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December 9th, 2009
09:17 pm - The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
 The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Viciously gritty fantasy with a twisted sense of humor and queer protagonists. Retired soldier-aristocrat seeks his cousin, sold into slavery, and stumbles into imperial politics and a clash of elder races.
Well, damn. I was trying to think of a pithy way to get this book across. Because really, how do you explain a book whose major thematic movement is tied to an image motif of impalement – on spikes, on swords, on cocks, on doomsday weapons? Morgan has the remarkable trick of writing gaudy, gratuitous violence, then using its gratuity to push the whole unrelenting thing a bit deeper, which makes it not gratuitous at all, except that it still is. I'm not explaining this well.
I'm being kind of scattershot here, because I'm still processing. Not as subtle a book as I'd always like, but complicated, and richly backstoried, and interesting as all hell. This is not the sort of grittiness that makes me roll my eyes, it's the kind that makes the characters inside a pretty standard epic fantasy power structure into completely fascinating people. Sign me up for the trilogy.
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December 3rd, 2009
08:58 pm - First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher
 First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Conclusion to this six-book epic fantasy about the lost prince rising to power in the land overrun by creepy hive-minded spider thingies.
It's not romanesque, it's romanish. Which explains everything you really need to know about this series, except that it's predictable and has quietly annoying gender issues and is deeply, deeply satisfying. Like dolphin noises satisfying. Like Anne McCaffrey when you're twelve satisfying, only more swords.
No, wait, I do actually have something else to say. There's a moment in the epilogue where one of the characters explains Jim Butcher's books to us. He's talking about writing a history of the war, and he says the bits they're living now – everything since the very last second victory at the OMG! Last! Stand! Of brave! Men! – is the boring stuff, and all Jim Butcher cares about the interesting bits are the heroic battles and close calls and fights to the death. Forget about the reconstruction and the politics and the reunions and relationships.
Jim Butcher is wrong, and wow did he drop the ball on the denouement here, which is, you know, what he does every. Single. time.
But I dolphin noise anyway.
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08:44 pm - Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
 Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Heyer does Pride and Prejudice. She is the outspoken country girl, he is the prideful but goodhearted duke. They rub each other completely the wrong way, but are then thrown together by hilarious circumstance.
Picture my silly grin right now. I have figured out what my deal is with Heyer: the more like The Grand Sophy it is, the happier I am. By which I mean if our leading couple spend most of the novel being witheringly sarcastic at each other, when they aren't cracking each other right up to the annoyance and consternation of all the self-involved/stupid people around them, we're golden. I guess the heroine has to be, um you know. *mumbles* Fiery. Shut up.
This isn't quite as awesome as Sophy -- our heroine here is, um, a little too plot-required dumb, for one. But still. It's a formula, and it works.
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December 2nd, 2009
07:30 pm - Kushiel's Dart
 Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Epic BDSM prostitution fantasy. Young woman in fantasy!Europe is raised by a court spy to be a courtesan. Politics and adventure ensue.
I was trying to figure out which word is most important up there, by the way, but actually I think it works out that there's one that doesn't matter much. To wit: epic! BDSM! Prostitution! . . . fantasy.
And the really funny thing about this book is that an epic BDSM prostitution fantasy would generally evoke a response, one way or another. I mean, you'd really think, right? And yet here . . . not really. It's an interesting book, by turns annoyingly portentous and accidentally hilarious (there's no intentional humor, by the way) and then sometimes genuinely interesting. But mostly it was the book equivalent of white noise – soothing, better than silence, just there.
Epic BDSM prostitution fantasy. White noise. Who'da thunk.
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November 23rd, 2009
10:06 pm - Eclipse 2 edited by Jonathan Strahan
 Eclipse 2: New Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jonathan Strahan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stories Jonathan Strahan likes round two: more scifi, fewer women. I picked through this over several months, so random impressions from stories actually interesting enough to remember:
Ted Chiang, "Exhalation": The reason I picked up the collection, and totally worth it. Classic Chiang, if a bit didactic in that way he can pull off. I won't bother trying to describe it, because it's available here and you should all go read it.
