Fourteen books

[firstfrost]

Fight Me (by Austin Grossman)

I loved Soon I Will Be Invincible, but I only liked Fight Me. In general, I think I like sympathetic villains a lot more than unsympathetic heroes. Fight Me goes through the lives of four originally-teen heroes with wildly different origin stories (the Billy Batson/Shazam brick, the deposed faerie princess, the sort-of-time-traveling gadgeteer, and the corp-engineered assassin) - all the reviews call them the Breakfast Club, and it's definitely that vibe. They're government prisoners, and a superhero team, and sometimes supervillains, and sometimes just in hiding in alter identities. Mostly, they mope and snipe at each other a lot. There are a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards and flashmiddles and sometimes I lost track of when I was or why they were fighting this time. And it was hard to tell how much character growth they had because it wasn't really in order? I wanted to like it better; it amused me but I didn't care enough about anyone in it.

The Twist of a Knife (by Anthony Horowitz)

I think I missed the third book in the Magpie Murders series, but as with many detective novels the order might not totally matter. This time author-protagonist Horowitz is one, author of a play opening on Broadway, and two, the murder suspect when the worst critic is murdered. Detective Hawthorne has to sort things out. I still don't like fictional-Horowitz much - for the love of God, if you are ARRESTED FOR MURDER AND HELD IN JAIL you should not try to cover it up from your wife "because you don't want her to worry". I feel all the sympathy for her for thinking her husband actually did it. But I guess if you're putting yourself as a self-insert you can't actually make the character a paragon of all the virtues. It was clever, but again might not have cared enough about the characters. And I get the feeling that one of the points of this series is that Hawthorne is not supposed to be interesting, only smart.

The Last Devil to Die (by Richard Osman)

Thursday Murder Club book four, which I've been listening to with Jerry, and I adore them. This is the first one that I didn't read/listen to, before listening to together, so we both guessed at random plot points (it's cheating if I've already read it). These books are all about characters to care about, probably more so than any other mysteries I can think of. Even the drug dealers are remarkably sympathetic in their put-upon-ed-ness. A friend from a previous book is murdered, and there's a missing valuable package. Then more bodies start piling up; the drug dealers want to know where the heroin is, but the Murder Club wants to know who killed their friend. The ensemble continues to both grow ("Computer Bob" and the B plot of the romance fraud are hilarious, once Ibrahim takes over writing the lines for the fraud-ee) and shrink (Elizabeth's husband Steven has been sliding farther into dementia with each book, and he finally exits). There are some particularly nice turns for Joyce, who has to step up to be Elizabeth when Elizabeth is unavailable, leaving Ron "to play the part of Joyce" and burst into tears when needed for a scene. This one hits all the notes of "made me care, made me laugh, and made me think" with some bonus bits of "made me cry". Sometimes I read YA and think I'm getting too old for it; I am not sure I would have appreciated these properly when young.

The Starless Sea (by Erin Morgenstern)

I so so so wanted to love this book. I loved The Night Circus more than most books, and the meta narrative is about Stories, which always hooks me. When Zachary was young, there was a painted door on the wall near his house. He couldn't bring himself to try to turn the doorknob lest he be disappointed, and the next day it was painted over. Years later, Zachary is a media studies grad student, and starts reading a book, in which he reads the story of a boy who encounters a painted door on the wall near his house, and this time he pursues where the story goes, to the great underground library on the harbor of the Starless Sea, the magical library beyond all libraries. There are secret societies and time-crossed lovers, and the Owl King, and stories in books in other stories. And loads and loads of beautiful imagery of mysterious rooms and secret hallways and stairways and bookcases and stacks of books and cases of books and stories written on strips of paper or the wings of butterflies or in the taste of candy....

"You're kidding," Zachary says. He takes a pale pink disk that looks like it might be peppermint.
Mirabel smiles at him. She puts the case away without taking one herself.
Zachary puts the candy on his tongue. He was right, peppermint. No, steel. Cold steel.
The story unfolds in his head more than in his ears and there are words but there aren't, pictures and sensations and tastes that change and progress from the initial mint and metal through blood and sugar and summer air. Then it's gone.
"What was that?" Zachary says.
"That was a story," Mirabel says. "You can try to tell it to me but I know they're hard to translate."
"It was..." Zachary pauses, trying to wrap his head around the brief, strange experience that did indeed leave a story in his head, like a half- remembered fairy tale. "There was a knight, like the shining-armor type. Many people loved him but he never loved any of them in return and he felt badly about all the hearts he broke so he carved a heart on his skin for each broken one. Rows and rows of scarred hearts on his arms and his legs and across his chest. Then he met someone he wasn't expecting and...I...I don't remember what happened after that."
"Knights who break hearts and hearts that break knights, " Mirabel says.
"Do you know it?" Zachary asks.
"No, each one's different. They have similar elements, though. All stories do, no matter what form they take. Something was, and then something changed. Change is what a story is, after all."
"Where did those come from?"
"I found a jar full of them years ago. I like to keep them on hand, like always having a book with you, and I do that, too."

