Metaphor soup & other reading
Jun. 2nd, 2013 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanate*The Hidden Land- Pamela Dean. I bought this book over a decade ago as a used paperback, and finally got around to reading it after the reread of the prequel. Most of what I had to say about that applies here, too-- lots of interesting, kind of a neat premise still, a bit of an "argh, but--!" at the end. Nice adapted variant on my favorite bit of "The Wasteland" and again, probably more incidental Shakespeare & similar than I recognize.
*City of Death- Laurence Yep. Book 3, still good. There was a little more of the neat cityscape worldbuilding (it would have to be pretty crazy doing air traffic control for not just planes but rocs and formations of griffins...) and good friends/adventure. A couple worldbuilding inconsistencies about gods & griffins, but nothing too jarring.
*Stolen Magic- Stephanie Burgis. This book took a month to read because it was sitting next to the wrong chair, but it was quite worthy once I got back to it. Book 3 (begins with Kat, Incorrigible) of regency magic & mayhem for the preteen set, this time with a country estate and smugglers and various family mayhem. Lots of fun, but start at the beginning. :)
*B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy)- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. Boy & golem vs bullies with bonus friends and klezmer band. I picked it up because golem in a klezmer band sounded like fun, and discovered I was working from a different baseline golem legend than the authors. I think of the one where the problem with the golem is that it looms at you saying "give me work!" and finishes what ought to be impossible tasks too quickly. They were working from golem as protector of the Jews, with a horror twist. (This isn't a spoiler; it's the prologue.) So, not a bad story, but largely not the one I was looking for.
*After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America- E.C. Pielou. I read this extremely slowly (I think I renewed it four times?) but really enjoyed it. Begins with an overview of glaciation and fascinating things like climate cycles, isostatic changes in the earth's crust, and the ways in which glaciers spread & shrink (which is more complicated than you'd think.) Continues more or less chronologically through the last glaciation looking at various plant & animal communities, and how we know what we know. Broad scope and clear explanations, and the author is also quite good about presenting multiple theories one at a time with pros and cons. Other highlights include lots of maps and line drawings of plants & animals (did you know there was once such a thing as a shrub ox?) and the occasional turn of phrase, such as that prairie pot holes being responsible for [large percent] of North American duck production. Now I want to write about life on glacial lakes or next to receding glaciers. Which is the kind of craziness that most people would think was horribly unrealistic & I'd made up.
*Pay the Piper: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. Pied piper, exiled fae princes, rock band, spunky girl reporter. Quick read (it's only about 100 pages or so), recommended.
*The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature- David George Haskell. This is the metaphor soup book. The premise is cool: the author picked a square meter of old growth forest in TN to visit several times a week for a year and wrote up bits of what he saw with explanations of the scientific bits behind them. And a lot of what he has to say is fascinating. HOWEVER, he begins by making a somewhat tenuous comparison of his square meter to a mandala, which he then proceeds to call it for the rest of the book, and the just when you're cringing about orientalism, he broadens his scope to talk about DNA being a chef's recipe, and compare parasitic worms to Alexander the Great, who he appears to think was a pirate. So if you're prepared to skim half the book or laugh about ticks on grail quest, I'd recommend it for some fascinating naturalist stuff rendered in layman's terms.
*Trollbridge: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. This time the musicians are the kids, and we have both classical snobbery & pop music represented. Also trolls, an enchanted fiddle, a talking animal, and unlikely allies. I was half-way through this when I realized that my father would have loved it: he was a sucker for fractured & retold fairy tales, and for strong women characters.
*Gunmetal Magic (/Magic Gifts)- Ilona Andrews. The book about Andrea with bonus chronologically overlapping Kate novella. Fun if you like the series, but start at the beginning. Aside from the character bloat issue (which is much less annoying at novel length than in the novella) there continues to be an escalation of crisis problem with the novels: if last time the threat was to the city, next time it has to be to the state. But I think that comes under the heading of me being picky.