Stephen Baxter, "Turing's Apples." Classic Baxter: interesting Big Idea, terrible character work, that perpetual feeling that the sentence after next is going to really annoy me.
Peter S. Beagle, "The Rabbi's Hobby." I think I'm missing the Beagle gene or something. I can look at this ghost story and think about all the good atmosphere and character work, and yet? Meh. Nothing happens.
Paul Cornell, "Michael Lorits is: Drowning." Not really a story, about the future of social networking. Well-executed and entertaining.
Tony Daniel, "Ex Cathedra." Swear to God, I can't tell if this story about the end of the universe is great or utter nonsense. I think it's great.
Terry Dowling, "Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose." Maybe this would have been interesting if I knew the surrounding universe? *shrug*
Nancy Kress, "Elevator." People in a hospital locked in an elevator, with one of the worst and most idiotic disability clichés front and center. Yuck.
Alastair Reynolds, "Fury." Strangely disappointing and obvious story about robot brothers and a galactic empire. I expect better from him.
Ken Scholes, "Invisible Empire of Ascending Light." A premise that really grabbed me, and an execution that was almost there. Cool politics, cooler world-building that I won't spoil. It made me want to read his fantasy novels.
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November 22nd, 2009
05:16 pm - Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker
 Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Soundbyte: Read Peter Watts's Blindsight instead.
Psychology professor is drawn into the FBI pursuit of his best friend, the sociopath who tortures through neurosurgery. It's a thriller about the implications of the brain as a physical substrate, how love for one's offspring, friendship, empathy are all physical processes that can be hacked and repurposed. It always surprises me how few people really know these facts, and are disturbed by them, because to me they are both obvious and kind of reassuring in a complicated way, but that's a topic for another time.
Mostly it's a book about the blindness of the conscious self known as "I," how we don't ever really have a grasp on sensory data, on other people, on our own decisions. Case in point: the consciousness known as "me" managed to strategically forget again that, oh yeah, I hate thrillers long enough for me to decide to read this one. This book embodies most things I hate about thrillers – unrelentingly awful people, twists made deliberately unfair, that vague desire to shoot myself in the head when it's all over. And it also didn't redeem itself through the treatment of modern consciousness research. Like I said, Peter Watts does a much more thorough, interesting job with this because he takes it to the next logical step – asking what consciousness is actually for, if it's so functionally useless.
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November 20th, 2009
04:49 pm - Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold
 Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In which this four-book romance fantasy wanders – by which I mean plot? What plot? – to a close – by which I mean babies for all!
Yikes. A friend called this the "never-ending beige adventure," which made me laugh. More than the book did.
I'm feeling kind of cranky about this book. It's intellectually boring, with a thematic conversation (communication, clashing and changing paradigms, etc.) little deeper than your average morality play. I could forgive intellectual boredom for emotional interest – God knows I've done that before. But my emotional needle didn't so much as quiver throughout. I will say that the book is at least prettily, if . . . rustically written. And I don't usually get cranky over boring, because boring for me is a great romance for someone else (though, I've never met anyone who was actually really moved by this particular series . . . Bueller?).
No, the real problem is the explicit and implicit helping of babymaking propaganda. Did you guys know that the purpose of marriage is babies? Didya didya didya? The sheer amount of moral imperative this series piles on reproduction – though, okay, not always heteronormatively – is staggering because half of it is delivered with this 'duh' of universal unarguable truth, which, um, no, and the other half feels entirely unconscious and kind of uncomfortable as a glimpse of author id to me. The older I get, the more toxic that becomes. Yeurgh.
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November 17th, 2009
08:38 pm - Matters of the Blood, Blood Bargain by Maria Lima
 Matters Of The Blood by Maria Lima
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Disclosure: I know the author a bit.
