cyphomandra

Just finished:

Experimental Film, Gemma Files. Lois Cairns is a film critic/lecturer suddenly without a job, who in an otherwise uninspiring short film sees a sample taken from much older footage; a glimpse of a field in harsh sunlight, people working in it, and a woman in a dazzling white veil with a sword. She becomes obsessed with this, and the two stories behind it. One is of an unknown early amateur Canadian filmmaker, Mrs Whitcomb, who made the film, hid it, and disappeared under strange circumstances from a locked train carriage; the other is a Wendish tale about Lady Midday, who comes to workers in the fields and offers them dangerous choices. All of these stories run together, the echoes building on each other in unnerving near-similarity.

Lois is also a mother to Clark, who is autistic, and whom she loves with a difficult, believable tension that is only aggravated by her own mother (there is a deeply black comic moment where Lois forces her mother to look at an Asperger's Syndrome checklist and compare it with Lois' own childhood behaviours, to which her mother can only tell Lois; "It's bad enough as it is. Don't try to make this all about you.").

I liked this a lot; the evocative writing, the daylight horror of Lady Midday, the disintegration of Lois (and I loved that her husband Simon provides support and optimism in the way of someone who feels he's been through far worse). I did feel that Lois told me that things would get worse, be more terrible etc, at least three more times than I would have liked, and the human villain never quite feels real (also while I know nothing about Canadian film history and it all sounded good, I did have a slight internal lurch when the book hit an area I do know about and managed five errors of fact in as many sentences). I intend to read more by her.

Going back before that, towards the end of January I was booked for a much-anticipated five day guided bush walk, and then had a sore throat on the first morning and so couldn’t go, which is disappointing enough, but the associated drama (initially they said I could go, then changed their minds and left me in a small town with no transport, a cousin living vaguely locally offered to have me stay and then when I finally made it there changed his mind and said I’d have to sleep outside, the (rather expensive) guide company are refusing to give me even a partial credit towards another walk, etc, etc) was pretty crushing and I ended up reading a ridiculous number of books as a coping mechanism (all following were in January).

Wonder City Stories, Jude McLaughlin. Adventures in a city of superheroes. Started as a weblog and still rather bitsy; on the plus side, queer and trans representation, ethnic diversity, and I liked that we got a range of ages. Didn’t leave me with a desperate desire to read more but I’d give another work by the same author a go.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Lois Bujold. I’ve sort of been avoiding this since it came out (I even got an ARC) because initially I had formatting & compatibility problems and then - well, I wanted to see if I could forget how much I’d disliked Cryoburn and Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance and the answer is nope, not yet. Did this help? Not really. In it we get the revelation that Aral had a longstanding relationship with his aide (Jole) that Cordelia was perfectly happy with (I’m okay with that, although I note concern from other readers that Aral seems to have started the relationship before discussing it with Cordelia) and that, more dubiously from my pov, involved no concern over power dynamics.

For plot, Cordelia is planning to have at least six girls via uterine replicator and offers some “eggshells” to Jole to have his own kids via combining his and Aral’s DNA. The science is dubious on this - three party IVF does exist now, but it relies on 2 female parents (one provides mitochondrial DNA, one egg/DNA) and one male (sperm/DNA). I suppose by “eggshell” Cordelia means that mitochondria are also present, but having both sets of DNA from the male parent would, in current time, cause problems due to disorders of imprinting. However possibly future technology has fixed this; it also seems to have greatly enhanced the success rates of any IVF procedure from about 20% to a near inevitability. Cordelia & Jole also get together and there’s a bit of worldbuilding as we’re back on the same planet as Shards of Honor. Disappointingly, given how thoughtful Bujold was about childbearing in the early books, here she has adopted the Abbey/Chalet School approach of bestowing on her favourite characters large numbers of enchantingly named children. Miles and Ekaterin have six; Cordelia plans another six; Jole loses one eggshell and thinks dolefully about only being able to manage three. In accordance with my concerns about her previous books, favoured individuals - especially Cordelia - will always make the right decisions and organisations need to be overruled.

There are some nice moments - I actually liked the bit where Cordelia suggests to Jole that once he tells people about considering parenting he will see a new side of them, and this happens - but I think my fundamental split with this series happened when Bujold gave Miles the Auditor job and didn’t make him ever face up to the consequences of what he did in Memory. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed some of the books since then, and this irritated me less than Cryoburn, but it’s a pretty low bar.

The Searcher, Tana French. Cal Hooper, Chicago detective, quits the force and moves to a small town in Ireland, where he spends most of his time fixing up an abandoned house; then one of the neighbourhood kids asks him to find a missing sibling. It’s really about the journey rather than the destination; the town, the people, the weather, the shifting undercurrents that can suddenly suck you under that French does so well. The ending is a bit of a letdown - the suspect is obvious, the denouement reinforces beliefs rather than challenges them - but it was an enjoyable read.

