(no subject)

[seekingferret]

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

I didn't really know what to make of this book, but I felt a strong commitment to finishing it because of that. If I am committed to the idea of the glorious failure, that has to mean that sometimes I read books that don't quite work. This one was playing with ideas about cloning and consciousness, and throw in some things about post-human gender and about AI and war and trauma and unhealthy love and it's kind of a lot, and I found it overwhelming and hard to wrap my head around. But the cherry on top was the language. Khaw strains the outer limits of a thesaurus for words to use that are just on the boundary of being words. They verb nouns, they noun adjectives, and they outdo the Word of the Day calendar at every turn. I have a pretty decent vocabulary and Khaw caught me off guard again and again. I can imagine it working for some people but I mostly found it annoying.


The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman

I can't quite remember why I picked it up, but this was cute. It's that kind of romance novel that's not really a romance novel, because the characters have enough else going on their life that the romance just becomes another plot thread, and not necessarily the A plot. In the opening chapters, Nina learns that her deadbeat father, whose identity she never knew, was a millionaire lawyer who just passed away, and she finds out that she has a complicated multigenerational family that if she's willing to put some work in, will welcome her. And those push-pull impulses between bookishness and solitude against family and friendship and human connection provide the grist for drama that covers all sorts of different kinds of relationship.

New York Dead by Stuart Woods

Orchid Blues by Stuart Woods

Dirt by Stuart Woods

I kind of was hoping that the answer was that the early books in the series were better and then as he got into the 40s and 50s, Woods just started pumping out crap, but no, this series is offensive and bad from the getgo. New York Dead is wildly homophobic and transphobic for no particular reason. Of the four Stuart Woods books I've read, two had murderous bisexuals killing former lovers they were having threesomes with. And actually I didn't finish Dirt because life is short, so it could be more.

And from the get-go with New York Dead, the books are badly plotted, with a strong tendency to just drift until Woods felt like adding another plot point.

Orchid Blues. the one Woods book I read that doesn't star (though it does feature) Stone Barrington, is marginally better than the others. It stars Holly Barker, the woman who later becomes President and Stone's lover, as a small town sheriff who gets involved in an investigation of a white supremacist conspiracy. There's surprisingly less weird sexism than you'd expect. There's not a lot of stereotyping or paternalism, or any of the classic hallmarks of lazy sexism. Its problem is that it's just not that compelling a book. Oh, well, never need to read another Woods novel and I've already read way more than I should've.

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

The Khaw really was a LOT. I've generally liked their shorter work much better than the novel -- but perhaps the next one will be more to that standard!