Hypothesis: paranormal romance is one big madlib.
Our heroine is a [description of paranormal attributes:] immortal faerie princess shapechanger weatherwitch healer psychic clairvoyant trust fund baby no for serious who gets involved with a [type of paranormal man:] vampire. Duh who has angst about [specific variety of manpain about his paranormal nature:] biting her and drinking her sweet sweet blood. They live in [location:] Texas and [verb and modifiers:] occasionally solve crime Also, there's a [love triangle:] love triangle.
About one in twenty of these suckers hits on the magical hotbutton combination for me. Otherwise, check, please.
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November 11th, 2009
02:40 pm - A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks
 A Leg to Stand On by Oliver W. Sacks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Sacks completely wrecked his leg in a run-in with a bull on a mountain in Norway, and barely got out alive. This is his memoir of his recovery, focusing on his post-operative distress to discover that the leg was psychologically absent from his body awareness, thanks probably to undiagnosed nerve damage.
I picked this up on a tangent from other research, and it was useful as subjective narrative. But it's also grossly overwritten in places. I'm kind of torn, because this book is clearly trauma post-processing from start to finish, and like a lot of post-trauma writing it's deeply self-involved and recursive and bound up in minutiae of memory that mean nothing to everyone who isn't Oliver Sacks. So kind of frustrating. But, I mean, I'm glad he wrote the book, because he clearly needed to.
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November 10th, 2009
09:04 pm - The Magicians by Lev Grossman
 The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Short version: rocked my socks! Shame about the protagonist, though.
Longer version: Extremely gifted and alienated seventeen-year-old boy is swept away from his Princeton interview to the entrance examinations for a secret college of magic. Quentin passes, matriculates, learns magic, and emerges on the other side not perceptibly happier than he came in. Then he and his friends discover a way into Fillory, the not!Narnia realm of the fantasy novels Quentin has never outgrown loving.
Ooh. I could sit here and make intellectually satisfied noises about how well this book's meta works – the allusions and homage's to the genre greats (including Harry Potter, natch), the reflections on the shape of story, the thematic conversation about what magic is and what it means to be an adult who believes in it. And the book does function very well on that meta level. But it's also a damn fine fantasy novel, with momentum and wonder and terror and humor. And writing, oh God. Writing that, more than once, socked me in the stomach and knocked the breath right out of me. Every fantasy novel that talks about the learning of magic from now on will be measured against the first half of this book, and most of them will be found wanting.
The problem is, though, that I periodically wanted to punch Quentin in his privileged, self-absorbed face. Gaah! The only thing that makes it bearable is that just when you want to grab him and shake him and tell him to OMG grow the fuck up, that's when Grossman is exercising the finest muscular control over the story. Quentin has to be the way he is for the book to work, for it to deconstruct coming-of-age fantasies the way it does, and I'm really glad it does. And because Grossman has compassion for Quentin, I found a few grains too, because every character in this book is broken in an awful or interesting way, but it just happens that our protagonist's way gets right up my nose.
Did I mention the amazing writing?
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November 9th, 2009
02:38 pm - The Sexual Politics of Disability
 The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires by Tom Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An issue survey book built around a structured interview study of a sample of British persons with disabilities. Thorough and inclusive – if anything, the author suggests he oversampled the LGBT population. It's particularly good on barriers to disabled sexual expression, and on unpacking the duel popular perception of disabled sexuality as non-existent but simultaneously perverse. Frustrating in the way of survey books in that I really wanted a half dozen books, each built off a fifteen page section here on the disability fetish market, institutionalized rape, sex surrogacy, etc.
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11:25 am - Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
 Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Alternate history 1914, where the Austro-German contingent has massive, striding mechanical walkers, and Darwin's work gave the west DNA and hybridized living creatures for flight and battle. Franz Ferdinand's son flees west, while a British girl dresses as a boy and enlists for the coming war.
