Not quite the full dozen
May. 27th, 2007 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI’ve had shopping amnesia recently – every time I went to the supermarket I automatically bought eggs, and I only realised what I was doing once I had 3 and a half cartons. So, for the last week, it’s been eggs for dinner (scrambled, buttered, omletted, encaked...), and now things are back to more sensible levels.
Along similar lines, I’ve been finishing off all my library books before they, too, exceed their expiration dates…
The Hungry Cloud, Tom Ingram. Children’s fantasy, in a vaguely Scottish world where two children wait in a castle for their parents to return from holiday, and strange things start to happen. The villains are impressively nasty (I wondered if they were going for Norse references, as they’re Fenrir (female) and something starting with L (have returned book) that could have been heading towards Loki, but they didn’t do anything further), and there’s also an interesting bit where the boy actually kills someone and has it not be one of those fantasy disappearing body deaths. Has a back cover blurb for The Night They Stole The Alphabet, which I really must get my own copy of.
I’ve bounced off a lot of Cherryh’s stuff, and it took Cyteen (which I read for the first time about three years ago) to actually make me stick. Foreigner. I liked this one, which has a number of interesting points to make about cultural appropriation and assimilation – what do you call it when you have 4 million humans with high-tech resources, isolated on an island enclave by many more indigenous – and lower-tech – aliens? In this book, one human – the paidhi (a standard Cherryh lead character, a passive damaged male) – is allowed into atevi society, to liaise and act as a filter between societies, for information and technology. There are a whole lot more in this series, but when I checked my local library (unhelpfully) only had number seven.
The Stormwatcher, Graham Joyce. The blurb disturbed me on this one. “In England,” it says, as if about to announce some bizarre perversion, “it is very common for groups of friends to vacation together…”. It then goes on to tell me that only one of the events in the story is unambiguously supernatural, and after finishing the book I’m still not sure which it was. Anyway. English people (possibly friends!) holidaying with each other in France. Nice interpersonal dynamics and an adolescent daughter with problems. It’s all done well, and the lines of tension between characters are convincingly tangled, but it doesn’t have the same catharsis and warmth as his The Facts of Life and (my favourite so far) The Limits of Enchantment.
Magic's Child. Tying up the series. I’m still a bit iffy about the magical pregnancy plot-line, but Reason’s own resolution is nicely handled, and I like Tom’s decision a lot. This series does a number of things well. I don’t love it, though, and that’s probably as much me as the books – they’re all set very near where I currently live, and my feelings for the place are not Larbelestier’s (and my version of King Street has significantly more grime, casual harassment and cockroaches). In addition, though, I would have liked more in the books – they’re all short, fast reads, and they do cover a fair amount of ground, but they don’t have the complexity that I like. I like that Reason’s father was Aboriginal, and that Jay-Tee’s Hispanic, but there’s not a lot of engagement with this (and you can argue that this is not what the book’s trying to do, and that’s perfectly valid), and other issues like magic, or sex, seem to get brought up but not explored fully. I do look forward to seeing what Larbalestier does next - ideally, I'd like a longer all-in-one work.
There’s also a small geographical issue that bugs me. Reason and her friends follow Jason Blake to Sydney Airport, but arrive after his plane takes off, heading west. There’s more than one flight leaving at that time, but they decide it’s the one to Auckland – and the timing of Jason’s arrival (about three hours) and transfer to NY via door confirms it. Unfortunately, if you fly *west* from Sydney it’ll take you far longer to reach Auckland. It’s three hours east.
Edwina Sparrow, Girl of Destiny. I found myself reading the last 80 pages of We Need to Talk About Kevin, to see if Lionel Shriver irked me as much in prose as she does in her Guardian columns (yes. And I don’t like books that want me to dislike everybody in them.) and needed an antidote. This is a cheerful, fast-paced YA about a girl dealing with family issues (Gran thinks she’s in WWII again, her mother is obsessed with dieting and her father’s in Antarctica), bullies at school, personal conflicts etc. Nicely done, although the socially epter younger brother gets on my nerves after the third or fourth time he kindly points out Edwina’s problems.
Garlic and Sapphires. Finished reading this in the bookstore. Third in her autobiographical series, this one focuses on her career as a restaurant reviewer for the NY Times; the disguises she uses, the effect on her approach to food (and relationships), the experience of eating for a living… Interesting, in places, and the way she constructs her other selves (her disguises) is fascinating, particularly when they bleed back into her, but the first one of these is still the best.
The Haunting of Lamb House. Someone scrawled "Catholicism is Anti-Christ" on the library fly-leaf, but it's really a more sad story of maltreatment and rejection, with no Catholicism or antichrists - the original story of Toby and his sister, and then encounters with the story by two authors later living in the house, Henry James and EF Benson (the house itself is real, but I have no idea about the ghost). This worked much better for me than the previous Aitken adult gothic I'd tried (I love her children's books). It has, however, left me with a strong desire to read EF Benson's David at Kings, which is in storage far too many miles away (and I have just checked Project Gutenberg. No luck, but they do have some of his others). Disturbing rather than creepy, and an interesting theme of the author's obligations to their source material.
