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May. 19th, 2015 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretOther recent reading
-X-Men: Dark Mirror by Marjorie Liu. X-Men novel, of all things. Picked up at a library book sale for cheap, otherwise there's no way I'd have been interested (Did you see Brad Torgersen's new post about how the Hugos have been neglecting to honor tie-in fiction?). It was strange to see the X-Men in novel form- Liu has access to kinds of interiority that you don't usually see in comics, but the form also seemed to impose an unwelcome realism on the story, which is about the X-team being bodyswapped with mental patients. I thought Liu's writing of Jubilee was the best part of the book, but I also liked her Scott and Jean and Logan, and I didn't like her Ororo or Rogue as much.
-Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone. Delightful, original secondary world urban fantasy in a world where mages are lawyers and accountants managing the debt obligations of an economy built on bartering soulstuff with deities and demons. The first book was probably a more pure intellectual thrill, with imaginative and well-plotted legal drama moving the plot forward at a constant clip. The second book integrates a lot of Aztec mythology in a way I found really thoughtful- presenting a pseudo-Aztec culture that has technologized and integrated with the rest of the world and has rejected human sacrifice, but is wrestling with the loss of cultural heritage that throwing off even something so repulsive to its moral sense can cause. An Aztec culture asking itself which parts of itself were and weren't tainted by their association with the old gods, and also asking itself how to justify the new cruelties of the capitalist society that it grew in place of its old traditions.
-Control Point by Myke Cole. Mutant SF with a military spin, the premise is that a terrified US government responded to an outbreak of powerful mutatations with regulation that conscripted all mutants it didn't kill. Our hero is a mutant who was supposed to be killed for having a mutation so dangerous even the military didn't want it, but... the military wanted it, so they faked his death, planted a remotely detonatable bomb in his chest, and assigned him to a special ops unit. This would have been a lot more interesting of a book if the hero had been more likeable, but he oscillated randomly between stupid and selfish over the course of the book, and never gave me a reason to particularly want him to survive or escape. What the book does have going for it is Cole's experience serving in Afghanistan, which clearly colors the book and makes it a fascinating artifact.
-Storm Front by Jim Butcher. First of the Dresden Files novels, toward the goal of reading Skin Game for Hugo voting. I didn't like it any more now than I did when I first read it when it first came out a decade ago. The mystery is tediously tropey, the characters are dull stereotypes, the jokes are rarely funny.
Books in process include... hah, I responded tomelannen's poll with "It's complicated." I'm reading Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Keith Roberts's Pavane, the new issue of Clarkesworld, Melville's Moby Dick, and in some manner of longer term reading wherein I consider myself to be readng them even though I haven't picked any of them up in at least a year, Bolano's 2666, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake
-X-Men: Dark Mirror by Marjorie Liu. X-Men novel, of all things. Picked up at a library book sale for cheap, otherwise there's no way I'd have been interested (Did you see Brad Torgersen's new post about how the Hugos have been neglecting to honor tie-in fiction?). It was strange to see the X-Men in novel form- Liu has access to kinds of interiority that you don't usually see in comics, but the form also seemed to impose an unwelcome realism on the story, which is about the X-team being bodyswapped with mental patients. I thought Liu's writing of Jubilee was the best part of the book, but I also liked her Scott and Jean and Logan, and I didn't like her Ororo or Rogue as much.
-Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone. Delightful, original secondary world urban fantasy in a world where mages are lawyers and accountants managing the debt obligations of an economy built on bartering soulstuff with deities and demons. The first book was probably a more pure intellectual thrill, with imaginative and well-plotted legal drama moving the plot forward at a constant clip. The second book integrates a lot of Aztec mythology in a way I found really thoughtful- presenting a pseudo-Aztec culture that has technologized and integrated with the rest of the world and has rejected human sacrifice, but is wrestling with the loss of cultural heritage that throwing off even something so repulsive to its moral sense can cause. An Aztec culture asking itself which parts of itself were and weren't tainted by their association with the old gods, and also asking itself how to justify the new cruelties of the capitalist society that it grew in place of its old traditions.
-Control Point by Myke Cole. Mutant SF with a military spin, the premise is that a terrified US government responded to an outbreak of powerful mutatations with regulation that conscripted all mutants it didn't kill. Our hero is a mutant who was supposed to be killed for having a mutation so dangerous even the military didn't want it, but... the military wanted it, so they faked his death, planted a remotely detonatable bomb in his chest, and assigned him to a special ops unit. This would have been a lot more interesting of a book if the hero had been more likeable, but he oscillated randomly between stupid and selfish over the course of the book, and never gave me a reason to particularly want him to survive or escape. What the book does have going for it is Cole's experience serving in Afghanistan, which clearly colors the book and makes it a fascinating artifact.
-Storm Front by Jim Butcher. First of the Dresden Files novels, toward the goal of reading Skin Game for Hugo voting. I didn't like it any more now than I did when I first read it when it first came out a decade ago. The mystery is tediously tropey, the characters are dull stereotypes, the jokes are rarely funny.
Books in process include... hah, I responded to
melannen's poll with "It's complicated." I'm reading Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Keith Roberts's Pavane, the new issue of Clarkesworld, Melville's Moby Dick, and in some manner of longer term reading wherein I consider myself to be readng them even though I haven't picked any of them up in at least a year, Bolano's 2666, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake