cyphomandra

Consider the title fair warning. I was not impressed by either of these, and if you liked them or haven't read them, you should probably skip over this. It may or may not help to know that my next post will probably be about 15 volumes of BL manga (all by the same author), which I accidentally read while writing my Yuletide story, and involve me attempting to justify this temporary obsession on somewhat shaky textual grounds.

( Connie Willis, All Clear. )

( Lois McMaster Bujold, Cryoburn. )

Starting off with massive thanks to Orannia for telling me about these and lending me her copies (I'm ordering my own shortly, although the trick is going to be not ordering a bunch of other unread books as well)...

Kiram Kir-Zaki is happy and well-adjusted, has a supportive (and surviving) family (he’s gay, so his mother tries to match him up with a nice young responsible male pharmacist) and no magical powers whatsoever, which makes him massively unlikely as the protagonist for a fantasy novel – I can’t remember the last one who fit all these criteria – but ideal for me to read about. He’s also the first Haldiim – a nonwhite ethnic minority – to attend the Sagrada Academy, an all-male quasi-military quasi-nobility training centre, by right of being an engineering prodigy, and because he has a cheerfully if cautiously atheistic attitude to the dominant Cadeleonian religion, he ends up sharing a room with Javier Tornesal, the only surviving heir of a cursed Dukedom, and apparently a soulless being with special powers. What ensues is two books of action, world-building, romance (complicated by the Cadeleonian objection to homosexuality), culture conflicts and blends of magic and technology, and the first secondary world fantasy I’ve really enjoyed for ages.

( More details, mostly vague but a few spoilers. )

Wicked Gentlemen. Two linked novellas in a semi-Victorian fantasy world, the first from the point of view of Belimai Sykes, a Prodigial – descended from demons, addicted to drugs, available for hire (as an investigator) and with a black past, and the second from William Harper’s point of view, a captain of the Inquisition who suppress the Prodigals, who also has a mysterious past and, in the opening novella, needs Belimai’s help. Complicating matters again is their relationship, which starts off as sexual and then develops emotionally, neither of which are particularly well tolerated by their worlds.

( More specific discussion. )

So, in summary, I really enjoyed Lord of the White Hell - Wicked Gentlemen less so, but it was written earlier, and so now I really want to see what she does next...

I am now optimistically on twitter as accanz, where I am noting down whatever I've read in the hope that this will make me catch up more quickly. Am currently doing long reviews of Cryoburn, the Jan Wong books and Ginn Hale; in the meantime, some briefer ones.

Elizabeth Hand, Ilyria. Madeleine and her cousin Rogan share identical twin fathers and a lifelong bond that becomes sexual in their early teens; the youngest members of a large, sprawling family with a famous actress for a great-grandmother, they meet in secret in the attic of one of her old houses, where they find a toy theatre that has its own inexplicable lighting and scenery. But tensions are developing between the two of them, from their families and themselves, and their involvement in the school production of Twelfth Night becomes both a way out and a breaking point.

( Vaguely spoilery discussion. )

Lisa Lutz, The Spellman files. Isabel is the black sheep daughter of a family of private investigators. When she wants out of the family business (after a series of doomed relationships), she's given one last case to solve... Light-hearted, and I like the family dynamic, but the case is both obvious and clumsy, and the family jeopardy situation (and its resolution) doesn't quite fit with the rest.

Jane Chetwynd, Cloud Farm. Professor of public health medicine buys a derelict farmhouse and a huge section; discovers personal meaning in renovating both, gives up job, acquires probable girlfriend (nothing stated, so it's entirely possible that a strange woman moves into a one-bedroom house with her for entirely platonic reasons). Doesn't quite lift off - it's interesting in parts, but I think the author knows that it's something that is likely to mean far more to her than to the reader. And somewhere I read a chunk of a book about gorse as a shelter crop on the same part of the country, which was interesting and is now bugging me as to what it was from.

Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like. Book of the blog - similarly mostly mildly amusing, occasionally very spot-on. I am 30% white mainly because I am not American and don't like coffee, but it is talking about a fairly specific experience. Most useful for pointing out the invisible-by-privilege cultural expectations.

Jeanette Walls, The glass castle. Dysfunctional family memoir. Does a great job of showing the loyalty and expectations that can exist within a family that really isn't serving most of its members' needs, and the description of how Jeanette tries to take over and run the family while her mother's away (an attempt completely undermined by her father) is just heart-breaking. Well written, but I probably won't be charging out to re-read it.

Two people with the same name tell alternating chapters of an intersecting story; both male (and white), one straight and determined not to care (but doing so despite himself), one gay (and closeted) and hating himself.

( Moderately detailed discussion, hopefully still vague enough if you haven't read it. )

I've been following much of the discussion about race and fandom that's been going on, through various iterations (and some appalling demonstrations of privilege), and so this does tend to come through in my reviews. I don't think I would have been wild about this book before that - it's the second Andre Norton ever published, and while it's an all right, if obvious, adventure story from a plot point of view, with occasional striking imagery, I really prefer her sf - but afterwards it's very difficult to see it as anything but problematic.

