Books read, October
Dec. 5th, 2024 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI have written up half the gaming but I can't find the file so here, books from October. Best of the month were Katherine Arden's Small Spaces series, perfectly seasonal middle grade horror.
Our wild farming life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger
Gate of the feral gods, Matt Dinniman, audiobook
The rest of us just live here, Patrick Ness
The striker and the clock, Georgia Cloepfil
Delay of game, Ari Baran
The girl who couldn’t lie, Radhika Sanghani
The school on the moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce
By honour bound, Bessie Marchant
The new prefect, Dorothea Moore
Pas de don’t, Chloe Angyal
A soundtrack for falling in love, Arden Powell
Mark cooper versus America, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Small spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead voices, Katherine Arden
Dark waters, Katherine Arden
Empty smiles, Katherine Arden
Our Wild Farming Life: Adventures on a Scottish Highland Croft, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer. Lynn (English) and Sandra (Swiss) meet while working on various conservation projects, fall in love, and plunge into buying a croft in the Scottish Highlands to learn how to live and farm with the land. For fans of rewilding and sustainable farming narratives, and it’s an enjoyable read while feeling a little bit pushed out to capitalise on their TV appearance.
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger. This is a spin-off of at least one other series that I haven’t read and is basically the K-pop industry in space, where singers are called gods and form pantheons rather than groups, their fans are worshippers, and concerts are a difficult to visualise mix of music and emotion and skin colour changes. Phex has a terrible backstory complete with traumatic rejection by his species and hazardous child labour, but fortunately he was also genetically engineered to have perfect pitch and thus when an alien hears him singing at his day job as a barista he is swept up into the industry. There are some nice dynamics with his pantheon but this is aiming for a found-family warm fuzzies heroic individuals stoically making food for all their loved ones in order to emotionally express themselves that is not really my thing. I am not sure that I will read the next two.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Patrick Ness. Ness is one of those authors that I keep meaning to read and not doing so - I think the only other one of his I’ve read is A Monster Calls. In this book a Buffyesque teen supernatural drama progressively takes place in the chapter descriptions while the actual chapters are about the other kids. This is a neat idea and it’s well written, but the main character is irritating, callous in his repeated “and then another indie kid died”, annoying in his whole “the girl I like but haven’t told said she was interested in someone else, woe” thing and I ended up wanting to know a lot more about everyone else. I’m not sure this has gotten me any closer to finally reading The Chaos Walking trilogy.
The Striker and the Clock: On Being in the Game, Georgia Cloepfil. Professional soccer player’s memoir, told in 90 short passages, one for each minute of the game. Meditative and compelling, occasionally a bit choppy; interesting to look at a team sport player who played mainly before the increasing professionalisation of women’s soccer.
Delay of Game, Ari Baran. I really liked Home Ice Advantage but this just didn’t work. It’s well-behaved captain Nate and bad boy trade Zach, but Baran makes the bold and inexplicable decision to start with Zach being traded from his winning team to Nate’s struggling one (Zach is super rude about the whole thing) then time-skip ahead 3 years to when Zach is reformed and Zach and Nate are BFFs with a side of pining. Missing out on that much character work made the rest of the story too thin for me.
The Girl who Couldn’t Lie, Radhika Sanghani. Twelve-year-old Priya lies in order to make her friends and family believe that everything is perfect rather than disappoint them; then her dying grandmother leaves her a bangle that compels her to tell the truth, and everything falls apart. Good contemporary middle grade; Priya’s friends are well-done, good representation (neurodivergence, sexuality, racial), ending slightly too neat but fun.
The School on the Moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce. First in the Toby series and conveniently on Faded Page, although the others aren’t (yet). Toby is the daughter of an artist and starts at the school; she loves the moor (it’s Dartmoor) and is convinced the Ark of the Covenant is hidden there. I like the landscape bits and dislike the religious bits; there is also a subplot in which Toby has a massive crush on one of the older girls (either the games captain or head) and is Cruelly Misjudged by her but Must Suffer in Silence in Order to Protect the Real Culprit, which is entertaining and another subplot in which the male relative of one of the mistresses has also been Falsely Accused (and actually convicted) and therefore must be helped to escape to flee to Africa by private plane to take up farming, which is frankly bizarre. Bruce’s strengths are not action.
