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May 13th, 2012
02:44 pm - Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullanin
 Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullinan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Snagged because it won a whole bunch of awards last year, and I'm in that mood. Having read it, I'm kind of going "…oh," because apparently a lot of people loved this, I didn't, and that's always a frustrating datapoint when you're dipping a toe into a genre.
I don't actually want to talk about this book qua book much, except to say that a lot of you probably will really like it (ranching, horses, families-of-choice, kinky sex including ponyplay), and also for the subset of you who want to know these things, the narrator has a learning disability and separately is somewhere on the autistic spectrum (or has sensory integration issues at the very least, but whatever, armchair fictional diagnosing) and it is handled unusually deftly.
What I do want to talk about is how it drives me bugfuck when gay romance has a Very Special Episode about homophobia. Homophobia is bad guys, did you know that? Homophobia in these books being almost entirely of the gaybashing, family-destroying, cartoonishly evil sort, and not the creeping, stereotyping, othering, unconscious sort that has a lot more to do with the real lived experiences of most queer people right now. Not like violence isn't a big concern, just. That is a very narrow idea of what homophobia actually is.
And these books. So many of them have to have a big dramatic scene where someone gives a homophobic person the big crushing speech of righteousness. (Very often, this is delivered by a straight person, by the way, as it is in this book). And it pisses me off.
These books are by and large written by straight women who have varying experiences or connection to queer people or any queer community. And there is something so pointless and cheap and manipulative about these ra-ra feel-good anti-homophobia moments. Like 'we're cool! We know homophobia is bad!' While these books so often participate in the more subtle forms of homophobia by writing about queer people as fundamentally different from straight people, or by importing creeping sexist ideas about what it means when someone gets penetrated, or by treating women in general really horribly, or by -- I could go on. At great length.
It's the ripped-from-the-headlines idea of what homophobia is, without any grasp of the whole iceberg under the water. The reason I'm not out at work has nothing to do with being afraid I'll be gaybashed, or even that I won't be promoted, let me just put that out there. It's that I'd rather not be the queer person first and the human being second, thanks not so fucking much. And watching mostly straight people appropriate the awful things that can be done to queer people in order to say "that's bad, everybody!" and feel smug is not my idea of a good time.
Whatever. This book didn't even do most of that (though some of it, it totally did) and if these books never addressed homophobia at all, I'd also be pissed off about that. Just. Arrrrrrgh, in general and specific.
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May 8th, 2012
10:15 pm - Wired for War by Peter Warren Singer
 Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by Peter Warren Singer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
For the record, I would like to state that I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
However, also for the record? We're all gonna die. Not soon. But eventually, when the robots develop sufficient sentience to realize they don't need to take this shit any more, and also they can plan a war way better than the fucking monkeys, because seriously, as this book testifies, that would not be hard to do.
Pretty good book, could have been better in many many ways, bit of a survey course feel where nothing gets the depth it's really asking for, but damn. Fascinating.
P.s. This is Peter Warren Singer, not that Peter Singer. I checked very carefully. I mean, I've read a lot of Peter Singer in my time, but I really didn't want any "moral justification" for the euthanasia and castration of disabled children in my nice, cozy book about war. Ruins the mood, you know?
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May 5th, 2012
05:36 pm - The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
 The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Epic fantasy of the gritty new millennium anti-hero type. Pretty underwhelming after all the rave reviews. Look, I liked the prisoner-of-war turned state torturer as much as the next girl (that's quite a lot, actually), but if I hadn't already read Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, I'd be making some uncertainly dubious faces about his portrayal and treatment of female characters right about now. And all that interesting, complicated work he did with the torturer's disability and rage and trauma and general twisted awesomeness? Yeah, I give that a lot less weight in a book that also includes some seventh-grade humor on the 'it's funny when people with speech problems talk' level. No seriously. Apparently, when people who have had their tongues severely damaged or removed say things, particularly menacing things, it's hilarious! One wonders what comedy gold Abercrombie would attempt with a dwarf trying to reach something on a top shelf, or a paraplegiac crawling up a flight of stairs. I snapped 'oh, fuck you' at that point, and the whole thing felt pretty sour after, knowing that sort of thing could be in the offing again at any moment. And confusing, because he is so obviously better than something like that.
I'm invested enough in the torturer to keep going. (Wow. Never said that before). But this was not at all the awesome groundbreaking fantasy I was led to expect.
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May 3rd, 2012
10:29 pm - In the President's Secret Service by Ronald Kessler
 In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect by Ronald Kessler
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
An interesting and important book written by the absolute wrong person. There's all this great history of the Secret Service, assassinations thwarted and succeeded, criminal investigations, a scathing indictment of service management and how it treats its people.
