Book: "A Companion to Wolves" Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

[hawkwing_lb]

Books 159-160, Fiction 150-151:

150. A Companion to Wolves, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette.

Wow.

I will say this again: wow.

There is so much in this book I don't know where to begin. matociquala's books - especially her fantasy - always leave me lost for breath and lacking words. truepenny isn't far behind. What they've done together...

It's as sharp and as icy and as brutal as the Norse mythos in which it feels so very firmly rooted. It's a coming of age novel, but not in the usual way. It's a novel about losing innocence and finding something more. It's violent, and bloody, and very, very, compassionately human.

Read this book.

Seriously.

151. Black Sun Rising, C.S. Friedman.

Dense, complex, thinky book that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy and does it well. It's the first book of a trilogy, and I'm certainly tempted to read the next, though I found Black Sun Rising to be somewhat fatiguing in its density.

But. Maybe I should read some of these other books first? The ones that have been sitting on my shelf for months and months...

---

Okay, having watched the first two episodes of the original Mission: Impossible, I may be developing a fondness. Despite the utter, utter ridiculousness of the acting, plot, and setting (Russian prisons do not have giant windows! The Soviet Union might have been sprawlingly corrupt, inefficient, and in certain aspects even evil, but individuals were not all incompetent, evil or stupid!), and certain cultural artefacts that do not please, I fear I am... interested. Perhaps even compelled.

I have the weakness for the caper and the ticking clock.

---

It's autumn at last. No wonder I keep wanting to curl up and hibernate.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

The original Mission:Impossible was utterly impossible to believe and yet... I remember watching this on TV (yes, I am that old) and feeling my heart just pounding away during those absolutely critical scenes. The music still sets me off. Just thinking about it makes me a little edgy and nervous.

::looks shiftily about::

On to other things. Hibernation is good, as long as the dogs also have this memo. If they don't have the memo, they tend to wake you early for their food. Or maybe it's just me. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

The key is the melodrama, the caper and the ticking clock, methinks.

I have no dogs, only 0630 trains to catch. Alas. Hibernation is devoutly to be wished, but not to be consummated. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Yes, the writing and the sound effects -- but also the acting. All of the regulars on M:I were good actors.

Hibernation, alas, is an impossible dream (cue "Man of La Mancha"). ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Except the headline guy. Or perhaps I'm just allergic to the square jaw. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

What? You no like Peterrr Grrraves? White-haired, gravitas-exuding Peter Graves??? You must be AMERIKANSKI! Take her away! We'll interrogate her later. (jackbooted thugs in KGB uniform drag her off)

Sorry. I got carried away by a flashback. Ever since my time in the Siberian camps I've been prone to these...memories. Especially when I think of the people who left me there to be captured..::twitch::

You were saying?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

No, the other bloke. The team leader. *does not remember names*

Ah, the jackbooted thugs. Such a staple of the spy genre.

(Why are they always jackboots? And thugs?)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oof..me neither. Although I can safely claim doddering age and decrepitation of the memory on my part, seeing as how it has been at least 35 years since I last watched M:I. Yanno, if neither of us can remember him, clearly he was not important enough to be remembered. So there.

(A) Jackboots were the obvious signal, like black hats on bad cowboys (and thus George Lucas' stunning display of transversion -- nay, subversion of the ideal in Star Wars, where the good guys wore black..but I digress). Who else wears the darned things? I suspect no one likes to wear jackboots because they are supremely uncomfortable, and make the wearers rather irritated, and prone to engaging in acts of torture just to take their minds off their discomfort. In my opinion. I've never worn jackboots, although I have worn engineer's boots.

So.

(B) Thugs -- as we all know -- are of little brain, and cannot understand that wearing jackboots is the source of their pain and bad mood, so they keep on wearing 'em.

(C) Finally, the prop department bought lots and lots of jackboots, and all the bad guys had to wear them. It was in the contract.

Pick one. Any one you like. It's bound to be at least somewhat correct. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Barney and Rollin are quite cool.

I always figured it was because the spy genre is a cliché, for the most part. So why not cliché bad guys?

(About the only I liked about the tv show Alias were the bad guys. Much less of clichés than I was used to. Well, I did like the music and the explosions too. :))

Lucas' stormtroopers are the more impressive for wearing white. Of course, until the nineties no one in science fiction tv/film ever, ever uses anything remotely like sensible military tactics. But. I digress.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

remotely like sensible military tactics

*dies laughing*

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yes. That.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I am fond of Black Sun Rising, very much so, less so of the subsequent two but still fond. The Hunter is just right on the edge of working in two different ways I really like if they actually work, the villain/antihero line and the character whom the author is clearly at least half in love with.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

He's Lucifer. Or I read him so. Very much fallen, but not without his own code, and seductive in his own way.

It's one of the most interesting kinds of characters to read, and one of the hardest, it seems, to do well.