By Honour Bound, Bessie Marchant. Poking round further on Faded Page got me this one, in which Dorothy sees another girl steal a jumper (there’s a great illustration of this, with Dorothy gazing absently into the mirror and seeing the girl’s reflection) and then finds out this girl is a) at her new school b) her chief rival for an important bursary that sends the recipient to Cambridge. Obviously Dorothy cannot possibly say what she saw and obviously Rhoda (the thief and rival) will do anything to discredit and disrupt her. Interesting subplot with Dorothy’s brother, Tom, who is at the local boys’ school - the two schools socialise every fortnight, Tom develops a crush on Rhoda and also falls into bad ways with gambling before recovering with Dorothy’s support.
The New Prefect, Dorothea Moore. More Faded P. The school’s pupils all perform terribly in an exam, except Petronella Carey, also the most responsible in her family, who is then chosen by the new headmistress (a woman whom Petronella has also conveniently rescued from an overturned train after stopping another train from crashing into it) as her new senior prefect. This raises the hackles of the head girl (understandingly) and much of the school; Petronella wins them over through hard work and personality, plus also rescuing a) an old man from a bog b) his crippled granddaughter, by organising a fundraiser for orthopaedic surgery c)a bunch of unnamed miners and the noble Lord Rustthorpe, who had gone down with them in order to persuade them not to strike. The whole mining chunk is so incredibly biased; only the “professional agitator”, described as “foxy-faced”, does not think that Rustthorpe is a “good landlord, a good sportsman, and a true friend to the men”, all of which begs the question why he couldn’t provide better working conditions. I prefer this trope where the lead has to struggle more and doesn’t spend quite so much time in dramatic rescues.
Pas de Don’t, Chloe Angyal. Heather Hays has everything she wants; the principal dancer role at her company, engagement to ballet royalty and male lead Jack. Then she discovers Jack is cheating and everything falls apart - the only job she is offered is at the Australian National Ballet company in Sydney, where she quickly falls for Marcus, who is struggling to make it back from injury, but alas the company, which has made many progressive changes, also has a strict no dating policy and colleagues who stuff up are sacked. The Sydney bits in this are great and Heather’s realisation about how terrible her ex was are well done. I had issues with the central “pas de don’t” concept of the novel - ban dating/relationships between people who spend most of their lives together? - and it felt as if it had been plunked into the story as a way to generate tension, rather than being a well-meaning idea with unfortunate consequences.
A Summer Soundtrack for Falling in Love, Arden Powell. Kris leaves small-town Kansas to make it big as a musician in New York - when things go wrong and he ends up without a home or a job, he busks in the park, and is picked up by flamboyant Rayne Bakshi of the alternative rock band The Chokecherries, who desperately need a new guitarist. Kris tells Rayne he’s straight, but is happy for Rayne to kiss and grope him on stage to generate fannish excitement; but offstage, Kris thinks he wants more, but can’t work out how to tell Rayne or deal with his own conservative family. I have firm suspicions about which fandom this author was in 2010 and I might well have enjoyed this more BUT the author makes the inexplicable choice to add in a skinhead desert cult who worship a peacock and start kidnapping band members in order to… I don’t know, make some sort of commentary about the arbitrary nature of fannish desire? Cover up for the fact that Kris’ personality is really not all that coherent? Provide a tenuous reason for having Rayne chained to a tentpole? Anyway. The start was nicely iddy but this totally fell apart.
