book readin'

[galatea]

I have been devouring books lately. There's a lot of reasons for that, which all mostly boil down to the fact that I tend to have 2-3 hours at work daily where there isn't much for me to do. (Well, there's always internet/RP to distract me, but a) I can only get lost in TV Tropes so many times before my head starts hurting, and b) all three of my pretendy funtime games can get pretty quiet during the JST-afternoon.) Part of it's also 'cause I didn't have steady access to fresh English-language books for several months. So now that I suddenly have a Kindle'd iPod to read with, I've basically been following up on any remotely interesting-sounding books that show up on my FList.

tl;dr YAY BOOKS. In particular, the books I've read in the past couple of months:

The Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik

Rich, interesting series with fabulous characters, good writing, but flawed pacing. I picked up the first four books in Sendai, during my first real trip to an English book store in about four months. And since the junk leftover collection of books taking up space in my house has pretty much no selection when it comes to sf/f books, I was desperate to get something new to read. Temeraire hit the spot pretty nicely. Novik is really, really good with detailing a premise, especially when it comes to individual characters and all the little niggly bits of daily life. ... problem is, the main conflicts of the books tend to show up really, really late in the story. His Majesty's Dragon didn't even touch on the main battle until the last twenty pages, and the next two books are pretty similar in that regard. Reading these books is basically a tug-of-war between the immersion created by her details, and the ... well, the weakness of the plot. I gave up on Empire of Ivory halfway through because the immersion/travelogue style just wasn't cutting it anymore. The first book was fascinating re: raising a dragon, the second re: traveling with China, but after that she started to lose my interest re: the plot. That said, I really really enjoy her characters. Lawrence and Temeraire are both fabulous, of course, but I also really felt a connection to all the minor characters sprinkled throughout the books. It really made me :(((( every time they ended up losing someone.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

Fun book! Not amazingly immersive, but a good page-turner. Haldeman's really good at getting you interested in wtf the protagonist is going to get himself into next, even if I had little to no interest in the protagonist himself. I think the first half is better than the second; after he makes his first major jump (into that crazy conservative Christian ... thing) the future just started looking weird rather than being a reasonable extrapolation. Also, I really really hate the whole "guy meets a girl in conservative society and whisks her away solely because he is a Modern Man who is Enlightening the Woman who then follows along madly along with him!" trope. Ugh. I facepalmed pretty hard all through that section, and again at the finale of the book. But overall entertaining.

Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley

I could not put this book down. The writing suffers a bit due to its central stylistic conceit -- that it's being written as a memoir by the protagonist, well after the actual events of the story -- but the characterization it gains from said conceit really outweighs the occasional moments of dumb slang and really stupid descriptions. Especially towards the end of the book, when the protagonist would not shut up long enough to let the climax actually happen, jesus. But considering that the book actually made me stay up late finishing the book at home, because I just had to know how said climax ended ... it's kind of hard to criticize it for doing a good job. I just loved the details and realism involved, from the dragon telepathy (totally awesome -- if I ever RP a telepath in the future, I'm definitely borrowing imagery from this book) to the relationship between Lois and the protagonist (adorable and also totally awesome). Also, the protagonist's comment about reading books with telepathic dragons in them, and thinking of them as "woo-woo": HILARITY. More brownie points for making a teenager who was realistically self-absorbed without making me hate him horribly.

Re: Eric: Adored him as a character (g-grumpy bastard with a heart of gold, my typeee), pleasantly surprised to have him openly gay at the end of the book (although I suspected it, due to synergic's comments on there being a good portrayal of a gay character in the book), generally pleased with his portrayal; almost wish more had been done with that. I say almost, because ... romance really, really didn't matter much to the book as a whole. The epilogue was pretty damn fair about balancing the hetero and homo sides of the force, I think. Plus the comment about Eleanor settling down with the person of her choice made me squee a little. So overall, I was pleased with how the book handled sexuality.