All the ingredients are there, but... for a book about stories, there is not enough story to it. If you took out all the descriptions, and all the substories (most are longer than the one about the knight) what is left could be boiled down to a short story in which Zachary tours a library and goes to a couple of parties and steals a book from a brownstone.

One of the things that it made me think about, though - when I wrote about Night Circus, I mentioned the mysterious magical bookstore that has wondrous stories you've never read before. That's still a tantalizing thought for me, but I realized that I'm no longer in the world where I've read all the books in my home library and the fear is that I can't find a new story. I live in the world now where I'm drowning in stories I haven't read. Back when I did physical books, my to-read pile grew faster than I could finish them. Now, when I look at a book on Amazon, it offers me a dozen more that look equally enticing. They won't all be great, sure, but I am not worried that I'll never find a story to love again. I worry that I won't have the time to read all the books I want to read. Which means... I'm not finishing this one. It's just homework to finish, and... there's almost something interestingly magical about a book leading me to the realization that I don't need to keep reading it.

The book seems like it should be like Piranesi which I loved; interestingly, reviewers seem to think that Night Circus:Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell :: Starless Sea:Piranesi; 'Two Magicians Fight' and 'A Weird Place' by Erin Morgenstern and Susanna Clark respectively. But I loved Night Circus and Piranesi more than their opposites. Piranesi was a strange dream I couldn't wake from; Starless Sea was an adventure story without much adventure. I seem to be focusing an awful lot on why I didn't like it, but this isn't a rant - it's not a terrible book. It just really bothers me that I didn't like it.

Mask of Mirrors / Liar's Knot / Labyrinth's Heart (Rook and Rose trilogy) (by M. A. Carrick)

A street urchin con artist finagles her way into a noble family by pretending to be the daughter of an estranged sister. She gets caught up in their own house politics; she's still caught up in the underworld politics she's escaping, and there are a lot of culture politics in the city of Nadežra she is caught up in too. The world building is seriously well done - (the Nadežran locals, the Vrazenians, have a ?Romani?-flavored culture, while their Liganti conquerors are more Venetian-Italian, but each has its own religion/philosophy/magic system underneath as well). In addition to our main character, who is wearing about four different hats by the end (depending on the plot she's in), there is the criminal-turned-semi-legit suave bastard, and the masked vigilante to share the stage - and then dozens of other characters each up to their own thing and forming their own alliances and feuds. There are a lot of plots and a lot of underlying world and a lot of angst and drama. There is very little exposition - the author trusts the reader to fill in the gaps, but there are a few times I could have used a little more prep for why a revelation was quite so epic, and at least one case where I seem to have missed the revelation entirely and the text just figured I had known it all along.

The setting is fantasy, but the sensibility is modern - we've got the colonization narrative of the Liganti, the Vrazenian policeman looked down on by his Liganti superiors and distrusted by his Vrazenian neighbors as a collaborator (we had a similar policeman in Fathomfolk - it's a good type), a plot about the Vrazenian lower class's access to clean water, and the general power dynamics of oppression - of course you can ask for more rights but if you start breaking rules or being uncivil along the way then how can you expect us to respect you?

Donaia forced her hands to relax. "I know there are problems. But the way to address them is through diplomacy. Not through bombing the bridges, trapping people on the Old Island as hostages. Not through chaos and bloodshed."
"We've tried diplomacy. Koszar told me how the meeting went. They refused to recognize him as a legitimate representative of Vraszenians in Nadežra."
"Because he's a criminal seditionist-"
"Nor will they recognize the ziemetse, because they're foreign powers. So no one has the authority to speak for Vraszenians here, and even the most reasonable people in the Cinquerat take that as reason to leave things as they are."

