jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Going through my books, because it's been a couple years since my last serious purge. Pick up The Fortunate Fall. Note that it's under the author's deadname. Ponder what to do about that: sticky-label on the spine? Shelve it under R?

Open it up. Note that my copy is signed (under the author's deadname). Flip through. Read two and a half pages. Realise I've just booksniped myself. Put it firmly back on the shelf.

Next up, I guess. I was gonna read some of my unreads to see if they're worth keeping / hauling but sometimes the bookshelf speaks.

(I believe Cameron Reed's second novel will be out this fall. FINALLY. I am excited.)



Just finished Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. It's ... the trappings are I guess "industrial fantasy." I think Abby described it as nihilistic. I can see where she was coming from but to me it's more about, mm. The process of outgrowing nihilism, maybe.
DONNY: Are these the nazis?
WALTER: No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be frightened of.

Currently reading the sequel, The Dragons of Babel, which starts off in the same nihilistic vein but quickly takes a turn for the at least somewhat more cheerful. I remember liking this one an awful lot when I read it. Looking forward to the third volume after this.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Well. I just had the fastest checkin / security experience I've ever had at YVR: no one in line ahead of me to check in, two slightly slow people in the fast line at security. I think the time from stepping off the train to thru security was on the order of ten minutes, and most of that was walking from one end of the domestic terminal to the other and back again.

The gate isn't empty, but it's not as crowded as I expect the Toronto redeye to be. I'm okay with that.

What are you reading now?

Just started Melissa Scott's Dreamships, about which I know pretty much nothing except that Steph is a fan of Scott's work. (I think I read one or two of hers before moving here but they did not survive the Great Cross-Country Purge.) It's enjoyable so far.

What did you just finish reading?

For some reason I had a strong desire to read Gene Wolfe's four-volume crypto-Catholic generation-ship epic Book Of The Long Sun. I think this is somehow only my second reread; might be my third. I can confirm that the crypto-Catholicism is ... not really all that crypto. On the other hand the ending of "and then a bunch of us got on the lander and went down to the planet, and it turned out the Pope had been a vampire from the neighbouring Vampire Planet all along, the end" is more telegraphed than I remember. Though it helps if you remember the Pope really is a vampire from a previous read. (Er. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old tetrology, I suppose, though honestly if you're paying attention you find out the Pope is a vampire early in the second or third book.)

These are very Wolfean books, by which I mean they excel at doing the thing where something happens that means one thing to the characters in the book and quite another to the reader. They also have an awful lot of scenes of the main character explaining things to other people, which is less fun. But they're good, and there's not much out there like them.

Before that, Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. I like these a little less on this read, I think. Partly it's that they're overflowing with characters that I have difficulty telling apart. Partly it's that they lean into the fantasy trope of The Evil Race. The final duology tries to undermine that, with the hybrid queen whose name escapes me but who is trying so hard... but then Wells brings in the groundling race who've decided that killing everyone else is fine if it means it kills off all the evil Fell as well. They're still enjoyable, they still have great characters with complex and real-feeling relationships. Just ... not quite as solid as I'd like.

What do you think you'll read next?

Beats me. Something else in ebook, since I only brought one paper book (Wells's City Of Bone). When I get home I may read Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, the sequel trilogy. Or I may not; I remember it as being extremely depressing, mostly because it's narrated by someone who's not sure who he is and is extremely depressed about it.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Good lord, it's been a minute. Happy xmas, all.

What are you reading now?

The Cloud Roads, first of Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. Second reread. Found family and polyamorous bird/lizard people, in a landscape filled with magic, and people (of wildly varying kinds) getting by in the ruins of much older civilizations. I love Moon's prickly loner-ness, and how grumpy Stone is, and, oh, just all the characters. I don't think I picked these up first on [personal profile] thanate's recommendation exactly but I associate her with "I should read Martha Wells," and that of course led to Murderbot, etc. All good things.

What did you just finish reading?

Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, first reread. Fantasy Hamlet, crossed with "point-of-view of a rock". It might be my favourite of Leckie's books.

I reread the first five Craft novels relatively recently, too. They hold up; Four Roads Cross remains my favourite, because Tara Abernathy is such a fun character. I'm looking forward to the concluding tetrology.

I gave up on A Tale Of Two Cities about sixty percent in. This might be the point where it starts to get Really Interesting but so far it has been two-dimensional (at best) characters setting up for some Plot to Happen, in ways that do not convince me that there is any Plot -to- Happen. The narrative voice occasionally amuses me but more often grates on me. Dickens, it seems, is Not My Thing and I am okay with that.

Also gave up on rereading Elric after about a page and a half of ridiculously florid prose. Those can be filed in the Good Teenage Memories mental box.

What do you think you'll read next?

Probably carrying on with the Raksura but I might switch gears, I guess. There's a new Susanna Clarke novella I shall acquire in a few weeks if I don't get it for xmas. I'm also vaguely looking for poetry by Gerry Cambridge; his Processional at the Winter Solstice feels lovely in my head.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Classes are done for the term. I have almost certainly maintained my 85% average, which is lower than I'd like but understandable and acceptable. Then over the weekend I had a bit of a depressive crash but managed to pull myself out of it. Or rather wait it out, it was pretty clearly triggered by external factors like "reading over my journal from early-vancouver when i was, in fact, Really Depressed and Unhappy and mostly not admitting it except for when it all boiled over". Sunday was a nothing-day but by Monday lunchtime I was more or less back to normal. Yay for being able to recognise things like that and to take the time to just roll with them.