Mark Cooper versus America, JA Rock and Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock and Lisa Henry
Prescott College series. Mark is an angry and homesick Australian who has come to Pennsylvania with his mother and newish stepdad, where he picks fights with everyone at Prescott College (and elsewhere - he gets banned from a local café for insistently requesting they make him flat whites :D ). Despite this he decides to rush the party fraternity Alpha Delta Phi because his stepdad has fond memories of it; however, the fraternity has gone somewhat downhill since then (Deacon’s description: “rich kids, foam parties, pig roasts and date-rape cover ups.”) and this process is going to test Mark even when he decides he’s going to try to convince them to kick him out. Deacon, meanwhile, is the laidback part-time bartender fellow student at neighbouring Phi Sigma Kappa (an academic board gaming frat), who is struggling with his only family issues but finds himself more and more drawn to Mark. Mark is a delight (in small doses) and his relationship with Deacon, which veers between sweet and kinky, is great The frat stuff - hmm. Bits of it work really well, and then bits of it don’t, especially given the ending - is the frat system bad, or is it just a few individuals who can be removed and then we can play the rest of it for laughs?
Brandon was sexually abused by his teacher and has no desire to ever be in any sort of relationship; Alex is a bouncy puppy type who is totally crushing on Brandon, and when they end up on the Phi Sigma Kappa quiz team together it seems like the ideal opportunity to get together. The leads aren’t anywhere near as compelling as those in the first book and it’s all a bit childish.
Small Spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead Voices, Katherine Arden
Dark Waters, Katherine Arden
Empty Smiles, Katherine Arden
Solidly effective and creepy middle grade horror quartet, with a group of distinctive and compelling schoolfriends (Ollie, Coco, and Brian) and a recurring villain who gave me satisfactory Randall Flagg vibes (mostly age appropriate). I liked these a lot. Each is set in a different season, with a different horror trope; Small Spaces has an autumnal haunted farm, with scarecrows and corn maze, Dead Voices is a winter cabin former orphanage, Dark Waters is a spring island that doesn’t exist on any maps, and Empty Smiles is the summer fair of DOOM. The first and the fourth were my favourites, and the second the weakest (it has some great visuals but the denouement wasn’t as satisfactory as the others.
Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (audiobook). Look I just love everyone in these books. I also particularly love that the covers (of the self-published versions) continue to be absolutely bonkers and completely accurate for everything except Donut's coat colour (she's a tortie but Dinniman has said that he finds drawing torties too hard and so gave the artist permission to change it)
Our wild farming life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger
Gate of the feral gods, Matt Dinniman, audiobook
The rest of us just live here, Patrick Ness
The striker and the clock, Georgia Cloepfil
Delay of game, Ari Baran
The girl who couldn’t lie, Radhika Sanghani
The school on the moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce
By honour bound, Bessie Marchant
The new prefect, Dorothea Moore
Pas de don’t, Chloe Angyal
A soundtrack for falling in love, Arden Powell
Mark cooper versus America, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Small spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead voices, Katherine Arden
Dark waters, Katherine Arden
Empty smiles, Katherine Arden
Our Wild Farming Life: Adventures on a Scottish Highland Croft, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer. Lynn (English) and Sandra (Swiss) meet while working on various conservation projects, fall in love, and plunge into buying a croft in the Scottish Highlands to learn how to live and farm with the land. For fans of rewilding and sustainable farming narratives, and it’s an enjoyable read while feeling a little bit pushed out to capitalise on their TV appearance.
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger. This is a spin-off of at least one other series that I haven’t read and is basically the K-pop industry in space, where singers are called gods and form pantheons rather than groups, their fans are worshippers, and concerts are a difficult to visualise mix of music and emotion and skin colour changes. Phex has a terrible backstory complete with traumatic rejection by his species and hazardous child labour, but fortunately he was also genetically engineered to have perfect pitch and thus when an alien hears him singing at his day job as a barista he is swept up into the industry. There are some nice dynamics with his pantheon but this is aiming for a found-family warm fuzzies heroic individuals stoically making food for all their loved ones in order to emotionally express themselves that is not really my thing. I am not sure that I will read the next two.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Patrick Ness. Ness is one of those authors that I keep meaning to read and not doing so - I think the only other one of his I’ve read is A Monster Calls. In this book a Buffyesque teen supernatural drama progressively takes place in the chapter descriptions while the actual chapters are about the other kids. This is a neat idea and it’s well written, but the main character is irritating, callous in his repeated “and then another indie kid died”, annoying in his whole “the girl I like but haven’t told said she was interested in someone else, woe” thing and I ended up wanting to know a lot more about everyone else. I’m not sure this has gotten me any closer to finally reading The Chaos Walking trilogy.
