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Thank you very much to everyone who sent me birthday wishes!
If you are so inclined, a lovely gift would be a review, long or just a few lines, of a book or some other thing (a manga! a burger!), whether wonderful or interesting or hilariously bad, on your own LJ/DW or in comments. One of my best birthday gifts ever was the year two people independently decided that the perfect gift would be a review of Crazy Beautiful. And, folks: late is okay!
If you are so inclined, a lovely gift would be a review, long or just a few lines, of a book or some other thing (a manga! a burger!), whether wonderful or interesting or hilariously bad, on your own LJ/DW or in comments. One of my best birthday gifts ever was the year two people independently decided that the perfect gift would be a review of Crazy Beautiful. And, folks: late is okay!
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Fletcher is not exactly the author -- she's more of an oral historian, who interviewed a whole bunch of experts and arranged their statements into this book. I can't say whether it's a good representation of crime scene investigation (although the two things I did know beforehand -- (1) put evidence like clothing with bodily fluids on it into a paper bag, not a plastic one and (2) crime labs are badly underfunded and have a horrible backlog of evidence to process -- are both present), but I was really impressed with it as oral history.
There's something really irreplaceable about the original, unedited words of people describing their own work. In this case all these experts are mostly very matter-of-fact about the gruesome things they see (which makes their emotional reactions more powerful) and also say a lot of completely hilarious things. I had to keep reading bits of it out loud to my boyfriend because he wanted to know why I kept snorting. This is not really what I was expecting from the subject matter! Anyway, I think you would like it the same way I did (if you haven't read it already, that is).
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The best thing I have seen recently that I will not review on my own LJ is an episode of the classic fifties television series Route 66. It's about two handsome proto-hippy best buds who spend their days tooling around on the open road, "searching for something indefinable" which might be meaning in their life, or which might be TV's first slash fandom, one or the other. One of them had a hard-knock life in Hell's Kitchen; he is the one who beats people up. One of them is an college kid who has only ONE THING LEFT after his dad died in debt, and that is his car. They get in their first fist-fight when people start talking disrespectfully about what might be under the car's hood. Nobody talks about his
girlcar that way!In the episode we saw, the town they visit has a Dark Secret! Because I saw the first six or so episodes of Supernatural, including Route 666, I kept expecting the secret would turn out to be a racist ghost truck. In actual fact it was to do with a German POW camp and a sinister metaphorical lynching tree, but close enough? Anyway it lets Intellectual Hero get captured and tied up and Sensitive Bruiser Hero come running to the rescue and that's all that really matters!
Best lines: when our heroes attempt to find out what's going on by demanding, "What's with this town? WHAT'S WITH THIS TREE?" and when, after one character dramatically flashbacks about his past trauma and how he swore that day he would never pick up an axe again, someone else goes "Uh . . . you're holding one now . . ."
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Also, I don't even need any context for "WHAT'S WITH THIS TREE?" to want it as an icon.
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It seems like I haven't finished anything lately, so I'll review what I'm currently reading, which is The Queen of Whale Cay. It's a shortish biography that's pretty well proving the idea that truth is stranger than fiction--Joe Carstairs, a rich oil heiress with screwed up parents and a myriad of issues, ends up discovering her butch self driving ambulances in France after WWI. Then she ends up as part of the gay scene in London and Paris in the 20s, moves into championship speedboat racing in the 30s, and then buys an island in the Bahamas in the later part of that decade and establishes a creepy colonialistic/paternalistic The Mosquito Coast society there, then lives to be in her early 90s. Also, her lifelong companion and the only being she doesn't lie through her teeth to is a doll given to her by one of her lovers in the 20s which she metaphorically animates as his own being.
All of this, on at the very least a factual level, actually happened, which is frankly kind of boggling in writing it all out, though the author (Kate Summerscale) has had a hell of a time piecing out truth and a full narrative from the bits and pieces and lies that Joe told. Summerscale is fairly upfront about what she can't really determine, though.
Also, the colonialism and racial attitudes of the period and the societies Joe lives in and participates in are stunning, if unsurprising. What was refreshing has been to read a book about an unabashedly queer person in the earlier part of the 20th century that's not trying to reclaim their life story as LGB history, but at the same time not whitewashing over their sexuality.
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....God, that book was so depressing. And had the most realistic horrifying description of a botched abortion I've ever read. Never have I been so glad to live post-Roe v Wade.
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If you haven't read them already, I'd recommend The City of Dreaming Books and The Alchemasters Apprentice, by Walter Moers. Here is the passage about Bookholm which I excerpted just after reading The City of Dreaming Books:
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I very much approve of your requested gift -- so much that I may make the same request when my birthday comes.
