books read, August
Oct. 9th, 2024 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraThree twins at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley
Dust up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley
Cat + gamer 4, Wataru Nadatani
Cat + gamer 5, Wataru Nadatani
Biography of x, Catherine Lacey
The Paris novel, Ruth Reichl
Delicious!, Ruth Reichl
We could be so good, Cat Sebastian
You should be so lucky, Cat Sebastian
A sorceress comes to call, T Kingfisher
All that we know, Shilo Kino
The heroines of SOE,Beryl E Escott
Home ice advantage, Ari Baran
I know you did it, Sue Wallman
The nightingale, Kristin Hannah
Backstage, Lorna Hill (re-read)
Carl's doomsday scenario, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The dungeon anarchist’s cookbook, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (re-read)
Three Twins at the Crater School
Dust Up at the Crater School
If you have spent at least some time reading pre 1950s British girls boarding school stories *and* sf from the days when Mars seemed like a habitable option, then these are laser-targeted to an unlikely but perfect intersection of all the best accompanying tropes. But there’s also a lot of interesting world building going on around the edges - the life cycle of the Martian inhabitants, the Cold War with the Russians that means radio propaganda is being broadcast to the surface from one of Mars’ moons, the developing tension between a colony and its Earth empire parent - and it’s an affectionate but clear-eyed homage to its forebears. Three Twins is a perfect title and there are indeed more than enough twins here, in what is a very effective introductory book; Dust Up complicates the worldbuilding in both Martian and imperial terms, and continues to provide satisfying school girl resolutions. My only tiny complaint is that I find Rowany a bit too accomplished even for an obvious authorial fave.
Cat + Gamer, v4, v5
Riko levels up as a cat owner and acquires another kitten! Soboro is a tortoishell munchkin who fears nothing and eats everything. After reading these I had to buy a kick toy for our kittens and found myself considering the gacha game I play as a metaphor for cat food dispensing.
Biography of X.
Lucca, widow of X, a performance artist/celebrity/serial liar and identity reinventor, objects strongly to another author's biography of X and sets out to do her own. This requires her to unpick much of what X created and, in the process, makes it clear that this is an alternate history where in the aftermath of WWII the American South seceded and became a walled facist theocracy; what has driven them to do this is the Socialist Capitalism politics of FDR, influenced heavily by an AU Emma Goldman. Lucca follows X, where she can, through a surprisingly familiar assortment of names and events (the book is throughly footnoted, showing where it has attributed work and quotes to/about X) but the more she finds out, the less she really knows about X at all. This would pair interestingly with David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue (both have Bowie, for example) but there's a hollowness at the heart of X that makes me unkeen to re-read it.
The Paris Novel
Delicious!
I loved Reichl’s first memoir, Tender at the Bone, but by Garlic and Sapphires I was less enthused and more critical of Reich’s game-playing. These are her first two novels - I started with Delicious!, stalled out about 2/3rds of the way through, read all of The Paris Novel and then went back to Delicious. Both have thin elegantly beautiful heroines with amazing senses of taste; both depend heavily on a plot involving investigation of a past mystery (in Delicious!, it’s a series of WWII letters from a teenager learning to cook to James Beard, in The Paris Novel it’s the life of Victorine-Louise Meurent, model for Manet and an artist in her own right), and both have an unconvincing het romance shoe-horned in in the last few pages. Both also have a lot of sensuously described food, as you would expect, but The Paris Novel has altogether too much fois gras (how much is too much? I think you could get away with one meal of it given that the book is set in the past, but three - the last of which uses an enormous slab simply to flavour lentils before discarding it - is definitely too much).
Both have significant structural issues and I don’t think I’d give another novel of hers a go. I preferred Delicious! despite getting stuck on it - the bits of discovering New York food culture and the letters themselves are very strong, but the heroine herself lacks bite.
We Could Be So Good
You Should Be So Lucky
Cat Sebastian has many fans and her books are constantly being recommended on m/m websites. I have read probably a dozen of them and really need to stop, because their gentle, low-stakes slow walllow relationship are just not my thing. These are late 1950s/early 1960s NY; the first matches a scrappy up-and-coming reporter to the son of the newspaper's owner, the second has a shortstop stuck in a batting slump and the grieving reporter assigned to cover his story.
A Sorceress Comes to Call
Kingfisher's take on The Goose Girl and arggh. If it hadn’t been, I would have loved this much more - a diabolically evil sorceress, who can control the will of others and routinely overwhelms her terrified daughter into an obedient shell of herself, a demon in the shape of a horse, a middle-aged woman whose brother is the sorceress’ new target, and a house party of the damned - but the goose girl is one of my favourite fairy tales and I hadn’t fully appreciated until I read this how much the relationship between the goose girl and Falada, her horse, is central to that for me. Kingfisher is not fond of horses and Falada is not a friend, and my childhood self got deeply deeply enraged by all this. Maybe this would work better for me on a re-read when I can manage my expectations. It is actually very good, just not for me.