The Striker and the Clock: On Being in the Game, Georgia Cloepfil. Professional soccer player’s memoir, told in 90 short passages, one for each minute of the game. Meditative and compelling, occasionally a bit choppy; interesting to look at a team sport player who played mainly before the increasing professionalisation of women’s soccer.
Delay of Game, Ari Baran. I really liked Home Ice Advantage but this just didn’t work. It’s well-behaved captain Nate and bad boy trade Zach, but Baran makes the bold and inexplicable decision to start with Zach being traded from his winning team to Nate’s struggling one (Zach is super rude about the whole thing) then time-skip ahead 3 years to when Zach is reformed and Zach and Nate are BFFs with a side of pining. Missing out on that much character work made the rest of the story too thin for me.
The Girl who Couldn’t Lie, Radhika Sanghani. Twelve-year-old Priya lies in order to make her friends and family believe that everything is perfect rather than disappoint them; then her dying grandmother leaves her a bangle that compels her to tell the truth, and everything falls apart. Good contemporary middle grade; Priya’s friends are well-done, good representation (neurodivergence, sexuality, racial), ending slightly too neat but fun.
The School on the Moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce. First in the Toby series and conveniently on Faded Page, although the others aren’t (yet). Toby is the daughter of an artist and starts at the school; she loves the moor (it’s Dartmoor) and is convinced the Ark of the Covenant is hidden there. I like the landscape bits and dislike the religious bits; there is also a subplot in which Toby has a massive crush on one of the older girls (either the games captain or head) and is Cruelly Misjudged by her but Must Suffer in Silence in Order to Protect the Real Culprit, which is entertaining and another subplot in which the male relative of one of the mistresses has also been Falsely Accused (and actually convicted) and therefore must be helped to escape to flee to Africa by private plane to take up farming, which is frankly bizarre. Bruce’s strengths are not action.
By Honour Bound, Bessie Marchant. Poking round further on Faded Page got me this one, in which Dorothy sees another girl steal a jumper (there’s a great illustration of this, with Dorothy gazing absently into the mirror and seeing the girl’s reflection) and then finds out this girl is a) at her new school b) her chief rival for an important bursary that sends the recipient to Cambridge. Obviously Dorothy cannot possibly say what she saw and obviously Rhoda (the thief and rival) will do anything to discredit and disrupt her. Interesting subplot with Dorothy’s brother, Tom, who is at the local boys’ school - the two schools socialise every fortnight, Tom develops a crush on Rhoda and also falls into bad ways with gambling before recovering with Dorothy’s support.
The New Prefect, Dorothea Moore. More Faded P. The school’s pupils all perform terribly in an exam, except Petronella Carey, also the most responsible in her family, who is then chosen by the new headmistress (a woman whom Petronella has also conveniently rescued from an overturned train after stopping another train from crashing into it) as her new senior prefect. This raises the hackles of the head girl (understandingly) and much of the school; Petronella wins them over through hard work and personality, plus also rescuing a) an old man from a bog b) his crippled granddaughter, by organising a fundraiser for orthopaedic surgery c)a bunch of unnamed miners and the noble Lord Rustthorpe, who had gone down with them in order to persuade them not to strike. The whole mining chunk is so incredibly biased; only the “professional agitator”, described as “foxy-faced”, does not think that Rustthorpe is a “good landlord, a good sportsman, and a true friend to the men”, all of which begs the question why he couldn’t provide better working conditions. I prefer this trope where the lead has to struggle more and doesn’t spend quite so much time in dramatic rescues.
Pas de Don’t, Chloe Angyal. Heather Hays has everything she wants; the principal dancer role at her company, engagement to ballet royalty and male lead Jack. Then she discovers Jack is cheating and everything falls apart - the only job she is offered is at the Australian National Ballet company in Sydney, where she quickly falls for Marcus, who is struggling to make it back from injury, but alas the company, which has made many progressive changes, also has a strict no dating policy and colleagues who stuff up are sacked. The Sydney bits in this are great and Heather’s realisation about how terrible her ex was are well done. I had issues with the central “pas de don’t” concept of the novel - ban dating/relationships between people who spend most of their lives together? - and it felt as if it had been plunked into the story as a way to generate tension, rather than being a well-meaning idea with unfortunate consequences.
