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Jul. 14th, 2007 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI have all these half-finished manga and anime posts that require inspiration, fact-checking and finishing off all the reading/watching in various combinations. I'm also behind on books - I read the first one of these about a month ago - but these are easier to catch up on.
I took an irrational dislike to this book when I heard the author read an extract from it, less because of the extract (from the first chapter, with Ista being contemplative) than because of the hordes of Bujold groupies (it was at Worldcon) who listened in an overly intense fashion with fixed beatific smiles on their faces. I thought Curse of Chalion was interesting but not outstanding, and Hallowed Hunt was neither. However, a lot of people seem to like this one best, so I – finally – gave it a chance. And it’s – okay. It has some nice moments, the active (sort-of) involvement of the gods is well handled (and I liked the clash of religions, between those favouring four gods and those favouring five), and I like dy Cabon, and Liss. On the other hand, it’s another fantasy book about special people; gifted by the gods, cursed through the actions of others, noble, rich, beautiful and powerful. Bujold likes writing about an aristocracy (what else are the Vor?), where the lower levels may be perfectly nice people but always know their place. I liked, at the start, that Ista was trapped by her position and privilege as much as anything, but that very rapidly falls away, and none of the significant people that she encounters see her as anything other than a main character. I still love many of Bujold's books, but her recent stuff (pretty much everything since A Civil Campaign, although I haven't read The Sharing Knife books) is not on that list.
Everest 1 and 2, Gordon Korman. And now I have to find the third one. I’d read half the first one before in a bookstore somewhere, and I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it. I love the MacDonald Hall books, and some of the older audience stuff; these, and the Dive series, are more fast-paced action/adventure trilogies, with much less goofiness (which is a shame, as he does it so well). This is about a sponsored climb of Everest (obviously), where the team is made up of teenagers; a large initial group of talented climbers and winners of a “collect lucky bottle caps and wrappers” contest undergo rigorous selection procedures in order to narrow down the team to four. The pov switches, but we start with (after one of those foreboding, nameless prologues) Dominic Alexis, the short, talented, determined younger brother of one of the team’s picked climbers.
The format means that this really is a very obvious book, and there’s not really a lot of time for anything other than necessary plot events and a bit of set-up. Book 2 is more interesting – it covers a lot less in terms of events, as it really just gets the team up to Base Camp (and then on a rescue mission), there are fewer characters and there’s a chance for Korman to deepen the whole thing out a bit. It feels well researched (although I have no way of judging the accuracy of, for example, the climbing stuff), but the information doesn’t slow things down, and there are enough surprises to keep me reading. Yes, there’s also a Sherpa who has a vision of Dominic, in that eastern mystic tradition, but at least it’s resolved in this book and, besides, it involves a Slinky, which puts it far ahead of many other mystical prophecies by friendly locals in other books.
Precious Dragon, Liz Williams. More Chen! The cover for this is absolutely gorgeous, with vast panoplies of demons surrounding a small boy with very large ears and a stuffed tiger, all highly relevant to the story. In this, Chen and Zhu Irzh are asked to take a delegate from Heaven on a fact-finding mission to Hell. Meanwhile an elderly lady acquires a mysterious grandson, and the city, recently endangered by earthquakes, is full of rumours and disturbances…
I liked this a lot, and it has a number of wonderful moments – a demon possessed by a human, matchmaking and weddings for the dead, Zhu Irzh’s family (especially his sister, Daisy), a gorgeous ending image and, as always, anything involving the badger tea-kettle. The thrust of the book, though, is the conflicts between – and rearrangement of – Heaven, Earth and Hell, and in this it’s very much building on the earlier two books and following the sf/f tendency to build a world, take it apart and put it back together again in a more harmonious manner. While I do like this, I find myself wishing that this series was following a more detective story approach to things, where the world-building is there more as setting and I would get to watch Chen solving smaller scale (but still nifty and demonic (or heavenly)) crimes, aided and abetted by the rest of the cast. However. Still very cool, and I see they’ve already titled the next one (The Shadow Pavilion). I will look out for the next tempting sale offer from Night Shade Books.
My edition also has a short story – Willow Pattern Plate – which is Inari’s pov. It has more badger/tea kettle and a nicely foreboding last-line.
And I'm also part of the Harry Potter re-reading horde - currently half-way through Order of the Phoenix, which should put me on track to finish Half-Blood Prince before next Saturday. Obviously, some sort of sheep icon would be appropriate at this point, but I'll have to settle for a hare...
