Reading November
Nov. 20th, 2021 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI have not updated here much recently as events took over - my city went back into lockdown on the 17th August, after one Delta strain COVID-19 community case, a fact which involved a lot of international & local commentary about over-reacting. Numbers obviously then increased, and eventually & slowly, decreased. We eventually hit single figures for daily cases - and then COVID-19 got into the homeless population, people with low levels of vaccination and little reason to trust any governmental organisations, and we lost control. Inevitable, but still hard.
On the date we went into lockdown less than 20% of the population were fully vaccinated, and about 1/3rd had had one dose. We’re now coming out of lockdown and moving towards a living with COVID-19 model, averaging about 160 cases per day. COVID-19 is moving downwards and throughout the country, popping up now in places that have never had cases, but now 82% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated (no vaccines yet for under 12s here) and 91% have had at least one dose. This is good but rates are much lower in certain areas and in certain typically disadvantages populations, especially Māori (running at about 62% double vax’d, and with younger average populations that mean more people aren’t yet eligible). Vaccine mandates are now in effect for a number of jobs, and as the numbers unvaccinated get smaller, the protests and dialogue get more bitter and more violent.
(on the bathos rather than pathos front, my local FB group had a massive schism as one of the admins is an essential oils marketer who deleted any and all mentions of COVID-19 and/or vaccination that weren’t about how terrible the vaccine was)
Anyway. I’ve been working and home-schooling, and reading - and even writing - but I haven’t been posting. Here is November (so far):
Just finished:
Lisey’s Story, Stephen King. Lisey is the widow of Scott Landon, a famous writer who survived both a terrible childhood and a madman with a gun, only to die abruptly from an odd illness. Lisey has put off sorting through all his papers, but when she begins, with the help (or otherwise) of her sisters, things begin to unravel; she will need strength and love to pick through her memories and deal with some very unpleasant realities (and unrealities). For some reason I stalled out twice on this book - once when I started reading it years ago, earthquake/house moves didn’t help but they meant it took me a very long time to start it again - and once on this read, when she first travels by herself to Boo’ya Moon, but only for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure why - it’s a solid, pacey read, I like the characters, and there are some wonderfully vivid moments in it. As always it goes back to his themes, about writing/creativity, about surviving, but through it all is the long-running marriage of Lisey and Scott. I re-read Rose Madder, Gerald’s Game, and Dolores Claiborne recently, and you can see King working on his female protagonists (from Carrie onwards he’s thought about it, but some work better than others). Also his villains; like Gerald’s Game, although there is one, it’s much more about the interior dangers than the external, but Jim Dooley is more believably domestically malevolent than Jessie’s man made of moonlight.
Violet Black, Eileen Merriman; first in a near-future YA trilogy. One day Merriman will work out how to finish a book without either a Terribly Obvious Death or a Terribly Obvious Fake-Out Death, but not today. On the nose plotting and dialogue in a near-future where a mutated strain of measles virus gives the teenagers it doesn’t kill psychic powers, so that they can be acquired by a mysterious and morally ambivalent organisation who want to train them for dubious purposes. The best bit in this is actually the setting when the main character goes to Berlin, and I can only assume Merriman, who wrote this in lockdown, channeled all her pent-up desire for travel into it.
Race the Sands, Sarah Beth Durst. In Becar everyone will be reborn; the augurs can tell how pure you soul is and how likely you are to avoid the terrible fate of being reborn as a kehok, cursed hideous beasts that represent the lowest possible outcome and from which there is no further possibility of reincarnation. Except for the kehok who is the mount for the overall winner of there violent and deadly races, who will be rewarded with a special ceremony to allow them to be reborn… Raia, determined to escape her bullying family, becomes a kehok rider for Tamra, a famous trainer whose reputation and confidence were lost after a terrible track accident. Tamra needs money to pay the augurs for her daughter’s training, as otherwise they will simply claim her, so she takes a chance on Raia and a terrible, deadly lion kehok.
One blurb said National Velvet with monsters, after which I had to pick it up, and it is good (not as laser-like in focus as National Velvet, but there’s a lot of additional plot I haven’t even mentioned yet). It’s a bit slow to build initially, but the world and the characters (and the racing!) are all great. Tamra, in particular, is fantastic. It’s rare in fantasy to get a protagonist who’s a mother and who gets to do things that aren’t directly related to that; she’s flawed and capable as a parent as well as a trainer and racer. I haven’t read any of Durst’s other books but will be seeking them out.
