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firstfrost- Fragile Things (by Neil Gaiman)
- I don't think I've ever read an anthology of stories, that I liked all the stories, no matter how much I usually like the author(s). This one is no exception. Sadly, my favorite ("A Study in Emerald") was also my favorite from Shadows Over Baker Street, which I seem to have not reviewed; it's the Sherlock Holmes / Lovecraft mashup, and most of the other authors did the same version of "Holmes investigates something spooky! Ooh, monsters." (Oddly, the inside cover blurb for Fragile Things is factually incorrect in the description of the story, leading me to suspect that the blurb author missed the the twist). I also really liked "Goliath", which was written for the Matrix web site. And "Sunbird" works well for what it is. (I think I like the stories best where one, something happens, and two, I understand what it is that happened. Rather like my reaction to the ten-minute play festival.)
- Carnival (by Elizabeth Bear)
- Like Undertow, the first of Bear's books I read I found this interesting, but not as gripping as I would have liked. I think I may just not be on the right wavelength for her; I have no real complaints. There's some interesting sparring over a class of cultures ("You cull people and practice fetal murder!" "Well, *you* infantilize and eat animals, and enslave men!") The main (New Amazonia ("What, you think our founders had no sense of humor?")) society keeps their "stud males" mostly at home because they're dangerous, and lets "gentle" (gay) males out. The plot is sort of like a two-person Assassin game that I think I missed many of the complexities of, in part due to consistently confusing the two characters (for which I have no excuse). Once I finally sorted them out, and the action picked up towards the end, I was less muddled. Mostly, I think I was a poor reader of this book. Three somewhat ambivalent stars.
- The Well of Ascension (by Brandon Sanderson)
- Book two of the Mistborn trilogy. This book is kind of closer to the main plot stolen for Tourmaline than either Tzalmir or Ankh-Morpork, but I didn't read it until now. In book one, the heroes defeated the permanent empire; in book two, they're trying to put their city government back together in the chaos while trying to advance a more liberal social agenda and keep their serfs free. :) Anyway, I'm really enjoying the series, though I wish he would resolve a few more of his mysteries sooner. Four stars.
- The Plutonium Blonde (by John Zakour & Lawrence Ganem)
- A science fiction pulp detective novel. About as silly as you'd expect from that name and description, but it's smart about its silliness, if that makes any sense. The quick description of the setting is "... after a handful of species-altering upheavals, Earth-shattering cataclysms, history-changing extraterrestral contacts, and pop-culture disasters, the world is now a pretty safe place." It doesn't tell you about any of the cataclysms in the backstory, that's just the setup to "and now it all looks like what we thought the future would look like in the 1950s." Fluff, but fun.
- The Alienist (by Caleb Carr)
- An interesting combination of historical fiction and serial-killer thriller that somehow didn't manage to feel right as an example of either genre to me. Watching the characters try to develop profiling was interesting (as opposed to in many modern books, where it's something of a magic wand wielded by NPCs); the main detective was a little too annoying for me, and the narrator was probably more opaque to me than he should have been. More of a "not so much for me" book than anything I can really complain about. Three stars.
- Off Armageddon Reef (by David Weber)
- I seem to have much less patience for books I don't like when I listen to them as audiobooks, probably because I can't skim or skip the boring parts. Well, I had no patience for this one, and only listened as far as I did because it was my airplane audiobook. It appears to be the adventures of a super-powered (and sapphire-eyed) Mary Sue named Merlin (but who is really Nimue in android disguise (?!)) who comes to save the One Good Country in the World Of Bad Religion. I rather think that if my civilization and everyone I had ever known got wiped out by aliens, the highest thing on my priority list would not be making sure the last vestiges of humanity were mindwiped into worshipping me as a god until I died of old age, but that's the flavor of villain we're dealing with. (The one good thing about listening to it as an audiobook was that it let me mostly ignore what is apparently a highly eccentric naming convention: Zhenifyr, Zhasyn, Zhozhef, and so on.) One star.
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Date: 2008-12-30 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 11:01 pm (UTC)(Have you read the sequels to Shadow in Summer? I should get around to that at some point.)
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Date: 2008-12-30 11:02 pm (UTC)