*"Magic Dreams"- Ilona Andrews out of the Hexed anthology. (which I talked about a couple posts back... I enjoyed this story, but failed to get into the other three. (#2 was stuffed with *all* the tangentially related gossipy fae backstory, #3 had high levels of backstory with too much ambient sex for me, and #4 was told in present tense. Moral=I continue to be not a UF person; if that's one of your genres of choice you'd probably like this fine.)
*City of Death- Laurence Yep. Book 3, still good. There was a little more of the neat cityscape worldbuilding (it would have to be pretty crazy doing air traffic control for not just planes but rocs and formations of griffins...) and good friends/adventure. A couple worldbuilding inconsistencies about gods & griffins, but nothing too jarring.
*Stolen Magic- Stephanie Burgis. This book took a month to read because it was sitting next to the wrong chair, but it was quite worthy once I got back to it. Book 3 (begins with Kat, Incorrigible) of regency magic & mayhem for the preteen set, this time with a country estate and smugglers and various family mayhem. Lots of fun, but start at the beginning. :)
*B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy)- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. Boy & golem vs bullies with bonus friends and klezmer band. I picked it up because golem in a klezmer band sounded like fun, and discovered I was working from a different baseline golem legend than the authors. I think of the one where the problem with the golem is that it looms at you saying "give me work!" and finishes what ought to be impossible tasks too quickly. They were working from golem as protector of the Jews, with a horror twist. (This isn't a spoiler; it's the prologue.) So, not a bad story, but largely not the one I was looking for.
*After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America- E.C. Pielou. I read this extremely slowly (I think I renewed it four times?) but really enjoyed it. Begins with an overview of glaciation and fascinating things like climate cycles, isostatic changes in the earth's crust, and the ways in which glaciers spread & shrink (which is more complicated than you'd think.) Continues more or less chronologically through the last glaciation looking at various plant & animal communities, and how we know what we know. Broad scope and clear explanations, and the author is also quite good about presenting multiple theories one at a time with pros and cons. Other highlights include lots of maps and line drawings of plants & animals (did you know there was once such a thing as a shrub ox?) and the occasional turn of phrase, such as that prairie pot holes being responsible for [large percent] of North American duck production. Now I want to write about life on glacial lakes or next to receding glaciers. Which is the kind of craziness that most people would think was horribly unrealistic & I'd made up.
*Pay the Piper: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. Pied piper, exiled fae princes, rock band, spunky girl reporter. Quick read (it's only about 100 pages or so), recommended.
*The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature- David George Haskell. This is the metaphor soup book. The premise is cool: the author picked a square meter of old growth forest in TN to visit several times a week for a year and wrote up bits of what he saw with explanations of the scientific bits behind them. And a lot of what he has to say is fascinating. HOWEVER, he begins by making a somewhat tenuous comparison of his square meter to a mandala, which he then proceeds to call it for the rest of the book, and the just when you're cringing about orientalism, he broadens his scope to talk about DNA being a chef's recipe, and compare parasitic worms to Alexander the Great, who he appears to think was a pirate. So if you're prepared to skim half the book or laugh about ticks on grail quest, I'd recommend it for some fascinating naturalist stuff rendered in layman's terms.
*Trollbridge: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale- Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple. This time the musicians are the kids, and we have both classical snobbery & pop music represented. Also trolls, an enchanted fiddle, a talking animal, and unlikely allies. I was half-way through this when I realized that my father would have loved it: he was a sucker for fractured & retold fairy tales, and for strong women characters.
*Gunmetal Magic (/Magic Gifts)- Ilona Andrews. The book about Andrea with bonus chronologically overlapping Kate novella. Fun if you like the series, but start at the beginning. Aside from the character bloat issue (which is much less annoying at novel length than in the novella) there continues to be an escalation of crisis problem with the novels: if last time the threat was to the city, next time it has to be to the state. But I think that comes under the heading of me being picky.
*"Magic Dreams"- Ilona Andrews out of the Hexed anthology. (which I talked about a couple posts back... I enjoyed this story, but failed to get into the other three. (#2 was stuffed with *all* the tangentially related gossipy fae backstory, #3 had high levels of backstory with too much ambient sex for me, and #4 was told in present tense. Moral=I continue to be not a UF person; if that's one of your genres of choice you'd probably like this fine.)