Today I went into town to accomplish a variety of errands. Got a replacement CPAP mask since the previous aftermarket one tore (and was not actually any cheaper, either; going with name-brand from now on). Got my eyes checked, and my prescription is slightly worse, as usual. More significantly this prescription includes bifocals since reading small print like on game cards has become "remove the glasses and hold it up at my nose" difficult. All told I'm out over twelve hundred for those, because my glasses are stupid expensive and I am willing to pay to have someone take care of fitting the frames etc for me. Oh well. Not like I'm running on limited funds here or anything.

I've also mostly accomplished xmas shopping: couple last things, and then box them up and send them home. I don't -think- I'm repeating xmas gifts to my cousins. It's possible, I don't remember what I got them last year, but it's not too likely. I don't think. Eh, I guess we'll see.

Reading has been a bit difficult this last month. It was something of an unexpected delight to start on Susanna Clarke's Piranesi last night, and devour most of it over the course of today. It's not Strange & Norrell, it's ... I was going to say less baroque and that's maybe a little true but mostly it's differently baroque. It's also exactly the sort of thing I like, done quite well: a person trapped(?) in a mythic(?) surrealist-allegorical(?) landscape, with limited knowledge of how they got there or what they're doing. It concerns itself with questions of knowledge and identity, while building an internally consistent and coherent world and using that world to reflect on the "real" world within the novel and on the world outside the novel. The narrator is an enjoyable person to spend time with, too, which helps.

Once my errands were done, I wandered over to a bakery and got a London Fog and a couple of pastries, and sat outside with my book. I should do that more often. It makes me happy.
jazzfish: an open bottle of ether, and George conked out (Ether George)
I am home, after having been away for two weeks, which is (it turns out) a long time. Mr Tuppert has mostly forgiven me for the twin indignities of leaving him alone and then brushing him vigorously.

In Minneapolis I visited Uncle Hugo/Edgar's Bookstore(s) and met some of Steph's friends, and also her two cats. Then in Fort I petted a lot of cats and not a few dogs, and stacked wood and fed geese and pigs and helped plant some ritual-space trees. Also I made a second key lime pie (with normal limes instead) and it turned out pretty well.

I finished my classes and I believe I passed them all, for credential-granting values of "passed." Pretty sure I did quite well in three and acceptably well in a fourth. As for the fifth, I consider it a triumph that I managed as well as I did. Bah. And I have at least one and possibly/probably two more classes with this instructor.

I have also received an unexpected US$2000 check from the IRS. I have no idea why (I have a couple of theories but that's all they are) (UPDATE: It is in fact the stimulus payment from 2020/2021 that I missed, plus interest), and after spending an hour plus getting Verified, the account page is useless. So tomorrow I will spend some time On Hold figuring that out. Tomorrow is also for groceries and journaling.

Tonight is for petting the cat and staring at the wall. And also blathering about books, because Wednesday.

What are you reading now?

Deadhouse Gates, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen #2 of 10 and then some. This one has taken a bit to spin up, I guess in the same way that Gardens of the Moon (#1) did, but it's rolling along quite nicely now. I'm enjoying most of the characters and much of the complex worldbuilding. My sole problem is that I can't tell if I want to be reading an ebook or not.

What did you just finish reading?

Rereads of Gideon/Harrow/Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Gideon remains a triumph of imaginative storytelling, narrative deftness, and voice, and I unreservedly recommend it. Harrow feels sluggish and pointless until three-fifths through (specifically, page 302 of 500ish) but the last two hundred pages are worth the price of admission. Nona does almost exactly the same thing but on reread I find Nona hanging out with the kids to be less annoying than Harrow's angst. On the other hand, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic." If I wanted to read far-future sci-fi with crypto-Catholic mysticism I'd reread Gene Wolfe. And sometimes I do want that! Here it just annoys me. (Granted, I am partly annoyed because Camilla Hect, the absolute best character in the series, has been SPOILERed.)

What do you think you'll read next?

Deadhouse is gonna occupy me for awhile. If I'm wanting something hardcopy I might dig into The Saint Of Bright Doors which I picked up in Mpls, after seeing recommendations from a rather diverse set of people. Or I might get into one of my Silvia M-G books. Or I might reread Fonda Lee's Green Bone books. Who knows.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Yesterday was all travel all the time: a three-hop flight from Cleveland to home. Turns out three flights is Just Too Many Flights. I was ready to be home about the time we were taking off from Calgary to Vancouver. In the event I rolled in shortly before midnight, unpacked my CPAP, and went to bed. Mr Tuppert was happy to see me at least. He's happier today when I'm Behaving Properly, sitting in the work chair and petting him. (And, yep, there's the demand for playtime.)

But: I am Home. I have my cat and my tea, in a mug that Erin made special for the eclipse. (Beautiful coppery glaze with a black sun.) I know I used to go straight back to work from a redeye and I am unclear how I managed that. Younger, I guess, and more willing to push through / ignore pending exhaustion. It's easier when someone else is telling me what to do, too.

Today: schoolwork, cat, and hopefully eclipse journaling. And also books.

What are you reading now?

One of the few advantages to not being at the Gathering right now is that my copy of Lyorn (Taltos #17) showed up while I was eclipsing. (Being eclipsed? Probably more accurate but sounds less good.).