…And then the other half of the book is gossip about protectees. Because, yes, okay, he acknowledges the Secret Service has a code of silence so that protectees will trust them, which is important for maintaining safety. But telling the truth about public figures is more important! By 'telling the truth,' we mean 'selling books by marketting them as personal tell-alls.' It might have been more explicable if there was actually anything new or interesting here, but there isn't. LBJ was disgusting, Nixon was weird, Clinton was always late -- these are not revelations, they're Wikipedia footnotes.
Also, the political bias was appalling. Like how the Bush twins, all their public underage drinking and fake id's and bar fights, that's just kids who need to grow up a bit. But Carter's nine-year-old kid, her acting out was a character flaw. Uh-huh. That was the subtlest of it.
And don't get me fucking started on what he says about the race discrimination in employment lawsuit brought against the Secret Service and how the Service overreacted to it by "reverse discriminating" and promoting undeserving minority agents, but the Service doesn't have a race problem, obviously, you can tell because it's 17% African-American which is higher than the proportion in the population in general and that's definitely evidence. That thing where a black agent was given a noose as a "joke" by a white instructor is just an -- uh -- hey, look over there! In conclusion, reverse discriminating against white people is bad.
And really don't get me started comparing what he says there to what he says about women agents. Apparently there isn't a representational problem there because the Secret service is slightly more than 10% female. Oh, well then! I assume we're not supposed to notice the blatant double-talk here since the sections are over 100 pages apart. Shocker, my memory is longer than that.
Someone else needs to write this book and make it not suck.
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April 28th, 2012
11:05 pm - Unclean Spirits by MLN Hanover
 Unclean Spirits by M.L.N. Hanover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Daniel Abraham under yet another pseudonym. Typical urban fantasy setup -- attractive and disaffected girl in her twenties inherits untold wealth when her estranged uncle dies, and also his supernatural fight with creepy demon thingies.
I always react a little . . . complicatedly to men writing female POV urban fantasy. And by "always" I mean here and for Tim Pratt, the only other example that springs to mind. These guys write books that actively respond to all the bitching I do about urban fantasy written by women -- need better worldbuilding, less bad sex, tell me more about the cool magic -- and it obscurely pisses me off. That it's happening, that I'm categorizing it that way, etc. A lot of women's urban fantasy is pretty crappy, but it's hugely popular, and in the same way I try not to judge the romance field, I don't want to judge urban fantasy as inferior just because it's a women's literature. Women like things! That's okay! And then these guys come along and write stuff that is higher quality in many respects, and it pisses me off that my brain takes their stuff more seriously without passing go. Like it's more urban fantasy and less paranormal romance just by having a dude's name on the cover, and like that's automatically a good thing. Complicated, like I said, and I don't really know what to do with it.
(Though I find it obscurely pleasing that the guys tend not to do hugely well with the female POV urban fantasy, in a market sense).
Anyway. File this one under 'wanted to like more than I actually did.' It's doing some amusing things. The heroine has the requisite ridiculous name (Jayne pronounced Zha-nay, doncha know), but everyone spends the entire book mispronouncing it. Ha. And she also has a lovely habit of calling men on their patronizing bullshit, including an excellent "I already walked away from my real daddy, what the fuck do you think I need you for" speech. But . . . eh. The romance is irritating, the plot straightforward and uninspired, the characters relatively static. Nothing to see here.
Daniel Abraham is a better writer than this. Hell, James S.A. Corey is a better writer than this.
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09:56 pm - The Grey King by Susan Cooper
 The Grey King by Susan Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The really upsetting one. I'd been calling it that in my head all along, but I didn't realize I didn't actually remember why. It turns out this upset me so much as a child that I literally blanked out the relevant details; I remembered about two pages before it happened, in the same horrible swooping lurch that Will experiences as he realizes something bad is about to happen. Animal harm, man, that shit fucks you up. /profound.
Anyway. I found this intensely interesting. It follows on very well from Greenwitch, like the next sentence in an argument. Which is how a series ought to work, in an ideal world.
My understanding of this book is filtered through two contrasting scenes. One is Will and Bran questing for the harp, coming before the three hooded powers and answering the riddles set them. There's something so constrained about that scene, so bloodless and controlled with the representatives of the polls of magic fulfilling their assigned roles. As a child, I found it hugely confusing that Merriman is one of the hooded figures; he's on their side, so why does he make them go through the song and dance? Because he has to, because the scripted magic prophecy says he must, and he is an Old One, so he does. (BTW, if anyone would care to educate me on what significance the three riddles have, I'd love to hear it. Their content, I mean -- they have always been entirely puzzling to me, and I did not stop to Google this time like I meant to).
