books read, late September
Oct. 1st, 2009 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaJoan Aiken, The Serial Garden. This is a collection of short stories for children and adults, all centered around a family to whom rather matter-of-fact magic happens. I found them utterly charming. At this point I'd rank them very highly amidst Aiken's other work. Very much recommended.
Renee Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. For such an interesting book, this wasn't very well-written; or else for such a badly written book, it was very interesting. I think mostly I found the subject matter inherently interesting. Bergland seems to have written for a reader who was not paying attention. I was not that reader. So the favorite bits of trivia that got repeated several times over the course of the book were fairly noticeable as such. I know sometimes writers find shiny bits we want to display to the other birds, but I wish this had been more closely edited.
Boy Scouts of America, Order of the Arrow Handbook. Grandpa's. This is the book of Grandpa's I most wish I had read before he died, because now I have questions about his personal experience of it. It's a 1961 book, so it's something he got well after joining the Order of the Arrow as a boy, and it's fascinating to me to see how this book is pitched: it's explicitly about inculcating anti-totalitarian attitudes in boys who do not remember WWII, for men who do. Some of the assumptions about manliness and about a substantially white boys' organization to Native American/First Nations cultures are extremely dated, but this book, at least, was the good kind of dated; among other things, it encouraged boys to do research into tribal customs in their own region and not accept a homogenized national picture of North America before European arrival. (There were also phrases that have shifted meaning somewhat in the 48 years since this book's publication; I was startled to read that many chapters of the Order of the Arrow had "dance teams," as for me "dance team" meant essentially "pom-pom squad," so I had to go look and see what they meant instead, since I had a hunch that was not it. What they mean is narrative dance. Did my grandpa do narrative dance? He might have. I really don't know. I'd kind of like to know, and I'd kind of like to know what stories he was part of telling if he did.)
Steven Brust (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skzbrust), Iorich. Discussed elsewhere.
Christopher Chant, The Zeppelin: the History of German Airships from 1900 to 1937. Grandpa's. A largely pictorial history, although it was very concerned with which models of engine went on which models of Zeppelin. Who doesn't like to look at pictures of Zeppelins? Also their name means Stork! That's pretty awesome.
W.E.B. Griffin, The Corps: Semper Fi. Grandpa's. I liked this better than the other Griffin book I've read so far, because the spies in it did actual spying, which I favor. It traced a perfectly good enlisted man becoming an officer, but some things can't be helped, I suppose. I will be interested to read the rest of this series. I suspect this Pearl Harbor incident is going to cause them some trouble. Stay tuned to see whether it does.
Robert A. Holland, The Mississippi River in Maps and Views: From Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. Like it says on the label. It started with some very early Spanish and French maps that were, as many maps of their era, heavier on concept than on geography. "Over here somewhere there's a river, and we kind of think it goes like this," sorts of things. "We are used to drawing the Mediterranean," some of them seem to say, "and surely the Caribbean cannot be much different really." I am so fond of my river.
Nancy Kress, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. Kress wrote one of the books that has consistently remained in my "top five short story collections ever" list a decade now, Aliens of Earth. It's really unfair of me to read Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and think, "That's no Aliens of Earth," because really, nothing is. I found most of the stories entertaining, albeit with a whiff of You Damn Kids Get Off My Lawn about some of them. I still think Kress is one of the most worthwhile short story writers working in the field today. But if you're only going to read one of her collections, this shouldn't be it.
Lois Lowry, The Willoughbys. Sort of along the lines of Lemony Snicket: horrible things happen to a bunch of children, and they turn out all right mostly. This read to me like a book being written for adults under the guise of being written for children, with all sorts of nudging about more famous children's books. I hoped to be charmed, and was not.
Elizabeth Moon, Once a Hero. Follows on the Heris Serrano trilogy but with a new main character working through her past issues and her present attempts to avoid explosive decompression, slavery to evil empires, and other nasty fates. Not deep but fun. I suspect there is more than one young person out there who needs to hear the things about their family of origin this book will say.