Heee. It's kind of like Fullmetal Alchemist with cross-dressing. The alternate world technology is the best thing about this book – giant hydrogen-floating whale ships versus Star Warsy many-legged metal walkers! The story is otherwise cute, and fluffier than you might expect for, you know, the first world war. Relatively light-weight young adult, with a lot of nice color and zing. I'm certainly intrigued enough to pick up the sequel when it arrives.
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November 3rd, 2009
09:07 pm - The Science and Fiction of Autism
 The Science and Fiction of Autism by Laura Schreibman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Researcher/clinician paints a pretty thorough but accessible picture of autism, from symptomology to history to treatment modalities, with one of the better breakdowns on clinically-verified treatments versus wild speculation that I've seen in a while.
There's only one huge, overwhelming problem: it's a book about autism that fails completely to be about autistic people. Clinicians talk a lot here, and neurologists, and parents, but not a single autistic person puts in a word. This book is pretty much the epitome of the medical model, and there isn't a blink of acknowledgement that there are other paradigms at play, that some persons with autism are rejecting full-time residential treatment and proclaiming their autonomy and rights to live as they are, just as an example. Writing a book about autism in the twenty-first century that never even mentions neurodiversity is pretty shocking to me.
It's a good book, for what it is, but you have to know what that is before reading it.
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November 2nd, 2009
11:28 am - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets's Nest
 Luftslottet som sprängdes by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Out in the U.S. next summer, acquired now because I have my vays.:]
More weirdly compelling Swedish reporter/hacker mystery adventures, this time with extra government conspiracy. If you don't know about this series yet, for God's sake don't start here. Because when I bitched that the last book had no denouement at all, it turns out that's because there's actually 600 pages of more plot instead.
This book shouldn't really work, but mostly does. It has this slow, grinding pace, full of starts and stops, which is totally appropriate for the tedious and convoluted investigations that surround Salander in the hospital and then in jail. But this routine with swaths of meetings and new characters and endless back-and-forth is great reality pacing, but bad book pacing. And yet, things really do happen, and the book is emotionally satisfying, and I can cut it a lot of slack for probably not being as thoroughly edited before the author's death as he would have liked.
And really, if this is the last of the series we get, it's not a bad place to stop. I mean, all told, we have three books of convoluted plotting with a cast of vivid characters whose assorted traumas and polyamorous* relationships ring really true to me. And these books are not violent against women in ways that make it difficult for me to pick up other random mysteries now, because the comparison is just too awful.
*Apparently Word knows "polyandrous," but not "polyamorous." Eh?
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November 1st, 2009
09:15 pm - Eifelheim
 Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In 1348 aliens are stranded in an isolated medieval village, while in modern times a physicist and a historian investigate the mystery of that disappeared village.
Hrm. Just . . . not quite. A book all about clashing paradigms – alien science with religious natural philosophy, narrative history with theoretical physics, the short modern mystery novella with the slow medieval tale of aliens and the Plague. And it just never came together in that elusive way we call 'gelling.' Lots of neat cosmological metaphors, some pretty writing, but ultimately just bits and pieces instead of a working whole.
Still, the historical research is pretty cool, and I was both discomforted and interested in the bedrock literalness of medieval religiosity – the aliens want to go home to the stars, so of course the answer is to save them. But in terms of a book, if it's scifi does the Middle Ages, I prefer Connie Willis's Doomsday Book.
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08:53 pm - Apotemnophilia
 Apotemnophilia: Information, Questions, Answers, and Recommendations About Self-demand Amputation by Gregg M. Furth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A short book on the etiology and presentation of what is now called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition analogous to Gender Identity Disorder where a person feels that their real and proper body is not the one they have, but one missing a specific limb. Thus self-demand surgical amputation of healthy limbs, and occasionally just self-amputation full-stop.
Disappointingly poorly written as a technical matter. Twice as long and half as informative as some of the medical journal articles I've been reading, though I will give them credit for the extensive reproduction of comments and subjective impressions from BIID patients that you really can't get in the medical literature.