I then re-read three Dick Francis books in one day after a particularly diabolical week. Banker (the shampoo one, also a very on-form one in which Francis doesn’t shy away from ripping out the reader’s heart), Twice Shy (less good; split narrators and advances in computer technology make the central concept of this, a successful race-betting system that only exists on computer tape, slightly less than convincing - but maybe it was more impressive then? I do like the bit where the blustering impulsive bad guy makes a complete hash of the system), and Flying Finish, which has a very stoic and possibly overly gifted hero (he’s secretly an Earl’s son! He flies planes! He’s an amateur jockey (natch)!) as well as the fantastic secretly smuggling oral contraceptives to Italian Roman Catholics girlfriend. The ending of this is so perfectly timed.
Changeling, Molly Harper. Cassandra Reed starts off with a bang at Miss Castwell’s Institute for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies by bonding with a mystical grimoire that no-one's been able to read for years; undercutting this, however, is the fact that she is really Sarah Smith, a Snipe (guttersnipe) from the oppressed non-magically minority in this quasi-Victorian England, and should not have any magic at all. It’s readable but very, very, predictable, and my ability to believe we were anywhere near the UK took a number of knocks (sidewalk, candy, milquetoast, and sass are the terms I’ve noted), and the evil older sister who resents Sarah and is obsessed with the son of the house is a really odd and ineffective character.
We Set the Dark on Fire, Tehlor Kay Mejia. Daniela is graduating at the top of her class at the Medio School for Girls, in which girls are trained either to be Primas (logical, intelligent, controlled) or Segundas (emotional, physical, seductive), who will be married off in pairs to rich young men from the best families, in imitation of the three-person marriage of their gods. Dani, naturally, is hiding a secret; she was born on the wrong side of the wall, smuggled over by desperate parents and using false papers. When she is married to Mateo Garcia, an unpleasant but very wealthy young man being groomed for the presidency, she should have everything she’s worked for - but her Segunda, Carmen, is her high school bully and enemy (and infuriatingly attractive!), and the secret revolutionary group La Voz are blackmailing Dani into spying for them to prevent them revealing her background. I liked a lot of this. Dani really grows over the course of the book, and the relationship between her and Carmen (they get over the bullying past perhaps a little quickly) is really nice. The Latin-American infused setting and definite political commentary also works well. I did have trouble getting a sense of the world, rather than a few key locations, and the revolutionaries all appear to be teenagers who really want their performance theatre pieces to be the key to fighting the power. Fortunately it has taken me so long to get around to reading this that now the sequel is out.
Still reading:
The Heart Principle, Helen Hoang. Her latest, this has Anna, a performance violinist stuck in a musical block, a loveless relationship with a guy who only wants her because she makes his life so much easier, and the expectations of her family, who never see her for herself. When the terrible boyfriend decides he wants an open relationship for a bit she rebels by joining a dating site for a one night stand, and meets Quan, best friend of Michael from The Kiss Quotient. He’s struggling to trust his body after cancer surgery, and also not looking for anything long-term - however, that’s what they both get. It’s a sincere, heart-felt book, about female autistics who mask until they’ve lost sight of their own selves, about the pressure on family caregivers and the pressure from family; Quan is a little too perfect and easy-going, but Anna’s fantastic.
Planetside, Michael Mammay. I can’t remember where or why I picked this up but I am on chapter 2 and it’s deeply irritating old-school military sf with a really annoying lead character. I might give it another couple of chapters but will probably dump it.
Up next:
At school each term there’s a book club from Scholastic, and I normally let the kids pick out books up to $20. The last one we got, my son stared wistfully at a boxed set of 8 volumes of the Amulet graphic novel series, which was definitely more than $20, and I said that given that I was a totally terrible example at resisting book temptation he could have it if he didn’t have anything else for the year. Naturally then we went into lockdown and he finally got it last week, several months later, and is now wallowing in it, and I want to read them too.
On the date we went into lockdown less than 20% of the population were fully vaccinated, and about 1/3rd had had one dose. We’re now coming out of lockdown and moving towards a living with COVID-19 model, averaging about 160 cases per day. COVID-19 is moving downwards and throughout the country, popping up now in places that have never had cases, but now 82% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated (no vaccines yet for under 12s here) and 91% have had at least one dose. This is good but rates are much lower in certain areas and in certain typically disadvantages populations, especially Māori (running at about 62% double vax’d, and with younger average populations that mean more people aren’t yet eligible). Vaccine mandates are now in effect for a number of jobs, and as the numbers unvaccinated get smaller, the protests and dialogue get more bitter and more violent.