Lyorn opens with a dedication to Mike Ford, "because it breaks my heart that I can't show it to him." Five pages in I said "Oh, because it's a theatre book." Two pages later, and less amused, I said "Oh, because Steve thinks he can write How Much For Just The Planet?." (Planet is JMF's Star Trek novel in the form of a musical comedy.) So far, thirteen pages in, we've had versions of "Modern Major General" and "My Favorite Things". I am still interested but my side-eye is armed and waiting. Which, it occurs to me, has been my response to most of the Taltos books post-Tiassa. (That one included the in-retrospect-prophetic line "I was told you think you're funny. That's alright, I think I'm funny too.")

I've also read a couple of chapters of Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Steven Erikson's ginormous fantasy sequence Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It's good: a bit more grim than I've been into lately, but good. Looking forward to getting back into it.

What did you just finish reading?

Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire (Hexarchate) trilogy. The first, Ninefox Gambit, remains my favourite: I quite like Cheris as a viewpoint character, and the occasional missives from one opposing character to another were a lot of fun as well. I -think- Raven Stratagem, the second, is probably the best of them? It's doing a bunch of interesting things with the plot and with the ideas of, well, empire. I'm not as fond of Brezan's narration, though. And Khiruev, the character who spends the most time with Cheris (who mostly doesn't get viewpoint anymore), is interesting but reminds me how much I miss Cheris.

On first read these felt like a duology with a third book tacked onto the end. I'm seeing a lot more thematic coherence this time, and I appreciate Revenant Gun more for it. It's not going to ever be a favourite but it's a fine conclusion to the trilogy. And the servitors, the intelligent robots, are some excellent characters too.

What do you think you'll read next?

Apart from Malazan? I've also started on Lee's collection Hexarchate Stories, and will doubtless finish it. At this point I am unfortunately prepared to concede that short story collections are Not For Me Anymore. I read an awful lot of them in junior high and high school, and then... I slowly dropped off. And now I have trouble switching gears from story to story. I still enjoy the stories quite a bit but multiple in a row have become difficult.

(I also hope against hope that Commonweal #6 will see the light of day sometime soon, but that depends heavily on Graydon's mental and financial state.)
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
I've just picked up Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee) for a reread, ostensibly in the hope that I'll get through the Hexarchate story collection this time but mostly because I want something zippy and brain-twisty.

I'm not sure how else to describe it. Ninefox shares with The Quantum Thief (Hannu Rajaniemi) et seq and the Commonweal (Graydon Saunders) a complex world coupled with a basic disregard for as-you-know-bob exposition that I crave. These are the kind of books where I spent my first read trying to get a handle on where I stood, because there was obviously some really interesting stuff going on below the surface if I could just get my bearings well enough to see it.

Ninefox is a space opera that uses Sufficiently Advanced Technology in the form of "the calendar," a belief system strong enough to influence the available tech. Quantum Thief has a great deal of, well, quantum handwaving. The Commonweal couples terse narration with deeply complex social and magical structures.

Mike Ford's books don't set me off in the same way, somehow. Or: Aspects does, but I don't know if that's because it's less familiar to me (only read it twice). Dragon Waiting ought to but doesn't. Gene Wolfe doesn't quite do this either. I think that's because I find that Wolfe's prose takes more effort to get into. Or maybe I just need to reread the Solar Cycle again.

I suspect that The Archive Undying (Emma Mieko Candon) will do this but I don't have a print copy. Might jump to the ebook for my plane trip, though.

Any other suggestions? What have you read lately where you couldn't make head nor tail of the worldbuilding but it kept you turning pages anyway?
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Just got done writing a program in Java that encodes a text file using 'run-length encoding'. Simple but kinda interesting. Marred by the assignment's insistence on COMMENTING EVERY LINE (heck with you then, you're getting comments on my open and close braces) and on the class's non-ChatGPT policy: "If you choose not to utilize generative AI tools to assist in completing this assignment, provide a separate reference document indicating this. Also, provide a list of the resources (course materials and/or external) that you did use and how they were used." I USED THE PDFS YOU PROVIDED BECAUSE THAT'S WHY YOU PROVIDED THEM.

Rob's two classes last term annoyed me. Comp in particular felt like he'd done a half-assed job of slapping something together from previous notes and just kind of left it. This (non-Rob) class is making me actively angry. Between the 'generative AI' stuff and the fact that there are only four lectures in a twelve-week course (one week each for midterm and final, which, fine, and the rest are for "group work") I am unclear why I have paid money for this. Apart from credentialism, yes yes.

Spoke with the ADHDoc today. She re-upped the Concerta and we'll talk again in three weeks, which should be plenty of time to decide if I want to up my dosage.

And also books.

What are you reading now?

Beasts of Ruin by Ayana Gray. Pan-African-inspired YA fantasy, sequel to Beasts of Prey. Good worldbuilding and atmosphere, decent characters and plot, okay writing. I'll read the third when it's available but I'm in no particular rush.

Also one chapter left in Polywise, which is unsurprisingly quite good if not as revolutionary as Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. System Collapse, the latest Murderbot. It reads like a coda / second-half for Network Effect. Suspect I will consider those two as a unit, in the same way I consider the first four novellas a unit. Annoyingly this means that I will now be reading Fugitive Telemetry in chron order (before Network Effect) rather than pub order (between NE and SC). Pro: going straight into SC from NE means all of NE is fresh in one's mind, which is helpful since SC really does read like a second half of NE. Con: the ending of both Exit Strategy and FT feature fights with nonsympathetic bots, which feels less repetitive when there's NE to break it up. Oh well.