The Hard Way. Which leaves me with one more to go (Bad Luck and Trouble) before I’m up to date. Readable, and I liked it, but I also guessed the major twists some time before the characters. Interesting seeing England through the eyes of an American character written by a British novelist. I think the standard "British people have bad teeth" theme is just a touch ham-handed here.
Along similar lines, I’ve been finishing off all my library books before they, too, exceed their expiration dates…
The Hungry Cloud, Tom Ingram. Children’s fantasy, in a vaguely Scottish world where two children wait in a castle for their parents to return from holiday, and strange things start to happen. The villains are impressively nasty (I wondered if they were going for Norse references, as they’re Fenrir (female) and something starting with L (have returned book) that could have been heading towards Loki, but they didn’t do anything further), and there’s also an interesting bit where the boy actually kills someone and has it not be one of those fantasy disappearing body deaths. Has a back cover blurb for The Night They Stole The Alphabet, which I really must get my own copy of.
I’ve bounced off a lot of Cherryh’s stuff, and it took Cyteen (which I read for the first time about three years ago) to actually make me stick. Foreigner. I liked this one, which has a number of interesting points to make about cultural appropriation and assimilation – what do you call it when you have 4 million humans with high-tech resources, isolated on an island enclave by many more indigenous – and lower-tech – aliens? In this book, one human – the paidhi (a standard Cherryh lead character, a passive damaged male) – is allowed into atevi society, to liaise and act as a filter between societies, for information and technology. There are a whole lot more in this series, but when I checked my local library (unhelpfully) only had number seven.
The Stormwatcher, Graham Joyce. The blurb disturbed me on this one. “In England,” it says, as if about to announce some bizarre perversion, “it is very common for groups of friends to vacation together…”. It then goes on to tell me that only one of the events in the story is unambiguously supernatural, and after finishing the book I’m still not sure which it was. Anyway. English people (possibly friends!) holidaying with each other in France. Nice interpersonal dynamics and an adolescent daughter with problems. It’s all done well, and the lines of tension between characters are convincingly tangled, but it doesn’t have the same catharsis and warmth as his The Facts of Life and (my favourite so far) The Limits of Enchantment.
Magic's Child. Tying up the series. I’m still a bit iffy about the magical pregnancy plot-line, but Reason’s own resolution is nicely handled, and I like Tom’s decision a lot. This series does a number of things well. I don’t love it, though, and that’s probably as much me as the books – they’re all set very near where I currently live, and my feelings for the place are not Larbelestier’s (and my version of King Street has significantly more grime, casual harassment and cockroaches). In addition, though, I would have liked more in the books – they’re all short, fast reads, and they do cover a fair amount of ground, but they don’t have the complexity that I like. I like that Reason’s father was Aboriginal, and that Jay-Tee’s Hispanic, but there’s not a lot of engagement with this (and you can argue that this is not what the book’s trying to do, and that’s perfectly valid), and other issues like magic, or sex, seem to get brought up but not explored fully. I do look forward to seeing what Larbalestier does next - ideally, I'd like a longer all-in-one work.
There’s also a small geographical issue that bugs me. Reason and her friends follow Jason Blake to Sydney Airport, but arrive after his plane takes off, heading west. There’s more than one flight leaving at that time, but they decide it’s the one to Auckland – and the timing of Jason’s arrival (about three hours) and transfer to NY via door confirms it. Unfortunately, if you fly *west* from Sydney it’ll take you far longer to reach Auckland. It’s three hours east.
Edwina Sparrow, Girl of Destiny. I found myself reading the last 80 pages of We Need to Talk About Kevin, to see if Lionel Shriver irked me as much in prose as she does in her Guardian columns (yes. And I don’t like books that want me to dislike everybody in them.) and needed an antidote. This is a cheerful, fast-paced YA about a girl dealing with family issues (Gran thinks she’s in WWII again, her mother is obsessed with dieting and her father’s in Antarctica), bullies at school, personal conflicts etc. Nicely done, although the socially epter younger brother gets on my nerves after the third or fourth time he kindly points out Edwina’s problems.
Garlic and Sapphires. Finished reading this in the bookstore. Third in her autobiographical series, this one focuses on her career as a restaurant reviewer for the NY Times; the disguises she uses, the effect on her approach to food (and relationships), the experience of eating for a living… Interesting, in places, and the way she constructs her other selves (her disguises) is fascinating, particularly when they bleed back into her, but the first one of these is still the best.
The Haunting of Lamb House. Someone scrawled "Catholicism is Anti-Christ" on the library fly-leaf, but it's really a more sad story of maltreatment and rejection, with no Catholicism or antichrists - the original story of Toby and his sister, and then encounters with the story by two authors later living in the house, Henry James and EF Benson (the house itself is real, but I have no idea about the ghost). This worked much better for me than the previous Aitken adult gothic I'd tried (I love her children's books). It has, however, left me with a strong desire to read EF Benson's David at Kings, which is in storage far too many miles away (and I have just checked Project Gutenberg. No luck, but they do have some of his others). Disturbing rather than creepy, and an interesting theme of the author's obligations to their source material.
The Hard Way. Which leaves me with one more to go (Bad Luck and Trouble) before I’m up to date. Readable, and I liked it, but I also guessed the major twists some time before the characters. Interesting seeing England through the eyes of an American character written by a British novelist. I think the standard "British people have bad teeth" theme is just a touch ham-handed here.