A Summer Soundtrack for Falling in Love, Arden Powell. Kris leaves small-town Kansas to make it big as a musician in New York - when things go wrong and he ends up without a home or a job, he busks in the park, and is picked up by flamboyant Rayne Bakshi of the alternative rock band The Chokecherries, who desperately need a new guitarist. Kris tells Rayne he’s straight, but is happy for Rayne to kiss and grope him on stage to generate fannish excitement; but offstage, Kris thinks he wants more, but can’t work out how to tell Rayne or deal with his own conservative family. I have firm suspicions about which fandom this author was in 2010 and I might well have enjoyed this more BUT the author makes the inexplicable choice to add in a skinhead desert cult who worship a peacock and start kidnapping band members in order to… I don’t know, make some sort of commentary about the arbitrary nature of fannish desire? Cover up for the fact that Kris’ personality is really not all that coherent? Provide a tenuous reason for having Rayne chained to a tentpole? Anyway. The start was nicely iddy but this totally fell apart.
Mark Cooper versus America, JA Rock and Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock and Lisa Henry
Prescott College series. Mark is an angry and homesick Australian who has come to Pennsylvania with his mother and newish stepdad, where he picks fights with everyone at Prescott College (and elsewhere - he gets banned from a local café for insistently requesting they make him flat whites :D ). Despite this he decides to rush the party fraternity Alpha Delta Phi because his stepdad has fond memories of it; however, the fraternity has gone somewhat downhill since then (Deacon’s description: “rich kids, foam parties, pig roasts and date-rape cover ups.”) and this process is going to test Mark even when he decides he’s going to try to convince them to kick him out. Deacon, meanwhile, is the laidback part-time bartender fellow student at neighbouring Phi Sigma Kappa (an academic board gaming frat), who is struggling with his only family issues but finds himself more and more drawn to Mark. Mark is a delight (in small doses) and his relationship with Deacon, which veers between sweet and kinky, is great The frat stuff - hmm. Bits of it work really well, and then bits of it don’t, especially given the ending - is the frat system bad, or is it just a few individuals who can be removed and then we can play the rest of it for laughs?
Brandon was sexually abused by his teacher and has no desire to ever be in any sort of relationship; Alex is a bouncy puppy type who is totally crushing on Brandon, and when they end up on the Phi Sigma Kappa quiz team together it seems like the ideal opportunity to get together. The leads aren’t anywhere near as compelling as those in the first book and it’s all a bit childish.
Small Spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead Voices, Katherine Arden
Dark Waters, Katherine Arden
Empty Smiles, Katherine Arden
Solidly effective and creepy middle grade horror quartet, with a group of distinctive and compelling schoolfriends (Ollie, Coco, and Brian) and a recurring villain who gave me satisfactory Randall Flagg vibes (mostly age appropriate). I liked these a lot. Each is set in a different season, with a different horror trope; Small Spaces has an autumnal haunted farm, with scarecrows and corn maze, Dead Voices is a winter cabin former orphanage, Dark Waters is a spring island that doesn’t exist on any maps, and Empty Smiles is the summer fair of DOOM. The first and the fourth were my favourites, and the second the weakest (it has some great visuals but the denouement wasn’t as satisfactory as the others.
Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman (audiobook). Look I just love everyone in these books. I also particularly love that the covers (of the self-published versions) continue to be absolutely bonkers and completely accurate for everything except Donut's coat colour (she's a tortie but Dinniman has said that he finds drawing torties too hard and so gave the artist permission to change it)
no subject
Date: 2024-12-05 12:41 am (UTC)This is amazing but also sounds like maybe it needs to be its own book, which focuses largely on the skinhead desert cult and their inexplicable peacock, because as a mere subplot that's maybe just Too Much.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-05 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-05 01:30 am (UTC)Like Tawûsî Melek, or literally a peacock?
no subject
Date: 2024-12-05 04:20 am (UTC)