Murderbot is coming to terms with its massive untreated trauma. I think I liked SC not quite as much as NE but NE was so very good that that's a high bar. Also, with Murderbot hacking governor modules / teaching other SecUnits how to hack them, it feels like we're moving towards some kind of world-shaking tipping point. Very curious to see where things go from here.

Before that, Scholomance 2 and 3. I continue to love these, between El's voice and the way the books make their commentary on modern (western?) crab-bucket society ever more overt. ("Oh, it's Omelas," I said when I got to a certain point in the third book, and then a chapter or two later IT LITERALLY WAS OMELAS.) The third, which takes place out in the Real World and away from the Scholomance, is ... certainly different, and maybe feels overcrowded? Suffering from the corresponding lack of tight focus? I dunno. I'm vaguely unsatisfied by it and I'm not sure why. Will need to reread at some point and see what I think.

What do you think you'll read next?

Nth reread of The March North, because I'm traveling north myself next week and want ebooks, and because it's been too long, and because Rachel Manija Brown wrote a great review of A Succession of Bad Days. "In a world rendered post-apocalyptic by thousands of years worth of warring Dark Lords, a group of adult students attend magic school to learn how to do civil engineering with magic. ... It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm."

After that, if I don't just keep rolling on the Commonweal, likely either Discworld (Men At Arms) or Craft (Full Fathom Five). Probably not an immediate reread of Scholomance but no promises.

büchen

Dec. 20th, 2023 09:34 pm
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Oh hey, it's Wednesday. I've been up north since my inexplicably delayed flight on Saturday, and it's been ... good? Good. I have also done A Lot of reading. It's been a good week or so for books.

What are you reading now?

In the home stretch of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, the first in a trilogy best described as "Harry Potter by way of The Hunger Games." So, a magical boarding school, but it's infested with magical monsters, who like nothing better than devouring unsuspecting students for their mana. The school has a survival/graduation rate of something like forty percent, and this is considered a vast improvement over other options. I picked this up because both Steph and Mya recommended it highly, and because I'd apparently bought the ebook at some point.

I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying our viewpoint/protagonist, El ("Galadriel"), and her drive and cynicism-tempered-with-optimism. I'm especially enjoying seeing her work out for herself the ways that the larger and more established groupings of magicians ("enclaves") explicitly set up the Scholomance to reinforce their existing power structures.
They wanted to be safe. It's not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don't have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they'd push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn't stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.
Quite curious as to where it goes from here.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. First reread of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead: if Max is going to go to the trouble of writing a new Craft trilogy I may as well reread the extant ones. These are also fantastic, and also about power, though differently so than the Scholomance, and explicitly about 2008. I confess I did not expect the villain to be a genuine TESCREAList but I guess the seeds of that nonsense were present fifteen years ago too.

Before that, Rebecca Fraimow's novella The Iron Children. More fantasy, more critique of power, from a very different angle. It crams a lot of worldbuilding and a decent amount of character into a small pagecount, mostly by cutting out "plot," which is fine by me. There's still a decent amount of stuff happening, and more importantly we get to see it affecting multiple characters.

Before that, finished up Lords And Ladies, about which more anon, but: it is really quite nice to get a Discworld book that I genuinely liked, especially one I didn't expect to.

What do you think you'll read next?

Two Serpents Rise, I think, and then I can argue with myself about whether I'll grab the rest of Scholomance now or wait for a theoretical ebook sale. Or maybe I'll just go straight into Scholomance.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Classes are going ... alright? I have no concerns about three of five: Intro to ArcGIS is "just how to use this fairly complicated program," and Intro To GIS and Intro To Mapping are, well, intro courses. I'm more concerned about GIS Programming and GIS Computing but that's mostly because I am annoyed by the professor (and, in the case of Programming, at potentially having to spend $90 on a book to learn Python).

What are you reading?

Other than stuff for class, which is mostly PDFs and video lectures at this point ... oh, I guess I'm still in the middle of Mike Carey's The Unwritten comic, I should get back to those. And I've still got a bookmark in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Rick Shelley's early-nineties portal fantasy The Varayan Memoir, because I had fond memories of them and they were in the used bookstore. More specifically, I had fond memories of the first but not so much the other two, which seemed odd. Having reread, I can confirm. These ... are not good. Shelley's got some interesting worldbuilding ideas but with maybe three exceptions his characters are not even two-dimensional, they're one-dimensional, and his plots are "a bunch of stuff happens, with no real narrative progression from A to B." I couldn't tell you most of what happens in the second book and I literally read it three weeks ago. The first book sets up an interesting world ("the buffer zone" between Fairy and the 1990s human world) and some potentially intriguing characters and situations. Then the second throws all that away for a stupid end-of-the-world fetch-quest, and the third doubles down on that. Oh well.

Over the last week and a half I also read the entire archive of the webcomic Dumbing of Age, which is a terrible name for a really good comic. It follows a bunch of college students, mostly freshmen, through, well, so far through their first semester and a half or so. (The first nine? years of real time got through I think about two months of comic time.) The characters are an interlocking Absolute Drama-Prone Mess, and it’s genuinely amusing and occasionally actually-laugh-out-loud-funny, and well-written and plotted and drawn. And with a dash of unreality to keep it interesting. The "main" character's a recovering fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which felt pleasantly familiar. (I shook that off mostly during high school, but the process was not dissimilar.)