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker. Now here is where I was charmed, in that batch of YAs from the library. Sometimes what you need is a straight-up quest story, with fantastical beasts and plants in, and this was that, a lovely trek through a jungle of great dangers, in which the young heroine finds more inner resources than she thought she had. Is that new? Of course it's not new. It's been done so many times because it's worth doing so many times, and because it's worth doing well, and this time is done well.
Philip Reeve, Larklight. I don't think of myself as cranky about steampunk. But certainly I am less delighted by it than many people. This was another one that read to me like the grown-ups winking at each other over the kids' heads, and being a grown-up who catches the references didn't actually improve the experience for me. It had a few moments with Fabulous Aliens, but I was not won over.
Red Stangland, Ole and Lena #5. Grandpa's. Uff da, you can get to some really bad jokes if you put out five of these things. Even though they're not very long. But I remember Grandpa telling some of these.
Donald Tuzin, The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. This is what happens when anthropologists get too attached to the culture they're studying. It was an entire book of "but--but--I liked it the way it was!" And sometimes there were even halfway decent reasons to like it the way it was. Sometimes. But.
Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Station. Grandpa's. This book was very taken with its own gritty, unflinching realism. I was not. Nor was I taken with its difficulties treating women and people of color as, y'know, people rather than a special category. The dialog had that "but I wrote down what they actually said!" problem (Wambaugh himself was a police officer in Southern California). Also, Ilya is by default a man's name. This is like naming your bosomy, sexy, American female prostitute character Mike because you heard Americans were often named Mike: you can do it, but someone should notice that there's something a little odd about it.
Renee Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. For such an interesting book, this wasn't very well-written; or else for such a badly written book, it was very interesting. I think mostly I found the subject matter inherently interesting. Bergland seems to have written for a reader who was not paying attention. I was not that reader. So the favorite bits of trivia that got repeated several times over the course of the book were fairly noticeable as such. I know sometimes writers find shiny bits we want to display to the other birds, but I wish this had been more closely edited.
Boy Scouts of America, Order of the Arrow Handbook. Grandpa's. This is the book of Grandpa's I most wish I had read before he died, because now I have questions about his personal experience of it. It's a 1961 book, so it's something he got well after joining the Order of the Arrow as a boy, and it's fascinating to me to see how this book is pitched: it's explicitly about inculcating anti-totalitarian attitudes in boys who do not remember WWII, for men who do. Some of the assumptions about manliness and about a substantially white boys' organization to Native American/First Nations cultures are extremely dated, but this book, at least, was the good kind of dated; among other things, it encouraged boys to do research into tribal customs in their own region and not accept a homogenized national picture of North America before European arrival. (There were also phrases that have shifted meaning somewhat in the 48 years since this book's publication; I was startled to read that many chapters of the Order of the Arrow had "dance teams," as for me "dance team" meant essentially "pom-pom squad," so I had to go look and see what they meant instead, since I had a hunch that was not it. What they mean is narrative dance. Did my grandpa do narrative dance? He might have. I really don't know. I'd kind of like to know, and I'd kind of like to know what stories he was part of telling if he did.)
Steven Brust (
skzbrust), Iorich. Discussed elsewhere.Christopher Chant, The Zeppelin: the History of German Airships from 1900 to 1937. Grandpa's. A largely pictorial history, although it was very concerned with which models of engine went on which models of Zeppelin. Who doesn't like to look at pictures of Zeppelins? Also their name means Stork! That's pretty awesome.
W.E.B. Griffin, The Corps: Semper Fi. Grandpa's. I liked this better than the other Griffin book I've read so far, because the spies in it did actual spying, which I favor. It traced a perfectly good enlisted man becoming an officer, but some things can't be helped, I suppose. I will be interested to read the rest of this series. I suspect this Pearl Harbor incident is going to cause them some trouble. Stay tuned to see whether it does.
Robert A. Holland, The Mississippi River in Maps and Views: From Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. Like it says on the label. It started with some very early Spanish and French maps that were, as many maps of their era, heavier on concept than on geography. "Over here somewhere there's a river, and we kind of think it goes like this," sorts of things. "We are used to drawing the Mediterranean," some of them seem to say, "and surely the Caribbean cannot be much different really." I am so fond of my river.
