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. :(

[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.)

[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.)

[shanaqui]

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