It's also got an Obviously Autistic character, Dina, who's my favourite (everyone's favourite) who everyone thinks is weird but is also solidly a part of the group. Here, have some Dina comics:Sadly I'm caught up as of yesterday evening, so now I get them one strip a day like everyone else. Alas.

What do you think you'll read next?

Jeez, I don't know. I'd like to read either The Dragon Republic or A Spindle Splintered but I do not know that I have the brain for something new. Maybe I'll go back to Mercedes Lackey ebooks.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Feeling a weird mix of tired and functional this morning. Which is good, because I have a decent amount of tidying to do before people come over for game this evening, and I'm also going to need a nap before I pick Erin up at the train station at eleven PM and if I'm tired I stand a better chance of Actually Napping.

What are you reading now?

Small Gods by Pratchett. I very distinctly Do Not Like this "Discworld" book but I will by gods finish it. (I am liking it slightly better as it goes on, which helps.)

Also Mike Carey and Peter Gross's comic series The Unwritten. I'm on volume four at the moment. This takes the mythic themes of Sandman and boils them down to grubby human-scale politicking. At least it seems to thus far, maybe I'm wrong. (I hope I'm wrong.) Gross's art is good but not spectacular. Eh. I'm a little disappointed but I'll keep reading.

What did you just finish reading?

Did a complete Murderbot reread (five novellas, one novel, two stories), because I thought the new novel was coming out sooner than "late November". Network Effect (the novel) is still absolutely fantastic; the rest are still quite good. I liked All Systems Red slightly less on this reread, I think because it's got less of Murderbot interacting with other humans. To the left, I liked Rogue Protocol a bit more. I usually think of Rogue Protocol as "the book I have to relatively slog through to get to Exit Strategy" but it's doing some interesting things with the two security consultants.

Also read KJ Parker's short piece "No Choice," available at this writing as a free download from Subterranean. I'd been meaning to read some Parker for awhile now: I'd read some of his "Tom Holt" stuff in high school (Flying Dutch and Ye Gods) and enjoyed it, like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett but with a bit of a bite. The "KJ Parker" works are, near as I can tell, all secondary-world fantasy with fast-moving plots and prose and unpleasant characters. "No Choice" drops you hard into the viewpoint of a person whose only redeeming facet may be his familial devotion, but who talks like an Oscar Wilde character, and quickly enough that that works. I don't know how I'd do with it on a larger scale but as basically an extended character study it was quite enjoyable.

What do you think you'll read next?

Who even knows. Ebook, no idea whatsoever, probably something to wash the taste of Small Gods out of my mouth. In hardcopy, Ann Leckie's Translation State has been calling my name for weeks, I've got Beasts of Prey that Steph loaned me but it's book 1 in a trilogy where book 3 isn't out til early next year, and RF Kuang's Dragon Republic showed up Monday. I also picked up paperbacks of Rick Shelley's The Varayan Memoir trilogy from Henderson Books on my way home on Sunday, because I have fond memories of them from high school and am curious how they hold up. (I suspect the answer will be "not well," honestly, but we shall see.)

But honestly, assuming it shows up on Friday like it's supposed to, it'll be Sorita D'Este's book on Artemis. Because after this weekend, apparently that's just gonna be a Thing for me now.

bookish

Jul. 5th, 2023 10:42 pm
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Return to regular blogging needed. The last week or two have been something of a disturbance in normal operating patterns, to the extent that anything is normal these days anyway.

It is Too Warm but at least the cold robot still works.

What are you reading now?

Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust & Emma Bull. Sixth or so reread. I read/reread (first reread in twenty years) Wrede & Stevermer's Sorcery & Cecilia before/during Fourth Street because Marissa Lingen was hosting a conversation with them about it, and I both enjoyed it a decent bit and kept thinking "I really wish I were reading F&N."

So. F&N is an epistolary novel that began life as a Letter Game, with four protagonists/writers instead of the usual two, and an exceedingly twisty plot centred around occultists and Communists in 1849 England. It contains fantastical elements, all of which are witnessed by skeptics. (I have a recollection that it's connected to Brust's Agyar, I think Jack Agyar is at school with James Cobham, but I'm not certain of that.) I continue to enjoy the process of reading it, and as always I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to. It's wordy, and I'm not certain what the wordiness is in service of, other than "being a kind of fun that I enjoy."

Also slowly working my way through Jessica Fern's Polysecure, finally (got about halfway a couple years ago). So far it's a fine introduction to both attachment theory and consensual nonmonogamy. Looking forward to how she ties those together.

What did you just finish reading?

A couple of weeks ago I needed something utterly unchallenging to read at midnight in a strange airport where I couldn't sleep. I'd just picked up an ebook bundle of All The Valdemar, so I started in on Mercedes Lackey's first three Valdemar books: Arrows of the Queen, Arrow's Flight, Arrow's Fall.

These are deeply wish-fulfilment-y fantasy novels, in which a teenage girl is carried off by a magical horse to Paladin School because she's Special, and becomes Way Too Empathic and finds True Love. Points for an almost complete lack of slut-shaming, and for gay characters and even a touch of polyamory; minus points for unpleasant and unexpected gender-essentialism ("Men!") and for the first half of the third book, which is one long exercise in People Refusing To Speak To Each Other So There Can Be Conflict. But: I read them (and the Last Herald-Mage trilogy) to death during junior high and early high school, and I have no particular regrets about that, or about revisiting them now. Not something I'll be doing often, though.

What do you think you'll read next?