Made me think, made me smile, made me care. Four and a half stars

Service Model (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Tchaikovsky really doesn't stick to a niche. This one is very Douglas Adams - brilliantly, bitterly funny - and he knows it, dropping forty-two as an answer and also with a appearance of not-tea - but also a robotic Jeeves in search of a Wooster, and a character who isn't the Doctor but has the same sort of "crash through the ceiling into the center of the plot" approach to things. It starts with a bit of a slow burn through robotic valet Charle's bad day, and then goes full on into a travelogue through the robot apocalypse, veering sometimes into horror and sometimes into camp. Comedy is very much a matter of taste, and a lot of books advertised as hilarious (or even worse, "the next [Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett]) make me cringe, but this was perfect, and for all that it reminded me of Adams, I think Tchaikovsky has more empathy than Adams ever did, and I liked it better. I listened to this on audiobook (and stopped and made Jerry listen before I got too far in), and it's narrated by the author, who does an amazing job of that as well.

As I said, comedy is a matter of taste, so here's a bit from the very beginning, to introduce the main character, to see if it amuses you too. (Imagine House voiced by Marvin the Paranoid Android for the full experience).

For the next chore, Charles connected to House, the manor's majordomo system.
House, please provide me with updates from the lady of the house's maidservant concerning any special requirements that her ladyship has which require master's attention.
House took the usual long moment to process this request, the same glacial period of time it would have taken Master to blink one human eyelid down and then all the way up. House had been in continuous operation for far longer than Charles and its data pathways were cluttered and inefficient, built up and built over by a tottering tower of special requests, instructions, forbiddances, and caveats.
Eventually the expected reply came back. Charles, there are no special requirements. There has been no lady of the house for seventeen years and twelve days.
Charles ticked that off the list. House, please provide me with her ladyship's daily schedule.
Charles, her ladyship has not filed a schedule today. There has been no lady of the house for seventeen years and twelve days.
Another tick. House, please confirm any specific dress instructions provided by her ladyship that might impact on the master's choice of clothes. And, when House confirmed that the same ladyship who hadn't been present for more than seventeen years had failed to give any such instructions, House, please relay the master's filed schedule to the lady of the house's maidservant.

Ticks all three boxes: made me smile (laugh, even), made me think, made me care. Five stars

The Appeal (by Janice Hallett)

This was interesting. Murder mysteries all have to have a shtick, and the epistolary shtick has been done before (including by my favorite Sarah Caudwell, who died too soon), but this was a slightly different take on it, where various emails and texts have been gathered up in what I assume is some process of discovery (it is intentionally not explained at the beginning, for Reasons), so it's a deliberately higgledy-piggledy view of the various people, and multiple (wildly varying) views of the same people and events. I guessed many things, but not all of them, and it's both clever and amusing. Possibly I didn't care about most of the characters, but because most of them are interestingly dreadful (murder mysteries will tend towards "everyone is likeable" or "everyone is dreadful" more than many other genres). This author is going on my follow list.

We Solve Murders (by Richard Osman)

Very much in the same vein as the Thursday Murder Club - the same sort of banter, the same way the party keeps growing as they katamari up potential enemies into the scooby gang, the same combination of old and less-old characters. I didn't love it quite as much as I do the Thursday Murder Club - mostly I'm not as fond of professional mercenaries and criminals - but it's still good fun.

"Well," says Rosie. "Upside down. How dramatic. And a client of Maximum Impact?"
"A Platinum client, yes," says Amy.
"Why aren't I Platinum?" asks Rosie.
"Platinum is the lowest," says Amy. "It goes Platinum, Platinum Plus, Platinum XL, Platinum Gold, Platinum Diamond, and Platinum Platinum. You're Amber, because someone actually wants to kill you."

Voyage of the Damned (by Frances White)

This feels like it's aiming for And Then There Were None on a fantasy boat, but it's entirely populated by asshole teenagers who think they're either smarter than each other or just generally better due to political standing. I hated pretty much everyone except for the first murder victim but including the narrator.

The Mercy of Gods (by James S. A. Corey)

First in a new space opera (the Captive's War). Compared to the Expanse, this is both larger scale (a vast universe with a whole lot of different alien species) and smaller scale (we stick tightly to one group of humans, who are quickly captives). Like the Expanse, the characters are interesting and different and worth following along even before their world is set on fire. Once everyone is a captive, there's a lot of thought devoted to things like, how do you rebel against an overwhelming authority (as the Carryx are); the line between collaborating and biding your time, the line between resisting and just getting you and everyone else killed. Dafyd, the main character, is a thinky charisma-based listener - here's where we first sort of see how he works:

