familiar enough that I expect I know where she's going and that isn't it. Anyway, this isn't nearly as bad on that front as Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary, but enough so that the last time I read it I didn't go on and read the second one, despite having picked them up on the same used book store run. This probably doesn't tell anybody anything useful... The premise is that a bunch of children have been play-acting a story that takes place in the Secret Country, and suddenly find their way there. Only it's not quite the same place they thought it was, and the story they've been playing sounds all very fine when it's not happening to anybody you know. And there's dissent amongst the children as to whether this place they've got to is real, anyway. Some of the decisions they make are things that make me vaguely uncomfortable in that "wait, why are you ignoring X?" sort of way, but on the whole they're logically consistent from a character perspective. On the whole an interesting story, with some nod to the Nesbit/Eager tradition of cousinly summer adventures and probably more Shakespeare references than I caught.