(on the bathos rather than pathos front, my local FB group had a massive schism as one of the admins is an essential oils marketer who deleted any and all mentions of COVID-19 and/or vaccination that weren’t about how terrible the vaccine was)
Anyway. I’ve been working and home-schooling, and reading - and even writing - but I haven’t been posting. Here is November (so far):
Just finished:
Lisey’s Story, Stephen King. Lisey is the widow of Scott Landon, a famous writer who survived both a terrible childhood and a madman with a gun, only to die abruptly from an odd illness. Lisey has put off sorting through all his papers, but when she begins, with the help (or otherwise) of her sisters, things begin to unravel; she will need strength and love to pick through her memories and deal with some very unpleasant realities (and unrealities). For some reason I stalled out twice on this book - once when I started reading it years ago, earthquake/house moves didn’t help but they meant it took me a very long time to start it again - and once on this read, when she first travels by herself to Boo’ya Moon, but only for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure why - it’s a solid, pacey read, I like the characters, and there are some wonderfully vivid moments in it. As always it goes back to his themes, about writing/creativity, about surviving, but through it all is the long-running marriage of Lisey and Scott. I re-read Rose Madder, Gerald’s Game, and Dolores Claiborne recently, and you can see King working on his female protagonists (from Carrie onwards he’s thought about it, but some work better than others). Also his villains; like Gerald’s Game, although there is one, it’s much more about the interior dangers than the external, but Jim Dooley is more believably domestically malevolent than Jessie’s man made of moonlight.
Violet Black, Eileen Merriman; first in a near-future YA trilogy. One day Merriman will work out how to finish a book without either a Terribly Obvious Death or a Terribly Obvious Fake-Out Death, but not today. On the nose plotting and dialogue in a near-future where a mutated strain of measles virus gives the teenagers it doesn’t kill psychic powers, so that they can be acquired by a mysterious and morally ambivalent organisation who want to train them for dubious purposes. The best bit in this is actually the setting when the main character goes to Berlin, and I can only assume Merriman, who wrote this in lockdown, channeled all her pent-up desire for travel into it.
Race the Sands, Sarah Beth Durst. In Becar everyone will be reborn; the augurs can tell how pure you soul is and how likely you are to avoid the terrible fate of being reborn as a kehok, cursed hideous beasts that represent the lowest possible outcome and from which there is no further possibility of reincarnation. Except for the kehok who is the mount for the overall winner of there violent and deadly races, who will be rewarded with a special ceremony to allow them to be reborn… Raia, determined to escape her bullying family, becomes a kehok rider for Tamra, a famous trainer whose reputation and confidence were lost after a terrible track accident. Tamra needs money to pay the augurs for her daughter’s training, as otherwise they will simply claim her, so she takes a chance on Raia and a terrible, deadly lion kehok.
One blurb said National Velvet with monsters, after which I had to pick it up, and it is good (not as laser-like in focus as National Velvet, but there’s a lot of additional plot I haven’t even mentioned yet). It’s a bit slow to build initially, but the world and the characters (and the racing!) are all great. Tamra, in particular, is fantastic. It’s rare in fantasy to get a protagonist who’s a mother and who gets to do things that aren’t directly related to that; she’s flawed and capable as a parent as well as a trainer and racer. I haven’t read any of Durst’s other books but will be seeking them out.
I then re-read three Dick Francis books in one day after a particularly diabolical week. Banker (the shampoo one, also a very on-form one in which Francis doesn’t shy away from ripping out the reader’s heart), Twice Shy (less good; split narrators and advances in computer technology make the central concept of this, a successful race-betting system that only exists on computer tape, slightly less than convincing - but maybe it was more impressive then? I do like the bit where the blustering impulsive bad guy makes a complete hash of the system), and Flying Finish, which has a very stoic and possibly overly gifted hero (he’s secretly an Earl’s son! He flies planes! He’s an amateur jockey (natch)!) as well as the fantastic secretly smuggling oral contraceptives to Italian Roman Catholics girlfriend. The ending of this is so perfectly timed.
Changeling, Molly Harper. Cassandra Reed starts off with a bang at Miss Castwell’s Institute for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies by bonding with a mystical grimoire that no-one's been able to read for years; undercutting this, however, is the fact that she is really Sarah Smith, a Snipe (guttersnipe) from the oppressed non-magically minority in this quasi-Victorian England, and should not have any magic at all. It’s readable but very, very, predictable, and my ability to believe we were anywhere near the UK took a number of knocks (sidewalk, candy, milquetoast, and sass are the terms I’ve noted), and the evil older sister who resents Sarah and is obsessed with the son of the house is a really odd and ineffective character.