Fires of the Faithful by Naomi Kritzer

Interesting ideas, mediocre writing, absolutely godawful pacing. I am a pacing whore, okay. If a book doesn't keep me clipping along at a good pace, I will get bored and wander away. And if it moves too fast, with no time spent actually developing its fabulous ideas? Then I will be tempted to throw my iPod at the wall. Multiple times. ... which was basically the case with this book. What's the point of building beautiful scenery if you're not going to let your readers stop and smell the flowers every now and then? A lot of critical events seemed horribly rushed, especially after Part 1's finale. The entire journey to Ravenna jumped around like crazy, although the pacing did get better in the final parts of the book. I also really didn't feel connected to any of the characters. Eliana's friends from the first part could have been condensed into two, maybe three characters (Bella and Guila), Bella herself didn't get enough development for me to care by the time stuff happened to her, and the reformers in Ravenna were pretty flat as well, with the exception of Giovanni. Probably the only two characters I really felt anything for were Eliana, Mira, and Mario. And Mira left after the first part, while Mario didn't even show up until the second half!

Normally, that'd be more than enough to make me put down a book, but ... I honestly liked the ideas behind the book, even if I kept wanting to smack it for not exploring them thoroughly enough. Lesbian protagonist = awesome, although I couldn't quite figure out what Eliana thought about the subject until late in the book. The parallels with Christianity were interesting too, especially in the spots where they differed. And the magic system also seemed terribly interesting. I just wish the author had spent more time talking about her world and less on the plot. (Says the person who can't get through Tolkien.) I'm ... torn about getting the next book in the series, because I WANT to see all this stuff get explored more. But if I get shoved through the plot as fast as I did in this book, then I will be very displeased. And I don't want to spend seven bucks on a book that I might end up wanting to smack against the wall. :(

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

If Scion had a kid-friendly spinoff series, this would be it. Fun, light read, but kind of shallow. I really wish this series had existed when I was a kid, 'cause I would totally have eaten it up. As an adult reader, though, I found myself second-guessing exactly what age group the book was aimed towards. The world-building was fun, if uncomplicated -- I loved all the more obscure references in it, like the Kindly Ones and the Lotus casino -- but the characters were mostly pretty flat. Percy was a decent protagonist, but Annabeth and Grover were both pretty one-dimensional. Not to mention the fact that all the demigods were described as being basically identical according to which god they'd descended from. I know that there really wasn't time to explore that in this book, but I would have really liked to see more variation. The non-god antagonists were really overdone in general. Susan and Clarisse were just over the top. And Luke ... really wasn't that subtle. I was pretty sure something was up right from the first description of his scar -- and I had it completely worked out by the time they sent the Iris message back to camp. The way he went from kinda cool to HEY SCORPIONS was kind of :/ inducing too. Is it too much to ask for a little complexity in the villains? Pleeease? (Or barring that, how about not describing most of the female antagonists as being "fat"?)

That said, Ares as a badass biker was pretty damn awesome. Just sayin'. Really, I think the book worked best when it was dealing directly with mythology, or translating it into more modern terms. Like the Lotus casino and the descriptions of the Underworld. So yeah, overall it was pretty good. If it deepens over the next book or so, then I'll be hooked. But right now it's a bit too shallow for me to feel really invested in it.

Current Reading List
Bonk by Mary Roach (saw a rec for it on the internet)
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (classicccc)
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Books I Will Probably Buy
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Nightlife by Rob Thurman
Affinity by Sarah Waters
(Empire of Ivory and Victory of Eagles eventually)

PDFs to Hunt Down
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Sunshine by Robin McKinley (rec'd)
Hero by Perry Moore (do want gay superhero novel)
Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede (apparently filled with race!fail, but I am weak to pioneer stories hardcore)
Finder by Emma Bull
Expendable by James Alan Gardner
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman


Any links recommendations? I'm mostly limited to DLing off of Amazon/Kindle (despite their recent fail, goddamn you Amazon) or importing PDFs, sadly, but other than that I am starving for more good sf/f/superhero novels. Having openly gay characters is a definite bonus, especially if they're more than just random minor characters.

Comments

[karayan]

The Percy Jackson series doesn't really hit its stride until the third book or so, I think, which is unfortunately halfway through the series. I totally agree with you on the initial shallowness, and I had exactly the same reaction as you: WHY COULDN'T THIS HAVE EXISTED WHEN I WAS A KID, WHEN I WOULD HAVE LOVED IT EVEN MORE? But the characters do get a little more complex as the series goes on, especially the antagonists, which made me happy.

Also, oh man, The Thirteenth Child has racefail? That's disappointing. I always loved Patricia C. Wrede's books when I was a kid, and I've been eying that one in the bookstore off and on for the past month or so. :(

I wish I could give you some recs, but I've mostly been reading nonfiction recently (a hazard of my job, since that's what I work with most often).