I took an irrational dislike to this book when I heard the author read an extract from it, less because of the extract (from the first chapter, with Ista being contemplative) than because of the hordes of Bujold groupies (it was at Worldcon) who listened in an overly intense fashion with fixed beatific smiles on their faces. I thought Curse of Chalion was interesting but not outstanding, and Hallowed Hunt was neither. However, a lot of people seem to like this one best, so I – finally – gave it a chance. And it’s – okay. It has some nice moments, the active (sort-of) involvement of the gods is well handled (and I liked the clash of religions, between those favouring four gods and those favouring five), and I like dy Cabon, and Liss. On the other hand, it’s another fantasy book about special people; gifted by the gods, cursed through the actions of others, noble, rich, beautiful and powerful. Bujold likes writing about an aristocracy (what else are the Vor?), where the lower levels may be perfectly nice people but always know their place. I liked, at the start, that Ista was trapped by her position and privilege as much as anything, but that very rapidly falls away, and none of the significant people that she encounters see her as anything other than a main character. I still love many of Bujold's books, but her recent stuff (pretty much everything since A Civil Campaign, although I haven't read The Sharing Knife books) is not on that list.
Everest 1 and 2, Gordon Korman. And now I have to find the third one. I’d read half the first one before in a bookstore somewhere, and I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it. I love the MacDonald Hall books, and some of the older audience stuff; these, and the Dive series, are more fast-paced action/adventure trilogies, with much less goofiness (which is a shame, as he does it so well). This is about a sponsored climb of Everest (obviously), where the team is made up of teenagers; a large initial group of talented climbers and winners of a “collect lucky bottle caps and wrappers” contest undergo rigorous selection procedures in order to narrow down the team to four. The pov switches, but we start with (after one of those foreboding, nameless prologues) Dominic Alexis, the short, talented, determined younger brother of one of the team’s picked climbers.
The format means that this really is a very obvious book, and there’s not really a lot of time for anything other than necessary plot events and a bit of set-up. Book 2 is more interesting – it covers a lot less in terms of events, as it really just gets the team up to Base Camp (and then on a rescue mission), there are fewer characters and there’s a chance for Korman to deepen the whole thing out a bit. It feels well researched (although I have no way of judging the accuracy of, for example, the climbing stuff), but the information doesn’t slow things down, and there are enough surprises to keep me reading. Yes, there’s also a Sherpa who has a vision of Dominic, in that eastern mystic tradition, but at least it’s resolved in this book and, besides, it involves a Slinky, which puts it far ahead of many other mystical prophecies by friendly locals in other books.
Precious Dragon, Liz Williams. More Chen! The cover for this is absolutely gorgeous, with vast panoplies of demons surrounding a small boy with very large ears and a stuffed tiger, all highly relevant to the story. In this, Chen and Zhu Irzh are asked to take a delegate from Heaven on a fact-finding mission to Hell. Meanwhile an elderly lady acquires a mysterious grandson, and the city, recently endangered by earthquakes, is full of rumours and disturbances…
I liked this a lot, and it has a number of wonderful moments – a demon possessed by a human, matchmaking and weddings for the dead, Zhu Irzh’s family (especially his sister, Daisy), a gorgeous ending image and, as always, anything involving the badger tea-kettle. The thrust of the book, though, is the conflicts between – and rearrangement of – Heaven, Earth and Hell, and in this it’s very much building on the earlier two books and following the sf/f tendency to build a world, take it apart and put it back together again in a more harmonious manner. While I do like this, I find myself wishing that this series was following a more detective story approach to things, where the world-building is there more as setting and I would get to watch Chen solving smaller scale (but still nifty and demonic (or heavenly)) crimes, aided and abetted by the rest of the cast. However. Still very cool, and I see they’ve already titled the next one (The Shadow Pavilion). I will look out for the next tempting sale offer from Night Shade Books.
My edition also has a short story – Willow Pattern Plate – which is Inari’s pov. It has more badger/tea kettle and a nicely foreboding last-line.
And I'm also part of the Harry Potter re-reading horde - currently half-way through Order of the Phoenix, which should put me on track to finish Half-Blood Prince before next Saturday. Obviously, some sort of sheep icon would be appropriate at this point, but I'll have to settle for a hare...