Nancy Kress, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. Kress wrote one of the books that has consistently remained in my "top five short story collections ever" list a decade now, Aliens of Earth. It's really unfair of me to read Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and think, "That's no Aliens of Earth," because really, nothing is. I found most of the stories entertaining, albeit with a whiff of You Damn Kids Get Off My Lawn about some of them. I still think Kress is one of the most worthwhile short story writers working in the field today. But if you're only going to read one of her collections, this shouldn't be it.
Lois Lowry, The Willoughbys. Sort of along the lines of Lemony Snicket: horrible things happen to a bunch of children, and they turn out all right mostly. This read to me like a book being written for adults under the guise of being written for children, with all sorts of nudging about more famous children's books. I hoped to be charmed, and was not.
Elizabeth Moon, Once a Hero. Follows on the Heris Serrano trilogy but with a new main character working through her past issues and her present attempts to avoid explosive decompression, slavery to evil empires, and other nasty fates. Not deep but fun. I suspect there is more than one young person out there who needs to hear the things about their family of origin this book will say.
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker. Now here is where I was charmed, in that batch of YAs from the library. Sometimes what you need is a straight-up quest story, with fantastical beasts and plants in, and this was that, a lovely trek through a jungle of great dangers, in which the young heroine finds more inner resources than she thought she had. Is that new? Of course it's not new. It's been done so many times because it's worth doing so many times, and because it's worth doing well, and this time is done well.
Philip Reeve, Larklight. I don't think of myself as cranky about steampunk. But certainly I am less delighted by it than many people. This was another one that read to me like the grown-ups winking at each other over the kids' heads, and being a grown-up who catches the references didn't actually improve the experience for me. It had a few moments with Fabulous Aliens, but I was not won over.
Red Stangland, Ole and Lena #5. Grandpa's. Uff da, you can get to some really bad jokes if you put out five of these things. Even though they're not very long. But I remember Grandpa telling some of these.
Donald Tuzin, The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. This is what happens when anthropologists get too attached to the culture they're studying. It was an entire book of "but--but--I liked it the way it was!" And sometimes there were even halfway decent reasons to like it the way it was. Sometimes. But.
Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Station. Grandpa's. This book was very taken with its own gritty, unflinching realism. I was not. Nor was I taken with its difficulties treating women and people of color as, y'know, people rather than a special category. The dialog had that "but I wrote down what they actually said!" problem (Wambaugh himself was a police officer in Southern California). Also, Ilya is by default a man's name. This is like naming your bosomy, sexy, American female prostitute character Mike because you heard Americans were often named Mike: you can do it, but someone should notice that there's something a little odd about it.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 01:21 pm (UTC)Boredom came from paper thin worldbuilding, potential for conflict set up but never followed through, and knowing just about every plot development before it happened. There were no surprises for me, nothing to pull me through to the end of the book.
I've been telling friends that the books I couldn't finish all felt shallow to me and that is exactly what it was. Some of these books really disappointed me. They had so much potential, could have been so much richer and they settled for the bare minimum surface.
Kids are smarter than that. I'm smarter than that. The books I gave up on didn't even try.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 04:03 pm (UTC)The issue I have is that YA is constantly held up to me as being superior in terms of storytelling and cool stuff. I hear over and over, from all kinds of places, that YA is where all the best and most innovative fantasy is at these days. I've had people tell me that this or that YA book was the best book written in the last ten years, by anyone, adult or YA author.
And I'm not seeing it. I keep looking, I keep trying more books, but I'm not seeing what others see.
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Date: 2009-10-02 04:07 pm (UTC)And I sympathize with you not liking YA as much as a lot of folks, because I don't like paranormal romance as much as a lot of folks. I get what it's aiming for, but it doesn't do that for me. And I know it does do that for its big fans. So analogy is our friend.
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Date: 2009-10-02 01:33 am (UTC)Ahem. Sorry.
P.
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Date: 2009-10-02 02:10 am (UTC)(Also, just yesterday I read an interview (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6571179.html) with DWJ in which she says (at the very end) "sooner or later is that most of my books come true eventually ... though you never know which bit is actually going to come true." Apparently this is a true bit.)
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Date: 2009-10-02 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 03:57 pm (UTC)I think zeppelins are particularly appropriate because of the alternate-worlds business; he'll have been somewhere where they flourish more than here.