( Ralestone Luck, Andre Norton. )

Anyway. I should go re-read some of her sf books after this, which are much better.

One of the plays I’ve seen this year was Homeland, a New Zealand drama that does an excellent job of exactly recreating a particular place and person – an old man on a farm, no longer coping but unwilling to admit it, and his family’s (local son & daughter-in-law, big city daughter with son-in-law and granddaughter) attempt to move him into residential care. The setting was amazingly familiar, the dialogue realistic, the characters recognisable, and all in all it was like spending two hours watching the equivalent period of someone else’s life – which is unfortunately not at all what I go to the theatre for. What I like about drama is that it’s shaped and selected; that it contrives to create truth and realism from the obvious artificiality of a stage, that the dialogue is sharp and polished, that the characters are unexpected and still believable; in short, what I like about drama is that it’s theatrical.

So. I recently re-read Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which is one of my favourite plays and which in no way suffers from any lack of theatricality.( Angels in America. )

E.W. Hildick, Jim Starling Goes to Town (re-read).

Pamela Brown, Blue Door Venture (re-read).

Both of these are books in which a group of British youngsters (with other adventures chronicled in earlier books in the series) are defrauded by flashy London conmen, and through their own efforts track down the men responsible and have their resourcefulness rewarded. Having said that, there are some key differences. Blue Door Venture was published in 1949, and the children in it, although described as such, are old enough to be working in their theatre full-time, having completed theatrical training; the town they live in is Fenchester, which I presume is somewhere near Cambridge (I haven’t got the other books handy to check for cross-references, but somewhere in the Home Counties), and their interactions with their remarkably tolerant parents as well as with the locals in Cornwall place them clearly in the middle class. Jim Starling, however, and his Last Apple Gang, are from 1963 and from Smogbury, a mill town two hundred miles north of London, younger (still at school), and definitely working class.

( The basic plots, however, run along very similar lines. )

Two more for 50books_poc, cross-posted.

Isabel Waiti-Mulholland, Inna Furey. The bit at the back of the book lists four more books in this series, but I’ve never seen any of them (this book came out in 2007) and Google suggests that it’s not just me. Which is a shame, because this book is largely set-up, and I’d like to know where the author was going with it.

A new, strange, girl – Inna Furey – starts at Leanne’s school. When Leanne meets Inna late one night in the reserve outside her house, she discovers Inna’s secret – she can transform into a giant bird (Haast’s eagle, the largest known raptor – now extinct). But, when she changes, she isn’t herself anymore, and whatever she transforms into is taking over more and more often…

( Isabel Waiti-Mulholland, Inna Furey. )

Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque. Two women working as prostitutes in Tokyo are murdered. Years earlier, they attended the same exclusive high school, along with the first, unnamed narrator, the older sister of one of those murdered (Yuriko). Yuriko was abnormally beautiful – a beauty described as grotesque – and the subsequent distortions this created for her and her sister reverberate through their lives.

( Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque. )

Minus the one I've left at work, and the one I still haven't read - the rest have now gone back.

Jose Carlos Somoza, Zig Zag.
This is a quantum physics serial killer novel in which the murders are committed via string theory, and like the other two of Somoza’s novels in translation that I’ve read it deserves a significant amount of credit just for the sheer audacity of the idea. I liked it more than The Art of Murder and less than The Athenian Murders, and I think my preferences reflect what he ends up doing with the fascinating concepts that he comes up with. Zig Zag is atmospheric and vivid, to the extent that I actually stopped reading it at one point because it was late and I was by myself, and the science in it is intriguing; but the resolution didn’t go enough beyond the standards of the serial killer story to work for me.

( Jose Carlos Somoza, Zig Zag. )

Walter Tevis. The Hustler.
The Queen’s Gambit is one of my favourite books (admittedly this is a rather large category), and I’m also fond of pool, although without being particularly good at it. This is a beautifully constructed novel about Eddie Felson, a pool hustler who comes to Chicago to take on the legendary Minnesota Fats, and in the course of a night beats him – at first, and then throws it all away. And then he attempts to put himself back together, with the indifferent help of Sarah, an alcoholic and an Economics masters’ student, and Bert, a helpful man with connections and views about winners and losers.

( Walter Tevis, The Hustler. )

Hsu-Ming Teo, Love and Vertigo.
Grace Tay’s mother kills herself by jumping from her brother’s high-rise apartment in Singapore. Grace, who came to Sydney from her birth country of Malaysia with her family (originally Singapore Chinese) flies back to Singapore for the wake, and the unravelling of her own and her parents’ pasts.

( Hsu-Ming Teo, Love and Vertigo. )

Also, I am fiddling with entry format. Let me know if it bothers you.

I have moved into the new house and out of the old one, which sounds simple enough but I have 12 bruises on my left thigh alone, I found a hole in the floor of the old house (fortunately this is now the property manager's problem) and the new house is largely decorated in a nice repeating cardboard box motif. Regular reviews will resume eventually with the same erratic frequency as previous, but in the meantime here are the two Dick Francis books I read while unpacking the "F"s (I am now up to the end of "M", although I have done all the manga as well).

( Dick Francis, Knock Down, Proof. )