We Set the Dark on Fire, Tehlor Kay Mejia. Daniela is graduating at the top of her class at the Medio School for Girls, in which girls are trained either to be Primas (logical, intelligent, controlled) or Segundas (emotional, physical, seductive), who will be married off in pairs to rich young men from the best families, in imitation of the three-person marriage of their gods. Dani, naturally, is hiding a secret; she was born on the wrong side of the wall, smuggled over by desperate parents and using false papers. When she is married to Mateo Garcia, an unpleasant but very wealthy young man being groomed for the presidency, she should have everything she’s worked for - but her Segunda, Carmen, is her high school bully and enemy (and infuriatingly attractive!), and the secret revolutionary group La Voz are blackmailing Dani into spying for them to prevent them revealing her background. I liked a lot of this. Dani really grows over the course of the book, and the relationship between her and Carmen (they get over the bullying past perhaps a little quickly) is really nice. The Latin-American infused setting and definite political commentary also works well. I did have trouble getting a sense of the world, rather than a few key locations, and the revolutionaries all appear to be teenagers who really want their performance theatre pieces to be the key to fighting the power. Fortunately it has taken me so long to get around to reading this that now the sequel is out.
Still reading:
The Heart Principle, Helen Hoang. Her latest, this has Anna, a performance violinist stuck in a musical block, a loveless relationship with a guy who only wants her because she makes his life so much easier, and the expectations of her family, who never see her for herself. When the terrible boyfriend decides he wants an open relationship for a bit she rebels by joining a dating site for a one night stand, and meets Quan, best friend of Michael from The Kiss Quotient. He’s struggling to trust his body after cancer surgery, and also not looking for anything long-term - however, that’s what they both get. It’s a sincere, heart-felt book, about female autistics who mask until they’ve lost sight of their own selves, about the pressure on family caregivers and the pressure from family; Quan is a little too perfect and easy-going, but Anna’s fantastic.
Planetside, Michael Mammay. I can’t remember where or why I picked this up but I am on chapter 2 and it’s deeply irritating old-school military sf with a really annoying lead character. I might give it another couple of chapters but will probably dump it.
Up next:
At school each term there’s a book club from Scholastic, and I normally let the kids pick out books up to $20. The last one we got, my son stared wistfully at a boxed set of 8 volumes of the Amulet graphic novel series, which was definitely more than $20, and I said that given that I was a totally terrible example at resisting book temptation he could have it if he didn’t have anything else for the year. Naturally then we went into lockdown and he finally got it last week, several months later, and is now wallowing in it, and I want to read them too.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-20 03:27 am (UTC)I have a whole lot of metaphysical questions! Will this book answer them?
(I am intrigued by the rest of it, I just have metaphysical questions.)
no subject
Date: 2021-11-20 04:46 am (UTC)I suspect not! I did also have questions (not least what do people eat) but there is rather a lot going on. Most of the reincarnation bits relate to the rulers - as the book starts the augurs are searching for the reincarnation of the recently deceased emperor, which will then be brought to the palace to live out a peaceful existence with the other reincarnations if not human and presumably totally muck up the line of succession if human.
One of the neighboring countries thinks all the Becarians are nuts for racing kehoks rather than exterminating them (presumably casting their souls into eternal darkness?), which I did like as a detail.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-20 09:52 am (UTC)Thank you for the interesting reviews. Is there anyone around these days who is writing (interestingly) about fairly ordinary characters in fairly ordinary situations, SF or otherwise? I feel like it's all apocalypses and dystopias and amazing magical gifts and...I don't know, maybe I just have very boring tastes in fiction.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-21 08:21 pm (UTC)Pessimistic me thinks that they are but not getting published :( I think there are books that have characters who are not the most special (I think in some ways Piranesi, which I loved, is this; also Grady Henrix's The Southern Bookclub's Guide to Slaying Vampires, although neither of these are "fairly ordinary situations"!). Some of the middle grade/YA contemporary books I've read this year - Rebecca Lim's Tiger Daughter and Angie Thomas' books, for example, but then not SF. I find it very difficult to think of any recent books similar to say Planetes, for mundane sf about the non exceptional, and even that has some drama in the plot. But overall I do think manga does this better - I can't think of a lit fic book similar to say Taniguchi's The Walking Man, for example.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-22 12:12 am (UTC)Pessimistic me thinks that they are but not getting published :(
Well, some of the best SFF I've read in the last few years has been self-published; maybe we'll see more from this direction in future, knock wood.