The plan had been to read Martha Wells's Witch King before I got sidetracked by F&N, so, probably that? Possibly a comic series (The Unwritten) by Mike Carey so I can decide if it's for the go-away stack, though.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Waiting on Telus, because my internet has been out (again) since at least Saturday. Supposedly they'll give me a call in the next hour or two, and then show up and do something to fix it. I am not optimistic.

Also my new glasses have picked up a permanent smudge on the inner left lens. It looks like a coating has degraded or fuzzed up. I am Not Best Pleased. Going in this afternoon to talk to the optician about that. I have an unpleasant suspicion that these are about to become a backup pair of glasses and I will spend Too Much Money elsewhere for another pair that I like less but can see out of. But perhaps I'll be wrong.

Speaking of Too Much Money I have registered for fall classes at BCIT. I figure I'll do the two-year program, front-load as many classes into the first year as I can and find some sort of employment starting next summer, and look into financial aid once my internet is back. I am nervous as all hell but I have faith in my ability to scrounge money out of somewhere. If nothing else I can raid my RRSP. (Unsurprisingly therapy yesterday dug up A Lot of anger at my ex. Maybe someday I'll figure out something to do with that other than say "oh well" and try to squelch it.)

What are you reading now?

Aspects, first reread, because what on earth do you do when you've just finished something that's so good anything else is going to feel like a letdown?

The lovely thing about a reread is that I can savor a book. There's no tension over "what happens next?" or "will they live?" (or, in this case, "who are they and who are they talking about?"), there's just the characters and the prose and the scene-setting. And they are wondrous, and now I can savour Varic's intricate guarded dance around his feelings for Longlight and Winterhill's barbed jollity. And the words. I want to quote passages but they all want pages of explication as to why they hit so hard.

I will come to the fragmentary end and be sad and angry all over again that we won't get the other two books. And grateful that we got even this little.

What did you just finish reading?

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh. Early candidate for best book of the year, and an easy recommend for anyone with an interest in space opera. Tesh's list of reference material in the afterword includes books on North Korea, Sparta, Scientology, and the rise of twenty-first-century fascism, but for all that it's not a grim book. (Thirty pages or so around the middle excepted.) It's a book of survival and recovery and ... maybe not healing, but maybe so.

Before that, Kat Howard's Unseen World duology. A Sleight Of Shadows is, mm, less focused? less tight? than An Unkindness Of Magicians. Still well worth my time. Both of these ... you know how when you watch a movie that's been made from a book it often feels rushed, because there's just not time to include everything needed? These each feel to me like they're an attempt to cram a network season of television into one book. Huge cast of characters, all of whom seem interesting and not enough of whom do we get to spend nearly enough time with to develop beyond seeming interesting; big sprawling plots and ideas, mostly well-developed but that would have benefited from having far more space to play in. Kat calls it a duology but then she called Unkindness a standalone, and there's certainly room for a third book exploring magic outside of the insular New York City world. I'd read it.

What do you think you'll read next?

Possibly Fonda Lee's novella Untethered Sky. Possibly Alix Harrow's Once And Future Witches or Silvia M-G's Mexican Gothic, because they're here and have been waiting patiently for several months and I probably have time to finish them in fancy hardcopy without trying to travel with a SubPress book. Or I might be due for a reread of The Last Hot Time.
jazzfish: artist painting a bird, looking at an egg for reference (Clairvoyance)
I'm reading Emily Tesh's new space opera Some Desperate Glory. This is very very clearly intended as a pointed commentary on overly-militarized milsf space operas. I hadn't grasped just how pointed it was going to be until about midway through chapter 2:
Cleo laughed a hard little laugh and said, "Where's the lecture? Sweet and meet, right? Shouldn't I be longing to die for a dead world?"

_It is sweet and meet to die for your fatherland_: old Earth poem, which they'd all learned by heart in Nursery.
OOF. That, y'all, is How It's Done.

(Exegesis: a contemporary reader thinks of Wilfred Owen's antiwar "Dulce et Decorum Est". But Cleo, and Kyr the narrator, are talking about the poem that Owen's referencing, one of Horace's Odes, which waxes, well, poetic, about the virtue of that very sentiment.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Today I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the EI office, mostly on hold, in an ultimately successful attempt to report my severance pay, which came through today. Verdict: my EI payments won't start until mid-June, but on the bright side my (year-long) claim limit also doesn't start until then. I mucked with my budget a day or two ago and determined that the EI will more or less cover my bills, so that's a relief.

Today I also took a two-hour nap. I may be fighting off a random sinus infection or summer cold; Mya was over for dinner last night, and reported feeling ill this morning. I've got a bit of a sore throat and a bit of the general muzzy-headedness that I usually associate with sinus infections. Who knows.

Also today Tsalmoth arrived, so I'm making my way through it. Feels like a throwback, which of course it is, set just after Yendi and long before Vlad quit the Jhereg. It's good? I may be starting to lose my taste for Vlad's first-person-asshole narrative voice.

It's been summer-like out today, and I think will be for the rest of the weekend. I may ride out somewhere and read under a tree tomorrow or Sunday. Next week is for GIS-career research, and getting back into viola practice, and continuing to get out on the bike as much as I can.

Mr Tuppert is dozing on my foot. I'm quite glad I get to be his human.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
It's not Wednesday, but that's okay, because this isn't "what I'm reading." Apparently April is preorders month.

