Ships and sharing knives
Sep. 30th, 2007 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraAfter these two posts I am only one book behind on my booklog. The number of half-finished manga posts I have, however, is appalling, and I really should create the same sort of pending file I have for books so I can start at it glumly. Anyway.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife 1: Beguilement. Oddly un-Bujoldish in some ways – no-one seems to “breathe” their lines the way they tend to in the Miles books – and someone needs to wrest the word “epic” back from the blurb writer, because while this does talk about potentially world-threatening menaces (the malices), most of it is low-key and domestic and relationship-based. Which I’m happy enough with in abstract form, but the characters here never really grabbed me enough to care.
One thing I did wish she’d done more with – when Fawn goes back to her family, they all treat her as how they’ve seen her before, and that sense of being misjudged, of your relatives not being able to see past the role you’ve always had, is well done here. But the flip side of that is finding *yourself* falling into the role you used to have, behaving the way you’re expected to, almost without being able to help yourself. I would have liked to see that here, and certainly she’s done similar things with other characters (Ekaterin, for example) instead, Fawn’s family have just (except for the obligatory blind elderly less judgemental relative) always been Horribly Wrong about her.
Joan Druett, A Watery Grave. Wiki Coffin, son of a Maori mother and a Boston whaling pakeha father who picks him up at age 12 and takes him back to Salem, where he leaves again to go sailing, ending up on the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition. Where he fights crime. This novel suffered a bit from being read around five presentations, nine volumes of Saiyuki and a truly appalling amount of fan fiction, and I ended up skimming back through and making notes before reading on to the denouement. Even allowing for that, though, the mystery in this is a bit underdeveloped, relying heavily on physical similarities between characters who are not well-described (hence note-taking) and a sort of shell-game across the expedition fleet, where anyone important swaps ships half a dozen times before Wiki tracks them down. However. The life at sea aspects are great, and the denouement revolves round a vividly horrible predicament for one of the characters, where the book really did come alive for me. Wiki himself is excellent, although most of the other characters – except Forsythe (all-round bad lot), oddly – are not as well developed.
Most of Joan Druett’s books have been nonfiction – maritime history – and I’ve read In the Wake of Madness (sea voyage goes horribly wrong, possible inspiration for Moby Dick, read while on actual tall ship for increased realism although fortunately without any floggings or mutinies), which was done well but suffered a bit from the limitations of the source. Opening things up with fiction may make for an interesting shift – there are at least four of these out so far, and I’ll probably try at least one more.
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood. I thought I’d read 100 pages of this before about five years ago, but having now finished this I’m still unsure – possibly I read something involving sheep? Anyway. University student in 1960s/70s Tokyo falls in love with at least two women, with a background of student rebellion, Beatles songs, mental illness and suicide. It’s all very smoothly put together and there are some very nice moments, both emotional and practical. I did find the way the female characters often describe themselves or their actions as not being suitable or normal for a girl a bit too grating, though; they seem mostly real enough as people and as women, so that being constantly compared to some sort of plastic ideal is irksome. And I don’t object to the sex, which as part of the action is rather well done, original without being improbable, but again the female characters all favour explicit sexual description in conversation as well (not just in the text), while Toru gets away with reported speech (“I told her about it in a low voice…”) and euphemisms.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife 1: Beguilement. Oddly un-Bujoldish in some ways – no-one seems to “breathe” their lines the way they tend to in the Miles books – and someone needs to wrest the word “epic” back from the blurb writer, because while this does talk about potentially world-threatening menaces (the malices), most of it is low-key and domestic and relationship-based. Which I’m happy enough with in abstract form, but the characters here never really grabbed me enough to care.
One thing I did wish she’d done more with – when Fawn goes back to her family, they all treat her as how they’ve seen her before, and that sense of being misjudged, of your relatives not being able to see past the role you’ve always had, is well done here. But the flip side of that is finding *yourself* falling into the role you used to have, behaving the way you’re expected to, almost without being able to help yourself. I would have liked to see that here, and certainly she’s done similar things with other characters (Ekaterin, for example) instead, Fawn’s family have just (except for the obligatory blind elderly less judgemental relative) always been Horribly Wrong about her.
Joan Druett, A Watery Grave. Wiki Coffin, son of a Maori mother and a Boston whaling pakeha father who picks him up at age 12 and takes him back to Salem, where he leaves again to go sailing, ending up on the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition. Where he fights crime. This novel suffered a bit from being read around five presentations, nine volumes of Saiyuki and a truly appalling amount of fan fiction, and I ended up skimming back through and making notes before reading on to the denouement. Even allowing for that, though, the mystery in this is a bit underdeveloped, relying heavily on physical similarities between characters who are not well-described (hence note-taking) and a sort of shell-game across the expedition fleet, where anyone important swaps ships half a dozen times before Wiki tracks them down. However. The life at sea aspects are great, and the denouement revolves round a vividly horrible predicament for one of the characters, where the book really did come alive for me. Wiki himself is excellent, although most of the other characters – except Forsythe (all-round bad lot), oddly – are not as well developed.
Most of Joan Druett’s books have been nonfiction – maritime history – and I’ve read In the Wake of Madness (sea voyage goes horribly wrong, possible inspiration for Moby Dick, read while on actual tall ship for increased realism although fortunately without any floggings or mutinies), which was done well but suffered a bit from the limitations of the source. Opening things up with fiction may make for an interesting shift – there are at least four of these out so far, and I’ll probably try at least one more.
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood. I thought I’d read 100 pages of this before about five years ago, but having now finished this I’m still unsure – possibly I read something involving sheep? Anyway. University student in 1960s/70s Tokyo falls in love with at least two women, with a background of student rebellion, Beatles songs, mental illness and suicide. It’s all very smoothly put together and there are some very nice moments, both emotional and practical. I did find the way the female characters often describe themselves or their actions as not being suitable or normal for a girl a bit too grating, though; they seem mostly real enough as people and as women, so that being constantly compared to some sort of plastic ideal is irksome. And I don’t object to the sex, which as part of the action is rather well done, original without being improbable, but again the female characters all favour explicit sexual description in conversation as well (not just in the text), while Toru gets away with reported speech (“I told her about it in a low voice…”) and euphemisms.