Also, the primary author is a Jungian, and I am really, really not, so there's that. You start going on at me about psychic archetypes, and I'll nod along, sure, because I have a literature degree and I appreciate a good narrative as much as the next girl. But in the pragmatics of neuropsychological research? You've got me for about two pages, then we're done.
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October 22nd, 2009
11:40 pm - Liar by Justine Larbalestier
 Liar by Justine Larbalestier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is difficult. Hard to talk about without ruining anything, and also hard to really describe as an experience, let alone rate. This is a book about a seventeen-year-old black girl who is dating someone else's boyfriend, until he is brutally murdered. She's also a liar – whether pathological to the point where she believes her own lies or merely compulsive, it remains unclear to the very end.
Yeah, difficult, because there is a lot of really great stuff here. The three movement structure with successive layers of more "truth" is built perfectly. The writing is vivid and complicated, with this lovely scattershot thematic arc of binaries mixed – Micah's race, her sexuality, her gender for a while, truth and lies, and, well, spoiler. This is a book that lies about its genre, and makes it work.
But the very success of the unreliable narrator means that I, for one, didn't get what I usually think I want from a book. You can't ever love a narrator you can't trust, and this book jerks you around from page one. In a good way – creepily and frighteningly and complexly – but there it is all the same. So I admire this book from a craft standpoint, and I keep thinking about it, but yeah. Difficult.
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October 20th, 2009
11:08 pm - Fire Lover
 Fire Lover: A True Story by Joseph Wambaugh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Two or three times a year I temporarily lose my memory and let my perennial fascination with profiling steer me down the dark, dark road of true crime. It's amazing that I can forget how [exploitative of violence/sexist/racist/judgmental/badly written:] [delete as applicable:] true crime can be, but two or three times a year I'm like oh my God, WTF, what am I doing.
This one wasn't that bad – it was just kind of boring, with a few off-tone rants about the propensity evidence rules in criminal trials, which, granted, look utterly insane to a non-lawyer. (And, uh, you know, to some of us lawyers too). Not an ounce of interesting psychological analysis to be found, except of the shallow/reductionist variety, surprise surprise.
Right, now I'm good for the next six months, hopefully.
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October 18th, 2009
03:41 pm - Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
 Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Discworld. Unseen University gets a football team, a university cook gets a chance to be repeatedly awesome, and an abused child just gets a chance.
I was looking forward to this book because hi, Discworld. And it was a pleasure to read, sure. But it's sort of like he took all the bits of a really great Discworld book – an extremely smart heroine, an absurd cultural artifact, people with something to prove – and assembled the whole thing, but then forgot to, I don't know, strike the match. There are a number of hilarious or wonderful or sad moments here, but there's no real unifying spark. It's still a very good book by generalized standards of 'things I want to read,' but judging against Pratchett himself . . . no, just not quite.
That, and okay, I just don't give a damn about football. I give an anti-damn, actually.
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01:34 pm - Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yowza. A story about a World War II cryptographer, a marine, a Japanese engineer, and fifty years later a software entrepreneur whose work turns out to depend on all of theirs.
Tremendously long and convoluted, with a plot that, well. See, it's quite silly in places, particularly the end, but that really doesn't matter because the point of this book is not the plot. This is one of those books where you just hang on and enjoy the journey through 1100 pages of math, and phreaking, and structural engineering, and military tactics, and academia, and electronic currencies, and I could go on. The whole thing is delivered in that straight-faced absurdist style Stephenson can do until the cows come home. What I'm saying is it's a ridiculous, enormous, wandery book with no real oomph to the through line and a lot of extra baggage, but I enjoyed the hell out of every page. Even the ones that hurt to read, and there were a few of those. The shameless glee with which this book flings itself down and just rolls around in its own piles of geekiness is infectious, and the way it's sad and hilarious and tragic just adds spice.
Ooh. That was nice. A big commitment, but yeah, that was nice.
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