The Girls of St Cyprians, Angela Brazil. Mildred is prone to laziness and day-dreaming but is also a talented musician; a competition between the five schools of the town (with contests in music, drama, arts etc) may be the spark she needs to really develop her talent. Quite a lot going on here - Mildred is also an orphan, whose rich relations invite her to stay with them and then expect that she will continue to do so, rather than with the poorer aunt & uncle who raised her, and there are tensions at school - and also a terribly racist bit with one of Mildred’s new-found cousins pretends to be a Māori relative to trick their brother (who fooled Mildred and a friend into each thinking the other was a suicidal medieval fantasist who needed humouring (they were both exploring a ruined castle)) which, argh, I was not expecting at all. Also the denouement has Mildred winning a musical scholarship to study in German for several years (as well as lots of musical Germans in her English town) and was published in 1914 so reads rather oddly in context.

The Lion and the Crow, Eli Easton. Beefy upstanding knight (the Lion) is trying to rescue his sister from her abusive noble husband, and ends up travelling with the beautiful, sneaky, youngest son (the Crow) of a bullying father, who is desperate to escape for his own reasons; forbidden passions ensue. This was much less irritating that Alex de Campi's The Scottish Boy, which is similar era (1200/1300s) and which I have some grumpy notes about somewhere, but I don't know, still not really hitting the spot for me.

Nerve, Dick Francis. Starts with a fellow jockey blowing his brains out at the races, and then follows Rob Finn, an aspiring steeplechaser and a disappointment to his musical family, as he uncovers a viciously successful plot to undermine jockeys and, in the process, becomes a target. I can see echoes of the more complex machinations in Come to Grief here; both works deal with the corrosion of character rumour can induce. Solid B grade.

Currently reading:

Beware of Dogs, Elizabeth Flann. Alix is a geologist who accepts an offer from a former neighbour to come to his family's holiday house; what he doesn't tell her until she turns up is that it's on a private island (he knows she is terrified of boats) and that he and the friends he brings with him intend to rape, torture, and murder her. The book starts with Alix hiding in a cramped cave with very limited supplies, having overheard some of the plans; she is experienced in the bush, but surviving - and escaping - is going to take her to the edge of her endurance.

I opened this tonight because it was due back in two days and I wanted to see what it was like, and now I only have fifty pages to go so yes, it's compelling, Alix is prickly and competent, and the set-up of survival vs landscape and human predators is great. It is a first novel and the backstory regarding Alix' family (cult-inclined missionaries who dragged Alix and her brother to Madagascar, then sent Alix away to a brutal boarding school in the UK) isn't always well-integrated, but I'm enjoying it a lot and hoping it can stick the ending.

Up next:

The last volume of Silver Spoon arrived at the library! And I do want to finish Death Sets Sail. I also appear to be reading three of MM Kaye's Death in ... books and a volume of her memoirs.

Abandoned:

Romancing Mr Bridgerton, Julia Quinn, in audiobook. I would have skimmed it in hardcopy but even yanking the speed up didn't help. Very, very, slow, and oddly unengaging. I still like Penelope but not as much, and Colin is very ordinary.

Dear Mrs Bird, AJ Pearce. WWII Britain; enthusiastic and naive Emmy dreams of being a war correspondent, but accidentally ends up becoming the assistant for a dour and puritannical agony aunt. I might go back to this.

Karis Walsh, Mounting Danger and Mounting Evidence

These are books 1&2 in the Mounted Police/Tacoma Mounted Patrol series, about (surprisingly) a mounted police unit in Tacoma; my library has yet to buy the third. I must admit that I was wistfully hoping for Dick Francis with lesbian leads. Not quite, and the first is closer (and a better book) than the second.

In the first, Rachel is ostracised by her fellow officers after turning a fellow cop in for domestic abuse; she is then put in charge of the mounted police unit after their captain is murdered in mysterious circumstances. In order to get everyone to work together as a team, she asks Cal, a professional polo player from an elite family, to help. This hits a lot of my favourite things - getting a struggling team to pull together, outcasts who need to overcome (unfair) prejudice, horse neepery - I like both leads and the relationship between them really sparks.

In the second, the upright hardass lieutenant Abby Hargrove from the first book is obsessed with atoning for her family's three generations of dirty cops, when she falls for a wetlands microbiologist, Kira, whose daughter is competing at a country fair that the mounted unit are patrolling. Abby has secretly given her old horse to Kira's daughter to make up for her brother's neglect of Kira's domestic abuse case (as in, Kira doesn't know it was from Abby, the horse being rather difficult to conceal). The crime plot in this is both obvious and jerky, the relationship less convincing (Rachel and Cal show up and have a sex scene before the two leads manage it, which doesn't help) , Abby herself far less confident than expected from her earlier appearance (or her job), and there is not nearly enough horse stuff. I stalled on this quite a bit and it's why I have yet to pick up the third myself, although I will check out the other Walsh books that the library does have (including Set the Stage).