All that We Know
NZ contemporary lit fic, set in my home city; Māreikura is angry; she's in love with her friend, Eru, but he is leaving the country on a church mission. She went viral at her high school after speaking out against a fellow student who did blackface, but doesn't know where she goes next. She wants to learn te reo but holds a lot of shame for not knowing it and resents pākehā being at her immersion kura at all. It's a spiky and engrossing read that dives right into the heart of current discourse (well, currentish - it's sadly obvious that the writing precedes our present highly racially divisive coalition government).
The Heroines of SOE: F Section, Britain's Secret Women in France.
WAAF historian goes through all of the women of F section, chronologically. I picked this up after reading Pippa Latour's memoir. It's good as an overview but the format tends towards repetition and the writing isn't great; still, the women themselves manage to shine through. I should track down the bio of Vera Atkins.
Home Ice Advantage.
Hockey m/m with actual adults; ex-hockey player gets offered chief coach position for a struggling team; the assistant coach, who'd expected the job, has to deal with being displaced. It is a little unclear to me how the emotions involved in this lead to them snogging in an office, but it's well-written and has believable sports content (then I read the previous one and it also fails to deal with the actual falling in love part via a very clunky time skip after the prologue. I have just borrowed the first one and am feeling a little cautious).
I know you did it.
Ruby caused the accidental death of another girl in a playground when they were pre-schoolers; on her first day at a new school, she finds a note in her locker (saying the title) and then other kids start dying... My son got this in his school bookclub and wanted me to read it. I guessed most but not all of the plot twists, which seemed satisfactory. It's not bad but I should get him some Lois Duncan.
The Nightingale
Vianne farewells her husband to fight in WWII, but her quiet French farming village is not left alone by the war; her husband is captured and her house requisitioned by the Nazis, with whom she must now cohabit. Her younger rebellious sister Isabelle joins the Resistance, and ends up being a thinly veiled "inspired by" version of Andrėe de Jongh, taking downed allied airmen across the Pyrenees in a lengthy, dangerous escape route back to the UK. This, unfortunately, falls apart the more you look at it - there are anachronisms (at one point the nice Nazi captain brings Vianne a small container of antibiotics for her severely ill daughter, a sentence with many many wrong things about it), inconsistencies (money, food, seasons) and the story never really inhabits the characters - in some ways it would have been stronger just as Vianne's story (with a better editor) - I would like to know more about the experiences of women in Occupied France! But Isabelle never really takes the leap from petulant teen to capable resistance fighter, and I would much rather have had a whole bunch of detailed mountain escape routes rather than one minimally described one and then a lot of guff about her passion for a fellow Resistance fighter.
Backstage
Anna is the daughter of a third-rate ballerina, growing up backstage at a struggling theatre; when it finally closes, she manages to scrape an entrance into the Royal Ballet school. I liked the bits about this where Anna realises she needs to do what she wants, not what her more forceful male dance partner wants her to do. This is late in Hill's series and the middle third is a rather self-indulgent catch up with all the more important main characters, but it's also a lovingly described Northern English winter and I enjoyed it for that.
Carl's doomsday scenario, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The dungeon anarchist’s cookbook, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (re-read)
Technically these are all re-reads. I just love this series and am wallowing around in it all over the place (nominated for Yuletide!). They are coming out now as mainstream published hardbacks from Penguin and have been optioned for TV, plus I am reading the latest one on Patreon. Do I think Dinniman can pull off the ending in 2-3 books' time? Hmm. Kaiju's ending doesn't work, but it's an interesting failure. I've started his Shivered Sky trilogy and will see how he does with that.
Dust up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley
Cat + gamer 4, Wataru Nadatani
Cat + gamer 5, Wataru Nadatani
Biography of x, Catherine Lacey
The Paris novel, Ruth Reichl
Delicious!, Ruth Reichl
We could be so good, Cat Sebastian
You should be so lucky, Cat Sebastian
A sorceress comes to call, T Kingfisher
All that we know, Shilo Kino
The heroines of SOE,Beryl E Escott
Home ice advantage, Ari Baran
I know you did it, Sue Wallman
The nightingale, Kristin Hannah
Backstage, Lorna Hill (re-read)
Carl's doomsday scenario, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The dungeon anarchist’s cookbook, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (re-read)
Three Twins at the Crater School
Dust Up at the Crater School
If you have spent at least some time reading pre 1950s British girls boarding school stories *and* sf from the days when Mars seemed like a habitable option, then these are laser-targeted to an unlikely but perfect intersection of all the best accompanying tropes. But there’s also a lot of interesting world building going on around the edges - the life cycle of the Martian inhabitants, the Cold War with the Russians that means radio propaganda is being broadcast to the surface from one of Mars’ moons, the developing tension between a colony and its Earth empire parent - and it’s an affectionate but clear-eyed homage to its forebears. Three Twins is a perfect title and there are indeed more than enough twins here, in what is a very effective introductory book; Dust Up complicates the worldbuilding in both Martian and imperial terms, and continues to provide satisfying school girl resolutions. My only tiny complaint is that I find Rowany a bit too accomplished even for an obvious authorial fave.