"There's a local girl I'm hoping to run into."
"And she'll be here?"
"I'm hoping so," Dafyd said. "Her boyfriend will." He smiled like it was a joke. Llaren Morse froze and then laughed. It was a trick Dafyd had, disarming the truth by telling it slant. "What about you? You have someone back at home?"
"Fiancée," the tall man said.
"Fiancée?" Dafyd echoed, keeping his voice playful and curious. They were almost past the part where Dafyd would need to say anything more about himself.
"Three years," Llaren Morse said. "We're looking to make it formal once I get a long-term placement."
"Long-term?"
"The position at Dyan Academy is just a two-year placement. There's no promise it'll fund after that. I'm hoping for at least a five-year before we start putting real roots down."
Dafyd sank his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned against the railing. "Sounds like stability's really important for you."
"Yeah, sure. I don't want to throw myself into a placement and then have it assigned out to someone else, you know? We put a lot of effort into things, and then as soon as you start getting results, some bigger fish comes in and swallows you."
And they were off. Dafyd spent the next half hour echoing back everything Llaren Morse said, either with exact words or near synonyms, or else pulling out what Dafyd thought the man meant and offering it back. The subject moved from the academic intrigue of Dyan Academy to Llaren Morse's parents and how they'd encouraged him into research, to their divorce and how it had affected him and his sisters.
The other man never noticed that Dafyd wasn't offering back any information about himself.
Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him. Which was convenient, even on those occasions when he didn't find himself liking them back.

So a lot of the book is Dafyd trying to listen to and understand the aliens, as other people despair or defy them; Dafyd isn't always right, not like a Clever Earthman of early SF, but he's right enough that the reader can imagine that some progress might be made. Still, this is very much the first part of the story, not nearly as self-contained as Leviathan Wakes, so you might want to wait until it's done. (It's currently slated to be a trilogy, but who knows where it will end up?). I also read Livesuit - a related novella, a disturbing Starship Troopers-adjacent piece of the war. I don't see how to connect the two pieces together or what that means for the scope of the rest of the series, but I'm happy to be along for the ride.

Titanium Noir (by Nick Harkaway)

This is a perfectly reasonable noir SF story: Cal Sounder is a detective who specializes in dealing with crimes having to do with Titans, who are larger, stronger, closer-to-immortal versions of humans due to their advanced (and expensive) gene therapy. A puzzlingly normal (not a celebrity, not vastly rich) Titan has been shot, and Sounder gets to partly investigate and partly keep the case from causing trouble for billionaire Stefan Tonfamecasca, owner of the aforementioned gene therapy. (Because it's not noir if there isn't an internalized conflict of interest that the protagonist has to weigh). It's less pyrotechnic than I expect from Harkaway; a genre a few steps over from his usual. It didn't completely fill any of my care/think/smile stars, but it's generally solid and atmospheric and dystopian, with a good mystery plot - not a puzzle to solve but a layered past to excavate.

Seven Demons (by Aiden Truhen)

However! Audible threw in a preview for Seven Demons at the end of Titanium Noir and it turns out that Aiden Truhen is also Nick Harkway, who is also Nicholas Cornwell - and Amazon lists Titanium Noir as "by Nick Harkaway and Nicholas Cornwell" and it's like there's no point in trying to keep track of anyone's pen names at this point. Anyway, Seven Demons is full of all the pyrotechnic I was missing, but it's a non-SF (as far as I can tell) heist, so maybe that's why the different name? Reviews on Amazon complain about the lack of punctuation, but the audiobook narrator (Christian Coulson, and they better have paid him well) just blazes right through whatever lack of structure Truhen is throwing at him (from run on sentences to sex noises) and it's hilarious and R-rated and madcap. I think this is actually the sequel to The Price You Pay, but that isn't on audiobook, and perhaps I'll read it next. Jack Price is a... um... a criminal mastermind? Well, he's the leader of the Seven Demons, who are a criminal gang (though a ridiculously wealthy one, so some of their heist problems are solved by just throwing insane amounts of money at the problem. Perhaps I will understand the business model better if I read the first book). His girlfriend is a "global science felon" which is a charming version of "mad scientist", and I always love those. Okay, this is the part that I played for Jerry, and you can imagine how the narrator earned his paycheck here. Jack has just been stabbed by a small child in lederhosen nicknamed Evil Hansel:

