a smattering of recently consumed media (not a comeback post)

Despite appearances here I have not given up on reading and interacting with artifacts of culture. This isn’t an apology for not posting book reviews, mind you, just an acknowledgment that they have been lacking. It’s possible I’ll be able to wrestle myself back into the swing of things soon.

One of the books I read in the close of 2014 and loved was Genevieve Valentine’s The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, which was about 12 dancing princesses in 1920s New York City. It took its fairy-tale roots seriously and was horrific in an utterly believable way.

I’ve also finally watched the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was an ordeal. Not because the show is bad or hard to watch, but because I wanted to get it all done before a friend returned from vacation, which meant I watched 144 episodes in 21 days. That is a lot of television. I liked the show generally. To me it’s a 3-season show about highschool Buffy followed immediately by a sequel show about more grown-up Buffy. I liked the first show better, but recognize that they were doing more interesting things in the later show. The Body is probably one of my favourite episodes of television ever. Anyway. Now I have Opinions about Buffy, so if that’s your thing we can converse!

I’m currently slowly reading a C.J. Cherryh novel called Fortress in the Eye of Time. It is slow going. A coworker is reading the Kingkiller Chronicles and I’m very jealous of reading fantasy that you can’t put down. I can put this down so easily.

I recently read Pinocchio Vampire Slayer and was also underwhelmed by it. I think it needed another pass on the dialogue to make it feel a little less amateurish. It read like it was trying to be Hellboy but with really obvious lines and jokes. I wanted to like it but couldn’t.

There’s been more. I will be doing a writeup for the Tales of the Black Company books I’ve been reading, but I want to do them justice. Maybe later this week.

book review: tehanu

Tehanu is the fourth book in Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea series and it’s the one that makes these books so powerful. Now, do not get me wrong, all the cool hero’s journey stuff that happens in the first three is great. You should totally read them if you haven’t. But those are tales of young adventurers heading out into the world and changing being changed by it, without any consideration of the women who do not go a roaming. Tehanu does that examination, and it does it by looking at how women’s strength is different from men’s strength and though it’s easily dismissed it’s worth a hell of a lot more.

I love this book for how it’s feminist in its challenging of fundamental values of what is worth celebrating: adventure or making a home livable. So often we just read about female characters off having adventures to make them seen as just as capable as men, while we don’t see many stories about men trying to be just as capable as women in these female spheres.

Anyway. I’m probably not talking about it correctly. I just loved this book as an adult in a way I don’t think I appreciated years ago (if I even read it – I didn’t have any clear recollections). It’s so good.

book review: rocannon’s world

Rocannon’s World is another Ursula K Le Guin paperback (I told you I recently bought a trove of these things). This one is a science fiction story about Rocannon, a high tech surveyor of planets and cultures, who gets trapped on a primitive world when the high tech enemy destroys his ship and crew. He and some stalwart companions must voyage across half the planet to find the enemy’s faster than light radio to get a message out to his allies. So yeah, it sounds like a basic colonial quest narrative.

What I loved about it was the long prologue, which is about a princess from one of the poor scrabbling cultures who travels to the stars to reclaim a treasure the colonialists stole from her ancestors. When she returns with the jewel, the vagaries of lightspeed travel mean that it was all for nothing and everyone she loves is dead. I love this because it puts the reader first in the head of the people who live on this world, and what their concerns are, before moving to the great scientific hero who must lead the primitives to save them from themselves.

Also, the quest is much more of a fantasy story than a technological one. Rocannon has an impermeable suit of protection, but he carries no weapons. At one point he is burned at the stake for days because his captors don’t understand it and think him magical, but he wins that confrontation by standing without water for that time, which is killing him just as surely (though slower).

The climax is a little anticlimactic, but I liked the book as a whole.

book review: the wise man’s fear

The Wise Man’s Fear is the sequel to Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. It remains a solid fantasy story, though it feels a bit more generic as it goes along. Kvothe hunts bandits and goes to the faerie realm and becomes a badass fighter in an exotic school with different cultural norms around sec, along with his magickal university exploits. There’s not much crazily new to this story compared to any other high fantasy kind of thing based on someone’s D&D campaign.

But Rothfuss just writes it all really well. The dialogue is great. The situations are more realistic and well-detailed versions of things you see in lesser books. I’ve gotten a little frustrated with the breakneck pace of how much has happened in three years of Kvothe’s life, but whatever. You don’t read a fantasy novel for its boring people I guess.

book review: the ocean at the end of the lane

The Ocean At The End of The Lane is Neil Gaiman’s latest book for adults, but it reminded me much more of Coraline or The Graveyard Book than American Gods.

Part of that is because of its small scale. There’s an author whose father has died and on his visit home for the funeral he stops by a neighbour’s farm. This prompts recollection of the story of the opal miner who was their lodger when he was seven, which is a story he’d forgotten. The story involves a creature giving people money and seducing his father so that he will never be able to get help.