[galatea]

Hahaha, good to know I'm not alone in that. I went through the first book pretty quickly, so if the second book continues to at least be popcorn-good, then I'll give the third one a try too.

Apparently, yeah. Which is. sob, 'cause I love Wrede lots and lots. Feministing's post is a good place to start; the links kind of spiral out from there. I'm still withholding judgment until I actually get a chance to read the book itself, but the fact that she erased the American Indians in order to make the premise work is kind of ... uncomfortable.

Well, I kind of picked up the Percy Jackson series after reading your posts, so ... p-pre-emptive recing? Or I'm just a stalker, but hey.

[karayan]

At least two months passed between the time when I read the first book and the second book, since I was only picking them up as "eh, they're good to read when I'm bored at work." Then I grabbed the third and finally was like, "OKAY THIS IS AWESOME."

... oh, gosh. That's no good, and makes me look at my dog-eared copies of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles with sadness. Thanks for the link.

Hey, I pick up more books that way -- just by going I THINK SOMEONE I KNOW LIKED THIS. ♥

[inarticulate]

As a caveat: the two books you pinged as bad pacing were two that I absolutely loved (and Naomi Kritzer is the only new author with gay characters that I follow), so who knows if I'm a good judge of anything that you'd like. That said, if you haven't read it, I think you'd like Victory of Eagles a lot more than the others-- she had a lot more time to write it, and it shows.

That said, it's not sf/f, but I would recommend Sarah Waters' Affinity because it's deeply entrenched in Victorian spiritualism and meets the criteria of having openly gay characters.

If you haven't read Ricardo Pinto's novels, you might want to try them? I suspect you'd have similar problems with pacing, because I honestly can't remember much that happens in the middle of the first book, but the worldbuilding is gorgeous, the characters are openly gay, and, now that the second book is out, I feel I can rec the first without it being OMGWTFBBQCLIFFHANGER.

If you're branching out into genderqueer, I'd definitely recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin and Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman (huhuhu unreliable narrators). But they don't really meet the qualification of gay so much as… gender.

That… is all I can think of at the moment :|a

[galatea]

Well, I'm stupidly sensitive to pacing overall, and get pretty harsh on books that aren't spot-on perfect -- but like I said, I still mostly enjoyed Novik's series, so I might go back and give Ivory another shot. Especially if the book after that is good.

Ooooh, all of those sound pretty good. I'm gonna pop those through Amazon and see which of them I can DL straight off the site. Thank you! ♥

[inarticulate]

Oh, no, I'm definitely easier on pacing because I have no concept of it in my own writing OTL. But I can't guarantee that any books I recommend won't suffer from it because of that.

(Honestly, if you want to give Naomi Kritzer another shot, I'd wait and see if a newer book of hers calls you rather than finishing the duology-- she wrote that as one book, so it's unlikely to be any improvement if you already had problems with it. OTOH, she's pretty consistent with having gay characters thus far, and she's still writing, so there's chance for improvement.)

[galatea]

What would be a good Pinto novel to start with, by the way?

[inarticulate]

Shit, shit, I forget the first novel's name. TIME TO RUMMAGE THROUGH GOOGLE. Uh, The Chosen is the first book, says Google, followed by The Standing Dead, and I have yet to read The Third God.

[xenoglossy]

I really should pick up the Temeraire series again. I read the first two books, enjoyed them, and then kind of wandered off. My attention span is so terrible these days. (Not in the sense that I can't sit down and focus on a given book, just that I never finish series anymore.)

... so am I correct in my impression that Dragonhaven is basically McKinley going "okay, I'm going to do the Anne McCaffrey thing but make it not suck"? Because, I mean. That's sort of what it sounds like.

My ten-year-old sister is really into the Percy Jackson books; I read the first one a while ago and found it enjoyable, but didn't really care enough to seek out the rest. According to my mother (who may not be the best book reviewer, but she's the only person I know who's read the books and isn't ten), the next few are better, but then the last one or two get a bit Harry Potter rip-off... ish.

I was a bit :/ about Hero, as well -- I wanted to like it, because gay superheroes!, but it was somewhat heavy-handed and predictable, and overall I sort of got the feeling that I would have enjoyed it more if I were still an angsty gay teenager younger. It did have some good moments, though, IIRC -- I'm not saying OH GOD DON'T READ IT IT'S TERRIBLE or anything, just... I don't know. MY THOUGHTS ON BOOKS, LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.