Cat + Gamer, v4, v5
Riko levels up as a cat owner and acquires another kitten! Soboro is a tortoishell munchkin who fears nothing and eats everything. After reading these I had to buy a kick toy for our kittens and found myself considering the gacha game I play as a metaphor for cat food dispensing.
Biography of X.
Lucca, widow of X, a performance artist/celebrity/serial liar and identity reinventor, objects strongly to another author's biography of X and sets out to do her own. This requires her to unpick much of what X created and, in the process, makes it clear that this is an alternate history where in the aftermath of WWII the American South seceded and became a walled facist theocracy; what has driven them to do this is the Socialist Capitalism politics of FDR, influenced heavily by an AU Emma Goldman. Lucca follows X, where she can, through a surprisingly familiar assortment of names and events (the book is throughly footnoted, showing where it has attributed work and quotes to/about X) but the more she finds out, the less she really knows about X at all. This would pair interestingly with David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue (both have Bowie, for example) but there's a hollowness at the heart of X that makes me unkeen to re-read it.
The Paris Novel
Delicious!
I loved Reichl’s first memoir, Tender at the Bone, but by Garlic and Sapphires I was less enthused and more critical of Reich’s game-playing. These are her first two novels - I started with Delicious!, stalled out about 2/3rds of the way through, read all of The Paris Novel and then went back to Delicious. Both have thin elegantly beautiful heroines with amazing senses of taste; both depend heavily on a plot involving investigation of a past mystery (in Delicious!, it’s a series of WWII letters from a teenager learning to cook to James Beard, in The Paris Novel it’s the life of Victorine-Louise Meurent, model for Manet and an artist in her own right), and both have an unconvincing het romance shoe-horned in in the last few pages. Both also have a lot of sensuously described food, as you would expect, but The Paris Novel has altogether too much fois gras (how much is too much? I think you could get away with one meal of it given that the book is set in the past, but three - the last of which uses an enormous slab simply to flavour lentils before discarding it - is definitely too much).
Both have significant structural issues and I don’t think I’d give another novel of hers a go. I preferred Delicious! despite getting stuck on it - the bits of discovering New York food culture and the letters themselves are very strong, but the heroine herself lacks bite.
We Could Be So Good
You Should Be So Lucky
Cat Sebastian has many fans and her books are constantly being recommended on m/m websites. I have read probably a dozen of them and really need to stop, because their gentle, low-stakes slow walllow relationship are just not my thing. These are late 1950s/early 1960s NY; the first matches a scrappy up-and-coming reporter to the son of the newspaper's owner, the second has a shortstop stuck in a batting slump and the grieving reporter assigned to cover his story.
A Sorceress Comes to Call
Kingfisher's take on The Goose Girl and arggh. If it hadn’t been, I would have loved this much more - a diabolically evil sorceress, who can control the will of others and routinely overwhelms her terrified daughter into an obedient shell of herself, a demon in the shape of a horse, a middle-aged woman whose brother is the sorceress’ new target, and a house party of the damned - but the goose girl is one of my favourite fairy tales and I hadn’t fully appreciated until I read this how much the relationship between the goose girl and Falada, her horse, is central to that for me. Kingfisher is not fond of horses and Falada is not a friend, and my childhood self got deeply deeply enraged by all this. Maybe this would work better for me on a re-read when I can manage my expectations. It is actually very good, just not for me.
All that We Know
NZ contemporary lit fic, set in my home city; Māreikura is angry; she's in love with her friend, Eru, but he is leaving the country on a church mission. She went viral at her high school after speaking out against a fellow student who did blackface, but doesn't know where she goes next. She wants to learn te reo but holds a lot of shame for not knowing it and resents pākehā being at her immersion kura at all. It's a spiky and engrossing read that dives right into the heart of current discourse (well, currentish - it's sadly obvious that the writing precedes our present highly racially divisive coalition government).
The Heroines of SOE: F Section, Britain's Secret Women in France.
WAAF historian goes through all of the women of F section, chronologically. I picked this up after reading Pippa Latour's memoir. It's good as an overview but the format tends towards repetition and the writing isn't great; still, the women themselves manage to shine through. I should track down the bio of Vera Atkins.
Home Ice Advantage.
