wednesday bookday

[jazzfish]

What are you reading?

I am at the very end of a first read of Under One Banner (Commonweal 4). I didn't care much for the first half, aka "Eugenia documents artillery process," but the second half, once they set out for the Eastern Waste to test said artillery, drew me in pretty solidly. The arrival of the Independent Crow is some of my favourite writing anywhere, I think.

What did you just finish reading?

Second and first reread of Commonweal 2 & 3, which I enjoyed substantially more than previous. I'm noticing, and appreciating, how much more I like these books every time I reread them. I finally got around to joining the Commonweal googlegroup (replacement for the G+ community that vanished with G+); somewhere in there Graydon mentions that there will probably be eight Commonweal books, of which two more may be of the "doorstopper" variety. Works for me.

In between I read Sarah Gailey's Magic For Liars, which can be summed up as "Raymond Chandler versus Harry Potter," and which I liked less than I had expected. In particular, I felt like the school was far too small. The only students one meets, even in passing, are the five who become relevant to the murder; ditto staff and faculty, with the (amusing! but slight) exception of the Dude In Your MFA teacher. And the "just happened to look under the right locker to find the notes" plotpoint irritated me. But: the characters and arcs are fantastic, particularly Ivy the nonmagical detective's development and growth and presentation; and I like Gailey's prose. I suspect I'd like this more on a reread.

I also read Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp, which I also liked less than I would have expected. It reads very like an RPG that I might have run: here's a fantasy world with intriguing aspects, here are some characters trying to figure out its rules, bits of it feel exceedingly dreamlike. Apparently this works better for me when I'm on the other side of it. (I had a similar experience with Vallista at the end of the Great Big Dragaera Reread a couple of years ago.) Curious as to how it might hold up to a reread in a year or three, because it's certainly not /bad/; I just didn't respond well to it.

It may be that interleaving other books with Commonweal means that those other books get unfairly clobbered in comparison.

What do you think you'll read next?

Likely going to dive straght into A Mist Of Grit And Splinters (Commonweal 5), to reduce the bad taste in my mouth that other books seem to be giving me.

Comments

[skygiants]

I would have liked Archivist Wasp more if there'd been any archiving in it. :(

[jazzfish]

Fair enough. Though on the plus side, there were also no wasps!

[malkingrey]

I like Saunders' Commonweal books a great deal, and buy them as soon as they come out -- but I have to admit that I can see why a commercial publisher might not have wanted to take a chance on them. Saunders is even more committed than the late John M. Ford to not explaining or describing things that the POV characters take for granted, which makes getting the information from context more of a job than a lot of readers would be willing to undertake.

(I've read all the books except for the most recent, which is in my virtual TBR pile, and I'm damned if I can say, for example, what a graul looks like even after spending at least one book inside of the head of one.)

[jazzfish]

It /is/ a heavy lift... but it's so, so, so worth it. (And that's not really something you can explain to people, either. :( )

Heh. Graul are, well, they're shorter than Creeks, which isn't saying much, and they look somewhere between "undead" and "demonic." Based on this, and the fact that I was playing Guacamelee! when I first read The March North, my personal vision of graul is something like Flame-Face.

[autopope]

Am finding "A Mist of Grit and Splinters" very much harder going than the other Commonweal books. It's partly the narrative style -- epistolary/diary entries by various parties -- and partly the subject matter: the creation and shakedown of a new Line battalion in the run-up to a Major Historic Event, as seen through the notes of its officers, which of necessity focus on logistics and training and stuff like a new type of boot-fastener and the best way to load a wheelbarrow. I'm still bogged down around halfway through and chewing slowly on it, although I expect things to speed up drastically as we get close to the MHE. (Also, Slow never uses a strong adjective where a pair of mild ones book-ending a double-negative will serve instead, which is insufficiently un-wearisome overall to satisfact.)

(Also, I'm pretty sure Graydon deliberately didn't approach any of the major publishers about this series because it's a hobby not a business and he wants complete control over it. If he ever changes his mind, well, I'm in a position to throw him in the lap of a Tor editorial director or two -- and I've offered.)

[malkingrey]

I would . . . also believe that of Graydon. About as influenceable as a bandersnatch.

[jazzfish]

Oof. Yeah, I got a couple pages into Mist, decided that I was being unnecessarily irritated at it for not starting off as clean as the others, and picked up Max Gladstone's Ruin of Angels instead. Will get back to Mist afterwards.

I hadn't considered 'control,' though that makes perfect sense. I was thinking more in terms of "once it becomes a business it stops being fun."

Honestly, I'd love to see what Subterranean or some other specialty press could do with the books. Graydon was estimating US$200 for a printed set with a print run of a couple thousand (an order of magnitude more than ebook sales per volume so far). For eight books, I find that a more than reasonable price, and would happily go over double that for Really Nice Editions.

[autopope]

Given Graydon's description of his sales figures I suspect Tor could afford to take the entire series on as a done deal and treat them as new (albeit with a slightly smaller advance than otherwise) once he's finished writing them all.

However, it'd take a very special, very dedicated editor to champion them. They're going to be an uphill sell in marketing terms.

However-again, we're talking about a publisher where some of the senior folks do stuff because they think it's their duty to the genre (e.g. going to vast lengths to acquire the rights to John M. Ford's back-list and republish the lot) even though it's not a terribly profitable use of their time and is an uphill sell in marketing terms (if any author was as elliptical and demanding of their readers as Graydon, it was Dr Mike).

[autopope]

I just finished "Mist".

It's kind of an epistolary/documentary yarn (minor spoiler: some of the narrative viewpoints die) and tends to get bogged down in the minutiae of how the Second Commonwealth creates a new battalion from scratch in a blinding hurry, in anticipation of a second friendly visit by the Sea People. Normally a Commonwealth battalion takes at least 20 years to work up: they manage it in only about 4, give or take. A lot of what we learn is tangentially relevant later; the way focuses and banners work, the way groups of minor, slightly witchy folks can sum up into a power as great as a sorcerer or a god via tradition and organization ...

And then the shit hits the fan, the Sea People come back for Round Two, and it starts raining salvos of level five Hot Red shot, each in the 50 kiloton range (going by a previous book).

And you suddenly get an idea for why so much of the terrain in the Commonwealth universe is the magical equivalent of post-nuclear wasteland: converted into energy terms we're familiar with, the Second Battle Below the Edge involves energetic discharges on the same scale as a full-up Soviet invasion through the Fulda Gap in the mid-80s (one that goes nuclear).

It's clearly laying the ground for the next couple of books: what's interesting is that this one's about ordinary soldiers, rather than high-end Independents. And it begins to become clear why everyone is so terrified of Laurel showing up (given that Laurel created the graul and invented the banners and focii and led an entire army group of graul) ...

[shanaqui]

Ooh, good points about Magic for Liars. And hmm, interesting on Archivist Wasp; I have it on my list.