I liked the story, it was beautiful and Gaimany. I kind of feel bad for saying it but I’d hoped for something more substantial.

book review: hilda and the bird parade

Hilda and the Bird Parade is the sequel to Luke Pearson’s Hilda and the Midnight Giant. In this one, Hilda and her mother are living in town, and Hilda’s kindness doesn’t really help her make any friends among her peers. She gets lost in the confusing streets with a bird suffering from amnesia, worrying her poor mother to death (not actually to death).

Another beautiful story, though a bit less impressive than the first one, it’s exactly the kind of comic I want in our library to be putting in kids’ hands.

book review: hilda and the midnight giant

Luke Pearson’s Hilda and the Midnight Giant is a beautiful comic. It’s a story about a little girl and her mom who live out far from town, and are being harassed by anonymous messages telling them to leave. And Hilda is pretty sure there’s a giant as tall as a mountain out watching them. Hilda does not want to go live in the nasty old town so she tries to negotiate with the tiny invisible people who live in their area and want her and her mother gone.

It’s cartoony with a purplish palette, and Hilda is clever and cute and makes perfect use of her fantastical world. The negotiation with the different layers of invisible government is all kinds of awesome. It works as a story about colonialism and who gets to live where too.

book review: lud-in-the-mist

Lud-in-the-Mist is a fairy story by Hope Mirrlees that was written in the 1920s but doesn’t feel especially out of date. There are some stylistic choices with the point of view never holding still with one character for long, which doesn’t feel very disciplined, but it’s completely forgivable because the story is so pleasant.

Lud in the Mist is a boring little town just to the East of the Faerie lands. When people start acting strangely the Mayor tries to get to the bottom of things and discovers smuggling of faerie fruit, which is such a tremendously obscene thing to eat or even discuss that in the court records it is referred to as silk. All sorts of things happen with this faerie fruit, including to the Mayor’s son and a whole school full of girls (guess which one is more of a concern). There are reversals and clever bits and friendship and strange oaths and it’s all quite charming.

If you enjoyed Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or Neil Gaiman’s Stardust you really should read this fairly neglected classic.

book review: the name of the wind

I’ve been hearing about Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind for years it feels like, but maybe that’s just because I read the blogs of writers who are friends of his. It’s a good fantasy novel that reminded me a lot of Ender’s Game, or a less postmodern The Magicians.

This is the first volume in a series about Kvothe, who is now an innkeeper named Kote, but was once much more. There’s an elaborate framing device wherein Kote is telling his story, the true story, to a Chronicler over three days. This first book is the first day of the story, and covers his boyhood to attending the magickal university. In the frame though we know that the Skraelings are being seen again and that people in his chosen hideyhole are ill-prepared to deal with them.

It’s all well-told, even if young Kvothe is a showoff asshole who has to assert his superiority at every turn. It’s a self-aggrandizing tale even as the innkeeper is trying to tell it warts and all, which is less than exciting to me. I just have a bit less patience for stories of people who are so obviously “better” than everyone surrounding them. And the flaw of pride in being awesome is an annoying kind of flaw in my books. The gender politics are really traditional, and though there are a few interesting economic interactions in the society fuelled by magic, the world doesn’t feel that fantastical.

But whatever. The story is engrossing enough, and in the end of this volume the idea of encouraging Kote to tell the story of his old self as heroically as possible is revealed to be part of the larger tale, which I found intriguing (I am a sucker for metatextual elements, I guess). This’d be a great book for a reader who’s read the Ranger’s Apprentice series and wants something a bit more sophisticated (and isn’t put off by the word-count of the tome).

book review: the tombs of atuan

The Tombs of Atuan is one of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and I have the vague feeling that it’s one she was less than pleased with decades later, which is why the main character returns in Tehanu. I confess I don’t know exactly why I think this is the case. It’s one of those things I read out in the digital wilds, I guess.

In this story, Tenar is a young girl who is raised to be a priestess of shadowy death in a nation ruled by god-kings (who are in competition with her older and more ineffable deities). She learns the ways of power and her labyrinth domain to such a degree that when Sparrowhawk the sorceror arrives looking for treasure and blundering into their traps she is in a much more powerful position than he is. But she abandons her life in the tombs and in the end she escapes.

Reading the story, I could see why LeGuin would want to revisit it later. Politically there’s a lot of reification of colonial and patriarchical themes in this story. Her backward ways are overturned by encountering the rational mage who liberates a girl who would remain trapped for all her life if he hadn’t happened along. This is happening to a heroine who’s already had her name stripped from her. I mean Tenar is a fine character but if you’re interested in feminism she’s not exactly an aspirational model.

It still strikes me oddly that I’m only reading these books as a 30-something-year-old person. I wonder why these weren’t part of my early sf education. They should be for kids today.