P.
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Date: 2009-10-02 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 01:37 am (UTC)I also am starting to have thoughts about YA that is not actually written for young adults, but for other adults. I am not sure there's anything wrong with that. I am wondering if it is filling a need on the part of the author to write a tightly plotted narrative that is less than 75,000 pages and lets them relive their high school years, and a need in the reader for same. I don't want to start naming names, but I am seeing quite a lot of YA books coming out that I can't actually imagine the YA audience being interested in (although I haven't read them yet, so I could be wrong). And since I am a parent of a representative of that audience, I feel like I have a lens, there. There is this whole other category of YA that my son reads, but I never see people enthusing about it on blogs and such because the authors aren't bloggers and aren't personal friends with people in the genre, etc. Just once I'd like to see people excited about the new Eoian Colfer or Brandon Mull or something.
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Date: 2009-10-02 05:32 am (UTC)I'm just wondering what people are going to do with all the mechanical bits and goggles and bobbles once it's run its course. I like the aesthetic of it for now (and the "recycle old stuff"-type principle is timely!) but ... it is going to die, and then what about all that stuff?
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Date: 2009-10-02 11:46 am (UTC)Or it'll get passed down to little kids as dress-up, and there'll be Steampunk Day at grade schools the way there was Hippie Day when I was a kid.
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Date: 2009-10-02 05:24 pm (UTC)OK, THAT is the best possible solution, here.
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Date: 2009-10-02 11:45 am (UTC)When Shel Silverstein wrote Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, nobody tried to treat it as a children's book even though it had the external form of one. Would that this happened more often. I certainly don't have a problem with books referring briefly to things most of the kids won't get the first time through--but briefly, for heaven's sake. The more you wink and nudge and snicker over the child's head, the less I like it.
I'm glad that the boom in YA is putting books for broad age ranges into more hands than they might otherwise reach--
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Date: 2009-10-02 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 03:12 pm (UTC)Part of the reason I think this is that I was talking to an agent a few years back, with whom I did not end up becoming a client. She suggested that I rewrite the adult novel I'd sent her as a YA, knocking ten years off the main character's age. She did not, she told me, rep YA, but she heard there was a lot of money in it. I was fairly convinced that the characterization would suffer to the point of being a book I didn't want to write if I did that, and I was not at all impressed with the idea that someone who didn't rep a genre had a set of very shallow suggestions for how to make a book fit that genre; it sounded a lot like, "Step 3: Profit!" to me. But it makes me wonder how many other people who didn't work in YA or read widely in it have said, "Cash cow! Hurrah!" in the last few years.
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Date: 2009-10-02 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 01:59 am (UTC)I have not heard of this AIken collection. It sounds marvelous. Is it still in print?
I am currently on the second book in Sherwood Smith's series. I liked Inda, but I like The Fox even more. I don't know when I started to be able to read nautical, but I keep thinking how much more this is like I wanted another, less liked, nautically themed fantasy to be.
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Date: 2009-10-02 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 11:47 am (UTC)Which to me was the wrong amount of ironic in both directions.
I know when I started to be able to read nautical: 1989. Yay, The Fox!
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Date: 2009-10-02 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 12:25 pm (UTC)I don't have the new Small Beer Serial Garden because I have all the stories but two in old Puffin paperbacks. I keep thinking I should get it just to be encouraging.
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Date: 2009-10-02 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-02 04:21 pm (UTC)I may not teach it again, though. I found it -- even the first time I read it -- to be at times entertaining, but I wanted more. Depth, I think they call it.
Are there direct allusions to _The Secret Garden_ in _The Serial Garden_?
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Date: 2009-10-02 04:24 pm (UTC)I don't recall any allusions to The Secret Garden, but I commend it to your attention anyway; I think you'd like it.
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Date: 2009-10-02 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-03 09:47 pm (UTC)Efficient, devastating, perfect.
Ole and Lena jokes... Uff da, indeed (I knew my law school roommate had spent a lot of time with me when we were touring an apartment for rent, and I heard her inhale behind me and say, "Uff da." She is from New Jersey, and of Welsh extraction).
no subject
Date: 2009-10-04 02:38 am (UTC)