I now have broadband and a car and, apparently, the vital piece of paper I need for such trivial matters as a salary is not more than 700 kilometres away from me, thus (almost) solving all my previously mentioned problems apart from my outstanding booklog. This post finishes off 2007 in books, and then I have a half-written best of post before launching myself into 2008, and also sorting out all my half-written manga posts. Oh man. This is not made any less challenging by the fact that, according to my records, somehow I have already read over 60 volumes of manga this year.

( Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman series - Homecoming, Dicey's Song, A Solitary Blue, The Runner, Come a Stranger, Sons From Afar, Seventeen Against the Dealer. )

I've seen a couple of memes recently about unread books. While I don't do so badly on the Library Thing one (I think I've read about 40) I have an entire box of unread books lurking by the door at the moment, in the hope that I'll actually pick one up on my way out the door. Given that Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is currently on top and I walk to work this is unlikely without more upper body strength, but I'll try and make a more conscious effort. I think part of it is the existential dread of Running Out of Books...

( Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom. )

( Michelle Tea, Rose of No Man's Land. )

( Green Rider, Kristen Britain. )

After 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. )

( Joan Druett, A Watery Grave. )

( Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood. )

Susan Palwick, Shelter.

Oh hell, it’s been too long since I read this. I really enjoyed it, although I'm still a bit unsure about the ending. An intelligent house offers refuge to a homeless man in the middle of a storm (a storm in which the house’s owner dies, having gone out to rescue his ex-wife), and the connections between these people and a few others spin out into the story. ( Shelter )

Robin Hobb, Renegade’s Magic. Third, and final book in the Soldier Son trilogy – a trilogy which does some interesting things but is also difficult, in many senses, and I do wonder what this has done to Hobb’s sales figures. I think she has enough goodwill from the Fitz books to survive one failure, but I’m not sure where she’ll go next.

( And “failure” is probably too strong a term. )

I've had too little time to look at the many fascinating entries and links IBARW has generated (maybe in another fortnight), but this has been sitting on my computer for over a month, and it seemed like an appropriate time to post it.

The second book in what is, for me, an intensely problematic duology. When I read the first book I wondered if I’d missed something, especially when I went hunting for reviews and none of them mentioned what I’d found – a massive, unbelievable hole at the heart of the book. Baffled, I put it aside, and hoped that the sequel – when it came out – would explain everything.

It doesn’t.

So. Both Dreamhunter books are set in an alternate version of New Zealand/Aotearoa, in the early 1900s; a version that is missing its North Island, but keeps all the rest of its geography, with a map on the frontispiece that is quite clearly the top of the South Island, where Nelson (the original capital) becomes Founderston, where the settlers arrived a few generations back, and Farewell Spit is So Long Spit, and Westport hasn’t even been renamed. Each corner of the map has a cameo inset with a different native creature: a tuatara, a kaka, a kiwi, and a fish (my species identification skills are not that good). But only the fish could be named in this book – because the other names are all Maori, the language (and the name) of the first settlers of Aotearoa – later called New Zealand. And, in Knox’s series, there are no Maori.

( Cut for problematic colonial mythology. )

The obligatory pre-release re-reads. I particularly wanted to re-read Half-Blood Prince, as I read it in the early hours of the release morning in a hotel bathroom in Manchester, which were probably not ideal circumstances, and this time I hope to be somewhere with more comfortable chairs and better lighting.

( Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. )

( Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. )

( Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. )

( Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. )

( Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. )

( Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. )

Really, I should just give up on entry titles. Two books with remarkably little to do with each other, both good. I have a few more books after this that I'm still thinking about, but I'm also working on my pre-July 21st Harry Potter series re-read.

I re-read this because of Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, and Dennis Burges’ Graves Gate, both of which feature Arthur Conan Doyles whom I like much less than this one. Dark, good and intriguing.( The Night Calls, David Pirie. )

A Fistful of Sky, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Gypsum is the middle child in a family of five growing up in California, a family where all the children, around puberty, go through transition and develop magical powers – except her. In addition, she’s overweight, plain, and uninterested in changing either of these states, something which her mother – beautiful and a little too fond of doing things for her children that are “for their own good” finds very difficult. But Gyp does transition, eventually, after her family have given up on her ever being other than ordinary – only to find that, like other people in the family who have transitioned later, she has one of the unkind powers, the power of curses. And if she doesn’t use it, the power will kill her.

( A Fistful of Sky, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. )

(as might be apparent, I'm catching up on a backlog. I also have scattered notes on various anime and manga that are currently awaiting some general organising principle that does not solely involve me going on about Full Metal Alchemist)

( Graves Gate, Dennis Burges. )

( The Necessary Beggar, Susan Palwick. )