It hurts getting stabbed in the leg. It communicates like few other things communicate that someone would like you to fuck the fuck off.
Doc says: "Do not touch the--"
(ZwinggggSMASH.)
(That is the noise bullets make when they are fired from a long way away.)
(It is one of the few other things that communicates more than being stabbed in the leg communicates that someone would like you to fuck the fuck off.)
(Bang.)
(That is the noise of the shot being fired it comes really late it is quite annoying. Now we are hiding behind a post-box. Swiss postbox. Good iron construction. It is a criminal offense on a pretty massive scale here to interfere with the postal service Volodya said so someone is in big trouble also probably shooting people in a built-up area for just no good reason that is likely to be a no-no also. That and stabbing but Evil Hansel is a minor so probably some sort of really shiny Lego-based rehab for him if I don't catch him first and cut off his pointy little Sound of Music-looking motherfucker head with--eheheh--a Swiss Army knife, which I will totally buy for the--
"DO NOT TOUCH--"
"I am NOT--"
"Do not touch the fucking knife Price for--"
"I am not touching it--"
"You are touching it how are we having this conversation DO NOT TOUCH THE--"
"I AM NOT--"
(ZwingggSMASH.)
"In fact you ARE that is--"
(Bang.)
"Cops will be here any--"
"That may or may not be a good--DO NOT TOUCH--"
"It's in my fucking leg of course I am touching it in that sense it is touching me--"
"I did not mean that, your other hand is--"
"I--oh shit I had no idea I was--"
"Keep your fucking hands away from the--"
"IT IS IN ME I HATE--"
"STOP TOUCHING--"
"I AM NOT IT IS ITCHY IS ALL I--"
"PRICE LEAVE THE--"
"GET THE ITCHY OUT OF ME--"
"NO NO NO NO YOUR DAMN HANDS YOU DAMN--"
(Bonk.)
No one says bonk but it is the noise I hear.
Somewhere Doc says: "Thank you Kex that was very timely. Lucille get that car please I'm afraid we'll have to kill the driver--yes stop screaming madame--I know it's unfortunate but I will make this painless there we are--goodbye I will do my best to take care of your family and so on if you have any--no that's it relax good and five four three two one done. Rex you drive GO. Jesus that's a lot of blood Price you IDIOT Charlie give me your belt now hold this and--for Christ's sake Charlie I do not want to fucking hear it you ALWAYS wear underwear when robbing a bank that is just professional--now TWIST--"
White light and hot cold and sleep now.

Absolutely fucking bonkers but a glorious roller coaster of a story.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

On the three tickyboxes: these days I often find myself looking for something that doesn't make me think (because my brain is tired or stressed and the point of reading is to amuse/distract myself)...but it can't *entirely* not make me think because then it would be stupid and boring. Which is hard to look for in a new-to-me book. (Re-reading is often useful in this bucket, both because familiarity = less hard thinking required, and because I know what level of thinkiness & stressfulness a book I've already read will get me into.)

[firstfrost]

Yeah, re-reading is a lot better for comfort reads - the stress is lower, and the Terrible Revelations are less of a surprise.

[desireearmfeldt]

Well, and alternatively, comfort-genre stories, like comedy, can get irritating if they're not just the one for me.

Bookstore/coffeeshop (and/or cats) found family second chance comfort as a genre appears to be having a boom just now. I've read a couple and they were nice but I think I'd pretty quickly hit my limit...

[firstfrost]

I think I didn't use enough words - what I meant is "my favorite books can more easily turn into comfort reads on a re-reading, even if they weren't 'comfort' genre on the first go-round [because reasons]".

[desireearmfeldt]

I think I understood what you meant... What I meant was, familiar books as comfort reading have the additional advantage that actual comfort-genre books can be rather hit or miss on the enjoyable-to-read criterion. :)

[arcanology]

that actually is how I feel about starless sea but didn't really want to admit. It's been on my "I should reread" list for forever but... I don't actually want to as it turns out.

[mathhobbit]

_Piranesi_ purchased. I LOVED _Starless Sea_ and couldn't wait to give it to my college roommate, who was very polite about the awful book I'd given her. There are some books where my advice is to read the preview and decide based on that; this may be one of them.

[firstfrost]

I really should put more weight on the preview and less weight on the cover; it's a terrible flaw of mine as a book-picker-upper. And it's easy when the preview is terrible or Not For Me (or, alternately, amazing); it's the so many cases where the preview is "hmm, this is medium interesting but it hasn't quite hooked me" that are the worst.

[vestigialvisage]

A quote from The Price You Pay:

"Right on time there's the drone like a little robot cupid and the band strikes up over on my left because of course I had to have a band I mean what's romance without music and because we are modern and cool and ironic I figured the most romantic thing would be a swing version of Gangnam Style and so that is what Tuukka hears when he should be hearing the little rotors getting closer."

Yeah, the punctuation thing takes some getting used to.

[firstfrost]

I am reading The Price You Pay now, and I find that I think the words out loud in my head as I go. It is a little less easy than than having the narrator do the work for me. :)