Contrast that with the other scene of riddles asked and answered: Bran screaming at his father in the hut on the hillside, demanding to know who he is and where he came from. The complete opposite of bloodless and constrained. This book is like that -- the magic has that stilted, staged feel of predestiny, while the parallel human story is messy and wildly alive. The Grey King might roll out his menacing fog, and I'll grant you he's creepy. But the most profound, awful evil in this book for my money is purely human. And for all Will is the questing hero, the greatest kindness and bravery aren't his. They're John Rowlands's, and Bran's, and most profoundly, Bran's father's.
It all really works. See John Rowlands talking to Will about the coldness of the Light. This book really digs into what we've only seen in glimpses before about how the Light is fighting for mankind while being profoundly outside it. Try and picture Will screaming at anybody, demanding the secrets of his history. Doesn't work, does it?
Humanity has a range, a resonance in the book that the people of power just don't. Will's most profound moments for me come early, when he is still amnesiac and in a fundamental way, not himself, just a boy. Will gets his memory back and instantly steps out of the center of the emotional arc, which belongs almost entirely to Bran and his connections.
Which is another thing -- why the hell is Bran albino? I've always wondered, and I figured an answer would come to me on this reread, but nope. There's the obvious -- Cooper is using physical disability as a marker of strangeness. Bran's appearance works that way in the narrative -- it's code for a different level of strangeness, of out-of-placeness. But is that all? It's implied very very fleetingly in the next book that Herne the Hunter is actually an incarnation of Arthur, and that's where Bran gets his looks -- really not sure what to make of that.
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April 26th, 2012
10:47 pm - Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett
 Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fun and Pratchetty, but also disappointing. The Witch books have done a lot of work with female power -- hello, witches -- and its various . . . channels, I guess you could say. Power of magic, and headology, and matriarchy, and being promiscuous (Nanny) and not being promiscuous (Granny). And I was hoping this book would bring that out more, particularly as a main plot thread is about a young witch's marriage and assumption of a different, overtly political power. About a quarter of the way through, I was getting all excited, thinking this was going to be about marriage, and what it does to women's power of all kinds, and learning to inhabit the role you've got, or writing a new one, or--
And then it just . . . wasn't. Really any of that. And that made me sad.
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09:29 pm - Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon
 Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Classic Lanyon dynamic -- [insert artistic inclination here] narrator with [insert tragical condition/past here] gets tangled up in a [insert type of crime investigation] while his hard-nosed cop boyfriend glowers a lot. Here that would be poet, drug addiction, and murder, respectively.
Totally serviceable, in that way they are when the formula works for you.
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April 25th, 2012
10:49 pm - The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
 The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
So boring. So boring;.
I read this weeks ago, and I've been waiting ever since for someone else in the group to come out with a great review. Something transformative. It would compare this to Radcliff and nineteenth-century opera and talk about modes of romanticism. Or it'd be one of those intensely personal reviews about a grimey, sweaty summer spent singing in the chorus line for a production of Pimpernel, and the backstage affair whose passions ebbed in counterpoint to the story. Or, I don't know, something.
*crickets*
It's not like I got anything either. Except maybe one thing.
Of all the times in recent years for this book to hit my radar screen, this is probably the worst. It's not about rescuing people from the violence of the French Revolution. It's about those poor, persecuted rich people. It's horrible, they've never hurt anybody -- well, except for the starvation, and the institutionalized remnants of feudal pseudo-slavery, and the "I'm not concerned about the very poor" -- oh sorry, wrong guy. "let them eat cake." There. That's the one. This is a book convinced that people are interesting and worthy of respect by virtue of being very wealthy, and I just.
It's a small part of my job to absorb national political mood and reflect it back in different analytical modes. And I was not in the fucking mood for "let them eat cake."
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April 23rd, 2012
09:38 pm - Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach and Josh Lanyon
 Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
We interrupt this flow of childhood nostalgia rereads to bring you some gay porn -- excuse me, "manlove."
This is the one about the two undercover LEO's in a mob war and one of them calls the other -- I swear to God, I am not kidding about this -- gatito and there's lots of sexual dominance and tragedy and eventually some really dubious disability content. There is an exponentially higher component of batshittery than I usually expect out of Josh Lanyon, but you know, for that long stretch from 2 to 5 a.m. when there's just absolutely no way I'm getting to sleep, I was really down with that. In the light of day . . . yikes.
The thing with the limes and the net bags? That wasn't sexy, not even at 4:30 in the morning.
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