books for wednesday!
Oct. 4th, 2017 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhat are you reading?
I was away from my Dragaera books last week when I finished Viscount, and Erin's books are mostly unpacked and there's a shelf of "tucker should read these," so I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. I am *checks table of contents* a little over ten percent through it. It appears to be a sweep-of-alternate-history book, following different characters through the centuries after the Black Death wipes out all of Europe instead of just a third of it, with a loose framing story around reincarnation. I'm not sure what I think of it yet but I haven't given up on it.
What did you just finish reading?
The Viscount of Adrilankha, for which see the medialog post. (Summary: enjoyable, but enjoyable primarily in the context of the rest of the Dragaera books, and bordering on Too Much Paarfi.)
I also finally finished Full Fathom Five. I'm still enjoying the Craft sequence quite a lot, I just have a strong preference for dead-tree books at the moment (and probably in general). One thing I put together just recently: Gladstone's world is explicitly a fantasy analogue of our own. This lets him toss off asides like "Koschei fighting with the Golden Horde" and I immediately have a sense of a sorcerous Siberian at war with steppe nomads. It adds depth to the worldbuilding, and I'm not sure whether it's depth that the world has earned. It feels a little like cheating, is I guess what I'm saying. Neat, though.
What do you think you'll read next?
Back on the Great Dragaera Reread, with the "new" (less than a decade ... crud, not anymore, Dzur was eleven years ago, I guess it's really "post-Blacksburg") Vlad books.
I was away from my Dragaera books last week when I finished Viscount, and Erin's books are mostly unpacked and there's a shelf of "tucker should read these," so I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. I am *checks table of contents* a little over ten percent through it. It appears to be a sweep-of-alternate-history book, following different characters through the centuries after the Black Death wipes out all of Europe instead of just a third of it, with a loose framing story around reincarnation. I'm not sure what I think of it yet but I haven't given up on it.
What did you just finish reading?
The Viscount of Adrilankha, for which see the medialog post. (Summary: enjoyable, but enjoyable primarily in the context of the rest of the Dragaera books, and bordering on Too Much Paarfi.)
I also finally finished Full Fathom Five. I'm still enjoying the Craft sequence quite a lot, I just have a strong preference for dead-tree books at the moment (and probably in general). One thing I put together just recently: Gladstone's world is explicitly a fantasy analogue of our own. This lets him toss off asides like "Koschei fighting with the Golden Horde" and I immediately have a sense of a sorcerous Siberian at war with steppe nomads. It adds depth to the worldbuilding, and I'm not sure whether it's depth that the world has earned. It feels a little like cheating, is I guess what I'm saying. Neat, though.
What do you think you'll read next?
Back on the Great Dragaera Reread, with the "new" (less than a decade ... crud, not anymore, Dzur was eleven years ago, I guess it's really "post-Blacksburg") Vlad books.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-05 12:05 am (UTC)I'm about 85% of the way through Ruin, and I have this list of analogs:
Kath - America, north and south.
Camlaan - England
Iskar - given the squid gods, I thought for a while this might be Atlantis, but it actually seems to be France.
Zur - Russia. (Russia -> Rus -> Sur -> Zur; and it's ruled by Koschei, who is a figure from Russian legend)
Telomere - Italy (including having an ancient version of the language that is an equivalent to Latin)
the Gleb - sub-Saharan Africa
Dhistra - India (we don't get a lot of detail about this one, but there is a reference to suttee)
the Empire - Japan (or possibly China; again, not much to go on)
Kavekana - Hawaii
Dresediel Lex - Los Angeles
Alt Coulumb - New York
Agdel Lex - Tunis
no subject
Date: 2017-10-05 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-07 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-10 04:51 am (UTC)The only author I can think of that I've bounced hard off of is Pat McKillip. Something about her prose just makes me glaze over.