Hockey m/m with actual adults; ex-hockey player gets offered chief coach position for a struggling team; the assistant coach, who'd expected the job, has to deal with being displaced. It is a little unclear to me how the emotions involved in this lead to them snogging in an office, but it's well-written and has believable sports content (then I read the previous one and it also fails to deal with the actual falling in love part via a very clunky time skip after the prologue. I have just borrowed the first one and am feeling a little cautious).
I know you did it.
Ruby caused the accidental death of another girl in a playground when they were pre-schoolers; on her first day at a new school, she finds a note in her locker (saying the title) and then other kids start dying... My son got this in his school bookclub and wanted me to read it. I guessed most but not all of the plot twists, which seemed satisfactory. It's not bad but I should get him some Lois Duncan.
The Nightingale
Vianne farewells her husband to fight in WWII, but her quiet French farming village is not left alone by the war; her husband is captured and her house requisitioned by the Nazis, with whom she must now cohabit. Her younger rebellious sister Isabelle joins the Resistance, and ends up being a thinly veiled "inspired by" version of Andrėe de Jongh, taking downed allied airmen across the Pyrenees in a lengthy, dangerous escape route back to the UK. This, unfortunately, falls apart the more you look at it - there are anachronisms (at one point the nice Nazi captain brings Vianne a small container of antibiotics for her severely ill daughter, a sentence with many many wrong things about it), inconsistencies (money, food, seasons) and the story never really inhabits the characters - in some ways it would have been stronger just as Vianne's story (with a better editor) - I would like to know more about the experiences of women in Occupied France! But Isabelle never really takes the leap from petulant teen to capable resistance fighter, and I would much rather have had a whole bunch of detailed mountain escape routes rather than one minimally described one and then a lot of guff about her passion for a fellow Resistance fighter.
Backstage
Anna is the daughter of a third-rate ballerina, growing up backstage at a struggling theatre; when it finally closes, she manages to scrape an entrance into the Royal Ballet school. I liked the bits about this where Anna realises she needs to do what she wants, not what her more forceful male dance partner wants her to do. This is late in Hill's series and the middle third is a rather self-indulgent catch up with all the more important main characters, but it's also a lovingly described Northern English winter and I enjoyed it for that.
Carl's doomsday scenario, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The dungeon anarchist’s cookbook, Matt Dinniman (audiobook)
The Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (re-read)
Technically these are all re-reads. I just love this series and am wallowing around in it all over the place (nominated for Yuletide!). They are coming out now as mainstream published hardbacks from Penguin and have been optioned for TV, plus I am reading the latest one on Patreon. Do I think Dinniman can pull off the ending in 2-3 books' time? Hmm. Kaiju's ending doesn't work, but it's an interesting failure. I've started his Shivered Sky trilogy and will see how he does with that.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 09:46 am (UTC)(similar calibrative evidence - you will not find my review of The House on the Cerulean Sea on here because I gave up 2/3rds of the way through due to overwhelming irritation :D )
no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 04:39 pm (UTC)Eh. That might just be story-breaking. I know people can do it, but that doesn't mean it has to work.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-09 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 07:22 am (UTC)My only tiny complaint is that I find Rowany a bit too accomplished even for an obvious authorial fave.
She must be derived from Rowan Marlow ;) (who is more successfully depicted in that sense)
Very curious about All That We Know, although I don't know how much sense it would make to me as an ignorant non-New Zealander. Does it spend a lot of time on the process of te reo learning, which sounds fascinating?
no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 11:41 pm (UTC)Yes, I'm sure there's a connection! But I agree that Rowan's bluntness definitely isn't shown as all good and she does not have Rowany's ability to see into the hearts and minds of the younger schoolgirls and present them with exactly what they need.
Very curious about All That We Know, although I don't know how much sense it would make to me as an ignorant non-New Zealander. Does it spend a lot of time on the process of te reo learning, which sounds fascinating?
Hmm not so much the process as the politics? Māreikura starts a podcast with a fellow course attender, and this leads through some of the issues around reclaiming te reo/identity.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 07:32 am (UTC)Her sense of place was absolutely outstanding, it's one of my strongest memories of the series. (The other is how much I disliked Sebastian, who to be fair must have been a vivid character if I remember him so much better than the lead girls!)
no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-14 10:44 am (UTC)Oh wow, a mention of Lorna Hill! I love those books, though they're quite difficult to get hold of. I don't remember exactly which ones I have in paperback in the attic, but I think Backstage isn't one of them.
This is late in Hill's series and the middle third is a rather self-indulgent catch up with all the more important main characters, but it's also a lovingly described Northern English winter and I enjoyed it for that.
Haha, I am quite up for a self-indulgent catch up with all the main characters :D
The loving descriptions of the North of England were one of the things I loved most about the series.
The Crater School books sound intriguing!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-23 09:56 pm (UTC)Girls Gone By have been reprinting Hill but they have short print runs and don’t do ebooks, arrgh.