Arrived while I was away:
  • Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee's novella about rocs that hunt manticores and the ... falconers? ... that train/ride them.
  • Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh's space opera which I preordered on the strength of her Victorian fantasy duology Silver In The Wood and Drowned Country.
  • A Sleight of Shadows, Kat Howard's sequel to her contemporary-fantasy An Unkindness of Magicians, which I devoured over winter solstice back in 2021.
And arriving sometime this week: Steven Brust's Tsalmoth, a Taltos book that's a throwback to the pre-Phoenix days.

And then there's Ann Leckie's new Imperial Radch book and Martha Wells's fantasy The Witch King, arriving I think in May.

It's a good time to have time to read, is what I'm saying.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Bah. I am doing better but "better" is not "good." The last couple of weeks have traded vision-stress for workstress. Thankfully that is letting up somewhat. And in a week and a half I go back north to see Erin for a long weekend, which is much needed, and then I go out to Niagara for a few days with Steph followed by the Gathering, which is also much needed.

Meanwhile I am at least still reading.

What are you reading now?

RF Kuang's The Poppy War, book 1 of a trilogy set in !China. I'd intended to not read these until I had all three of them, but since I'm getting the fancy Subterranean editions that won't be until the middle of next year at the earliest.

I'm about two-thirds through and it is really good. The first third or so is a school story: war orphan Rin goes off to the prestigious military academy and has a terrible time. Then there's an invasion by neighbouring !Japan, which is deeply unpleasant and includes numerous massacres, all of which per the author's note are historically attested from Sino-Japanese wars. It looks like the final third is going to involve unleashing the magical equivalent of an H-bomb but I have no idea how it's going to play out, or where the rest of the trilogy will go. Which is kind of neat.

I saw someone describe these as "grimdark," which, maybe? My only other exposure to that subgenre was Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy, which I read once and said "these are quite good and are doing a bunch of really interesting things, and they are also intensely nihilistic and i do not need that in my ambit." Poppy War is grim but feels less fatalistic about it. Maybe it's that Rin is more relatable and less inherently awful than most of Abercrombie's viewpoint characters.

What did you just finish reading?

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Return of the Sorceress, a fantasy novella that bears no relation to Clark Ashton Smith's parallel-named story. A young woman comes back to town to maybe defeat her former friend/rival who's now in charge of the local sorcerers, and maybe supplant him and maybe destroy the artifact that gives him his power; she's not terribly clear, even to herself. Good character moments, especially at the end after the big climax. Worth reading, worth keeping.

Before that, Kate Elliott's Servant Mage. The cosmology and the characters both felt a little thin, mostly because there was a great deal of both to cram into the space of a novella. Felt, mm, overly intricate for the story it was telling. But it's a good story, "the enemy of my enemy may be my ally but is not necessarily my friend." Also worth the reading.

What do you think you'll read next?

Might be the third of Tade Thompson's Rosewater trilogy, might be the next Discworld. Or I might break down and read the next two Kuang books in ebook rather than wait for Subterranean.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
As noted, I bailed on Twitter because they shut down access for third-party clients, including my preferred client, Tweetbot. This act of war pushed Tapbots, the Tweetbot developer, into overdrive on their Mastodon client Ivory. It went into wide release a few days later. I tried it out and while it's certainly an early release, it's enough like Tweetbot that I'm happy with it.

So, Mastodon. I'm at jazzfish@wandering.shop grr DW still wants to make a leading @ automatically DW-username-ize things (thanks to Nicky for the invite). My feed's mostly made up of my Twitterfolk that I could easily find plus a handful of other people I keep seeing retweeted / boosted and figured I'd go ahead and follow.

It's not as polished an experience as Twitter was and in particular I miss quote-retweet. But it's fun so far. (As with Twitter I'm using it primarily to read, and secondarily to retweet.)



Thanks to Mastodon I am following Cameron Reed (fka Raphael Carter, and once [personal profile] centuryplant). Cameron's novel The Fortunate Fall is probably my favourite novel that no one has heard of, and I include Mike Ford's books in that judgement. Yesterday she mentioned that "A mere 26 years after The Fortunate Fall, I am working seriously on another novel." So that's rather exciting.

In a followup she said "It's strange to have too many ideas after such a long period of creative nullity. Changing the hormone levels in my brain has been good for me." Which ... gives me some hope that I might manage to get back to writing, myself, at some point. That I might be able to rebalance my brain and my lifestyle to support that. But there's a lot to unpack there, too.



Bah. I was more functional working four days a week, for sure, but looking for that will make jobhunting Even Worse. And it's an open question as to how I'd do with a 20% pay cut. Between the not-quite-doubled housing cost and the general increase in cost of everything, that might require some serious belt-tightening. Bah.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Incidentally, I've discovered another rare exception to my Pub Order Dammit rule:

It is better to read Patricia Wrede's Talking To Dragons as the last (chronological) of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, rather than the first (publication).

Talking To Dragons works perfectly well as a standalone, and it also works perfectly well if slightly tonally dissonant as the series conclusion. The reason to read it last is that the whole point of Calling On Dragons is to serve as a bridge between Dealing+Searching and Talking, and ending the series with Calling just feels narratively wrong.

... also, per Wiki Wrede made a bunch of minor updates to Talking after the first three were published, so it's almost like still reading in publication order. Close enough.
jazzfish: Barnaby from "Bone," text "Stupid, stupid rat meme!" (Rat Meme)
As alluded yesterday, there have been books.

What are you reading right now?

