Books read, late August

[mrissa]

Gretel Ehrlich, The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold. A great August book in some ways -- she is lyrical about ice and snow in ways that I desperately need around the time the State Fair starts up. But I really think that anyone who is going to be critical of the technological nature of our culture needs to engage with why we do it and what they're doing within it. I am not generally a great enthusiast for rants about A Simpler Time and The Rhythms of Nature, knowing what they mean about, oh, say, deaths in childbirth and infant mortality. I am even less an enthusiast about such rants coming from someone blithely taking reliable contraception and lifesaving hospital care for granted. If you want to change people's minds and behavior about the environment, grappling honestly with what makes them make the choices they do is going to be necessary. I don't see that in Ehrlich.

Nicola Griffith, Always. Ahhhh. Aud Torvingen. I love these books so much. I may have loved this one as much as The Blue Place. Almost as much, at least. I can't even say why. They short-circuit the saying-why portion of my brain. Tell you what: you read them and you say why, and I'll nod enthusiastically.

John Scalzi (scalzi), The Android's Dream. This is the first non-OMW-universe thing I've read of Scalzi's. I didn't like it as well as the OMW stuff: the pacing didn't do as much for me, and the female characters seemed -- well, it started out with the female characters seeming pretty much nonexistent. So that didn't thrill my soul. There were some eventually, but it still felt unbalanced to me. (Also I discovered that when there is a character who is gender-not-specified in the book, my brain makes them gender-not-specified in personal presentation as well, rather than picking that they "must" be one or the other. The only way I could really parse Sam's gender being none of my business was that Sam was the sort of person who considered Sam's gender none of my business. Which is fine by me. It just doesn't help with the general feeling that there were an awfully lot of men per unit women in this book, being scored as "other.")

Will Shetterly (willshetterly), The Gospel of the Knife. You don't like the second-person. You find that it makes you feel like you're reading a choose-your-own-adventure, and that you have a certain tendency to set your jaw and mutter, "No, I don't!" at various sentences. You understand why someone else might choose this -- for this book in particular -- and you eventually get the jaw-setting part of the brain to shut up and let you read. But you are still jarred by the second person as you're reading, and you hope that there is no equally compelling reason for his next book to be done this way. The fact that you heard Will say that it started semi-autobiographical and diverged from there also makes you distrust the structure of the book: some things that are semi-autobiographical have things in the book for the unfortunate and insufficient reason that they really happened that way. On that point, you find you should have trusted Will from the beginning, and the structure does come around.

Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918. Sked seems to think that the worst sin a volume of nonfictional history can commit is narrative. So I was fighting with this book in my head all the way through, not just about his interpretation of some parts of the late Habsburgs but also about the way he thought his book should be structured. Possibly this is a better book for someone less ornery. They shouldn't be too hard to find.

Sherwood Smith (sartorias), The Fox. Long-awaited sequel to Inda. Where by "long" I mean "ten months." It felt like a long time. This book will make no sense without Inda, but if you liked Inda, I'm pretty sure you'll love this one. I thought it was an absolutely solid middle book, and I can't wait for the next.

I'm going to try to finish truepenny's The Mirador before markgritter, missista, and I head down to Omaha, so I don't have to haul a mostly-finished book in my bag. Next time I report in on reading, it'll all be travel reading. Eeee.

Comments

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Sked seems to think that the worst sin a volume of nonfictional history can commit is narrative.

I've encountered way too many history books like this, and I suspect this is the main reason I have trouble getting anyone else to appreciate the need to know more about history.

I find the second person so uncomfortable that I don't even write my interactive-fiction experiments in it. For the three or four projects I've begun in the Ariadne engine, I've picked a protagonist character and framed it so that at each junction, it's as if she's asking the reader, "Okay, what should I do next?" This also allows her to do things occasionally the reader might (or might not) approve of, and while it may somewhat lessen the appeal as a GAME, I think it greatly improves the whole as a STORY.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I like all of Scalzi's other books far more than I like TAD. The ambiguity of Sam truly annoyed me, possibly to the point of hate. The book suffered from the lack of female characters.

And you know, I got tired of reading F this and F that. It was boring.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

But I really think that anyone who is going to be critical of the technological nature of our culture needs to engage with why we do it and what they're doing within it.

In particular, I think that some of them need to be grappling honestly with the fact that, in the service of illustrating this criticism, they are travelling from one end of the earth to another on an airplane. I'm not saying that's necessarily a big fat wrong, but I believe it's a problem to consider seriously. That's what set my teeth against the book. (http://www.sculpin.com/journal/2005/08/08/the-future-of-ice/)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

YES. Even if she lives in a tent all winter, the carbon footprint from her jetting about is really pretty significant. This isn't about "other people" and the stupid things they do!

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I recently finishes "Old Man's War" and, on the plus side, found it quite a page-turner. The dialog was far snappier than realistic, but fun for that reason.

And yet- it left a bad taste in my mouth. Almost literally, which I'll get to. For one thing- their intervention to break a strike was done so matter-of-factly as to not even consider that strike-breaking is, at best, a somewhat dubious enterprise. Why were they striking? Who called in the troops, and why- was it for the sake of increased profit, as has tended to be the case historically? And to my mind, making the strikers Bad Guys who killed one of Our Hero's friends unpleasantly did not really make a good substitute for these issues not even occurring to anyone.

And now, the taste. In particular, the taste of humans. I find it incredibly hard to believe that we would, as a species, not only be edible and nutritious but delectable by so many other species who evolved on very different planets and presumably- and I would like to see at least an argument if this is not the case- with very different biochemistries. It's not like it takes much to make something indigestible- look at Olestra. Too, I fail to share the horror of these aliens farming humans for meat, particularly by those who make quite a big deal about their love for bacon, ham, and sausage, just for starters. Myopic, at best. I can certainly see why we wouldn't like it, approve of it, and would try to prevent it- but it's not OMG!!!1!!! Teh H0RR0RZ!!1!!!! -at least in my view as a non-vegetarian.

I had some other quibbles, but those were the ones that really put me off. Well, and the female presence- it just has an off-note to me, somehow, and I can't put my finger on why.

I may read the next one, because it was a good page-turner- but the unexamined and reactionary politics, as well as the lack of even a gesture toward hard science in the food area, put me off.

[aszanoni.livejournal.com]

Mrrr. You will find more bad taste in sequel, I think. I could be wrong; I read it as an ARC.

I do agree about the page-turning quality, though. I found myself gnashing my teeth a lot during the sequel, and I don't remember doing that during OMW.

I have been told that the reason I could enjoy OMW was because I was not a Heinlein fan. I found it an interesting and not unlikely premise. :>

- Chica

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I'm a Heinlein fan who enjoyed OMW. This may be because I'm just somebody who likes books, and cares fuckall for deconstructing the politics behind them.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I loved Dogland so much, and was delighted to discover Gospel of the Knife, only to discover that so far, I find it more irritating than anything else. Part of it seems to be finding the main character an obnoxious little shit. Part of it is the second person.

Mostly, I think it's that Dogland felt *complete* to me.