Meanwhile, I've just been reading Jane Austen's Emma for the first time (after reading Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice also for the first time)... and although the foreword suggests it's widely considered Austen's most mature and skillfully-crafted novel, without the inconsistancies of the two more popular ones, I did not find it so. I found the pacing slow, the characters puppetlike, the heroine unlikeably silly, the 'revelations' of the plot all too obvious yet without that comfortable satisfaction of service to a larger theme or archetype that sometimes, to me at least, excuses predictability. And worst, I felt Austen's occasionally wit was put to poor use, turned against characters for whom I believe the reader is meant to feel sympathy, and omitted or overused like a bludgeon in circumstances of tedious absurdity that a little sharp humor might have enlivened. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but empathize with some of the characters and read on in the hope that eventually they all might find some suitable and satisfying resolution. And it was very good to read at bedtime, just engaging enough to entertain, but with nothing to rouse so much preoccupation that I couldn't get to sleep. I suppose someone who prefers their romance with a tinge of soap-operaticness and an extremely slow build would find it rewarding.
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However, here's a short review of Rae Carson's Crown of Embers:
As I see it, there were two main directions the series could have gone in after the first book. Elisa really could come to grips with ruling the country, or she could continue to explore the Godstones in particular and magic in general. (In theory she could do both, but that would require a fairly complex plot.) She starts out doing the first but switches to the second. Justification is given for the transition, but I still felt that Elisa was being given short shrift on the whole ruling bit; I would have been happier to see her take charge a bit more (and respond earlier to the very obvious aspects of the enemy plotting).
The actual quest Elisa goes on is well-enough done and is actually completed in this volume, thus avoiding a major middle-book pitfall. We don't find out anything extraordinary, but we are given some more information about magic and the history of this world: enough so that it's clear we'll learn a lot more in the next book (or some later book if there are to be more than three).
People who do not like predictable romances will be pleased to learn that Carson once again defies expectations in this area, although not in the same way as in the first volume.
(BTW, your review of the first volume doesn't have an author tag.)
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I also post them on
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Not a review, but have you read the Liminal People, by Ayize Jama-Everett? I absolutely loved it until the ending, and I am still struggling with the ending.
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I direct you to these spoilery reviews (a real review from me always has spoilers because I want to squee or moan about bits in the story - I do use that GoodReads function to make it clear) of books you might enjoy:
Sharon Shinn's Fortune and Fate (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/295771781)
Andrea Höst's Touchstone Trilogy (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/244881901)
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I hope you have a lovely day!
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My mini review:
Huntress, by Malinda Lo.
GREAT KISSING.
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---L.
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This reminded me strongly of a lot of Robert Silverberg's work of roughly the same period: the immortals and their social life could have come from any of a number of his stories. So reading this is something like reading a 1970s Silverberg novel with a female protagonist, which is interesting. (The protagonist is also a nicer person than many Silverberg protagonists of the period.)
This is more of a character study than a plotty book, and what plot there is, at the end, felt rather forced. I still found it of interest as a period piece if nothing else. The main reason I can think of for avoiding it is if one is likely to be triggered by the descriptions of how the immortals deal with people with disabilities, which in a nutshell is very badly.
Much of the book goes in the familiar patterns of anthropological SF of the period, but it ends up going in a direction which I thought was unusual and avoided many of the typical pitfalls of said period works. Overall, better than Islands, and less Silverbergian, although I think it makes an interesting companion piece to his Downward to the Earth.
The rescue happens quite early on, and the rest of the books is about how the societies grow, interact, and avoid getting taken over (militarily or economically) by outside forces, with a heavy (but not exclusive) focus on the Kennerins. These are fairly lengthy books (unlike Randall's first two), so there is plenty of room for subplots involving other characters. There's also a lot of room for domesticity - many scenes take place while preparing or eating dinner, which gives the books a different feel than a lot of SF.
The main issue with the first volume (aside from general issues discussed below) is that one may frequently think to oneself "Gee, these characters are getting out of these bad situations awfully easily," and at one point one will think to oneself (particularly if one is Rachel) "That is an entirely inappropriate way to handle the situation! At the very least X needs extensive therapy!" However, Randall does know what she's doing, and these issues are addressed in the second volume. The first one is addressed in large part through the introduction of a new character, a woman from a planet of genetically-modified humans who is extremely competent and has little patience with the Kennerin approach to things.
These volumes are technically a prequel to A City in the North but take place long before it, so there's very little connection between them.
Continued on next rock...
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Overall I enjoyed reading these, and I will read her fantasy novel The Sword of Winter Real Soon Now. (She has also published a novel set in a dystopian Southern California, a mystery novel, and some short fiction.) However, they have dated to some extent. Randall has many good female characters, which is not in itself a dated aspect, but is less unusual now than it was 30-35 years ago. It's still not usual enough, of course, but these books probably seemed a lot more interesting in that area back when they were published.
Randall also has quite a few non-white characters - for example, hardly any of the Kennerins are white. However, since all the characters exist in entirely constructed contexts, the only way you can tell is by their physical descriptions. (Said descriptions sometimes don't read very well. This is also true of the Jewish character.) Again, 30-35 years ago just having major characters described as non-white was unusual. These days, there still aren't nearly enough such characters, but readers rightly expect more from writers than is provided here. That being said, if you can ignore the occasional bad word choice Randall is certainly not offensive in this area, just dated.
She is also somewhat dated in her handling of LBGTQ issues, which is really limited to LBG in these books (and mostly B). There are some scenes where it's described positively (or at least non-negatively), but there are others where there are negative connotations (and one which is definitely exploitative and therefore negative). I would again put this down to the period, and note that the negative bits are very short.