Finally getting back into the ebook of Moving Pictures. What I actually want to be reading is either The Ten Thousand Doors Of January (Harrow) or The Poppy War (Kuang), because I have fancy SubPress editions of both waiting for me. But I'm reluctant to take those to work with me, so they await a stretch of time when I'll be Not Working for a bit. Maybe this weekend.

Anyway, Moving Pictures is a bit of a slog, which surprises me. If you had told twelve-year-old me that there was a forty-plus-book fantasy series that was more like a bunch of interlocking serieses, as funny and readable as Douglas Adams but with actual plots, but the subseries I'd like least was the one about all the wizards, well. I would have thought you were entirely out to lunch.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. First reread of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. Still excellent. These prefigure Murderbot in some ways, which I had forgotten but which I greatly appreciate. Also the line "We're not cousins anymore" late in Ancillary Mercy remains the funniest line on the funniest page of anything I have read in quite some time. (I note with some excitement that Leckie has a new Radch book out next year, heavily featuring a Presger translator.)

Also read the first two of Walter Jon Williams's new space opera trilogy, sequel to his previous excellent Dread Empire's Fall trilogy. I outsource my commentary to paraphrasing Marissa Lingen, who said of the first "it's more of the same, space battles and space empire politics, it's still good but start with the first trilogy," and of the second "it's MORE OF THE SAME, stupid awful interpersonal stuff with the leads hooking up and breaking up, and i may be done with it now." I note that she hasn't reviewed the third, which came out a month or two ago.

And reread Gibson's The Peripheral and read Agency, which ... these are weird, but I like them. In both roughly the first third is sort of orientation, getting you used to the world(s) of the novel, and then most of the rest is ... nothing really happens, but you get a lot of nice character and worldbuilding and dialogue moments, and then in like the last thirty pages there is suddenly PLOT! and then it's over. Spook Country did this as well. It is very much not my normal reading mode. And Gibson's characters are... they're sort of emotionally muted, which contributes to the sense of not much really happening. I'm not describing this well at all. I think I liked them? Keeping them around, at the very least.

What do you think you'll read next?

Maybe 10K Doors or Poppy War. Maybe Provenance, the sequel to the Ancillary books. Maybe the third of WJW's space opera books, it's on the shelf and then I can be done with them. (They /are/ well-written and fast-paced and well-plotted, it's just the relationship between the two leads that grinds my teeth.) Maybe whatever the next Discworld is.



And, from [personal profile] ironymaiden, the return of the Five Questions meme. Comment and ask and I'll ask you five questions of your own.

1. What has been the biggest surprise about life with Mr. Tuppert?

It's the sitting-on-shins thing. The way he's not hugely a People Cat is a bit of a surprise, and not being able to tempt him up onto the couch to sit next to me is a bit of a disappointment, but. Starting from the very first night he was here, when I get into bed he comes up on the bed with me, and he'll usually come up for a few scritches first. Then it's like a switch gets thrown in his tiny cat-brain, and he tries to position himself lengthwise on top of my shin, and kneads at the blanket and makes meowy-growly noises of discontent that he can't get situated comfortably there. This goes on for several minutes, usually until I shift a bit at the right time or in the right way to shake him out of it, and he'll either get comfortable on my feet or curl up next to them.

2. What did you think of the "bonus episode" of Sandman?

So, this is two questions, or maybe three. The "bonus episode" presentation in itself is kinda weird, though it makes sense: may as well at least try to tell the stories in something like the original order, and they want to seed 'Calliope' early to set up for the chain that leads to The Kindly Ones. So why not goose numbers with a bonus episode? Plus, they've already done the Hob Gadling story, and the Element Girl story is unfilmable without using DC's cosmos (and honestly skippable anyway), so why not give us all of Dream Country in its original place? Works for me.

'Dream of a Thousand Cats' was a basically perfect adaptation with a stellar voice cast. A+, no notes. The story itself is slight but fun.

I am perhaps overly sensitive to stories that revolve around sexual assault, so I hated 'Calliope' on my recent reread. I disliked it much less onscreen. And it's always nice to see Arthur Darvill getting work, and Derek Jacobi too.

3. What's your current favorite boardgame and why?

With the caveat that I've only played it once in the last year-plus, and that's not too likely to change before April: Sidereal Confluence. I doubt I can improve on what I wrote awhile ago:
SidCon is a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun.
It is extremely interactive, it is surprisingly smooth-playing with low rules overhead despite the high emergent complexity, and it plays in under three hours. I adore it. I've only played with a full nine-player contingent once, and that was under highly nonoptimal conditions: multiple brand-new players that I had to hand-hold for the first couple of rounds, a loud room at a convention, a table setup that made it difficult for everyone to talk to everyone else. It was still a top boardgaming experience.

4. Still working through Discworld? What's your current favorite?

I am, but slowly. Partly I've been reading physical books instead of ebooks; partly I'm just finding Moving Pictures to be slower going. My favourite is definitely Pyramids, though I've a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, and Mort is also wonderful.

5. What food of your childhood is unobtainable where you live now, and is that a good or bad thing?

Growing up an Army brat means I don't really have food 'of my childhood,' other than the stuff Mom made on the regular, and most if not all of that is replicable. Closest thing would be good Memphis-style barbecue, which we had whenever we went to see grandparents: both sets lived an hour and a half out of Memphis (different directions). That lack is unquestionably a Bad Thing. There's at least one okay barbecue joint in the Lower Mainland but it's not the same.

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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