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hawkwing_lbBooks 2009: 12-15
12. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn.
I read Sanderson's first novel a couple of years ago, and swore thereafter never to touch another. But, well. Mistborn was free, and the first few pages were not terrible... and I found myself pretty damn entertained.
It's epic fantasy, and I'm not really into epic, these last few years. But this is epic fantasy wrapped up around a caper plot - a pretty damn good caper plot - and tied up with a postapocalyptic bow and a magic system that's never really well explained but works out pretty cool. The main players, Kelsier and Vin, are pretty well done - even if I am much annoyed, in retrospect, by the fact that Vin is The Only Girl, and you have your standard epic fantasy norms of behaviour, which also annoy me.
But it's entertaining, for all that.
13. C.E. Murphy, The Queen's Bastard.
This is... a pretty good book. And I do not like it a whole lot. The problematised power dynamics - particularly the sexual ones - squicked me the hell out. And while Belinda is well-drawn, and understandable even when she is acting in ways that are the opposite of sympathetic - well, let's just say I don't care for rape, however you play it, in the main protagonist of a novel, and I have a really hard time looking past that.
On the other hand, I didn't mind the thinly disguised Renaissance Europe half so much as I expected to, and found in disproportionately amusing that the Mary-Queen-of-Scots/Catherine de Medici composite/analogue - her son is first introduced to Belinda as 'James'.
14. Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness.
A Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. Lord Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, stands accused of murder. Interesting investigations ensue.
I'm halfway through two books by Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air and The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. Despite their incredible worldbuilding, great story, and interesting characters, they bid fair to be uncomforting, and so I have been putting them down and picking them up again whenever I feel I can stand some doom.
I do not like it when bad things happen to unobjectionable people for no good reason. I can't take much of it even in fiction, lately.
12. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn.
I read Sanderson's first novel a couple of years ago, and swore thereafter never to touch another. But, well. Mistborn was free, and the first few pages were not terrible... and I found myself pretty damn entertained.
It's epic fantasy, and I'm not really into epic, these last few years. But this is epic fantasy wrapped up around a caper plot - a pretty damn good caper plot - and tied up with a postapocalyptic bow and a magic system that's never really well explained but works out pretty cool. The main players, Kelsier and Vin, are pretty well done - even if I am much annoyed, in retrospect, by the fact that Vin is The Only Girl, and you have your standard epic fantasy norms of behaviour, which also annoy me.
But it's entertaining, for all that.
13. C.E. Murphy, The Queen's Bastard.
This is... a pretty good book. And I do not like it a whole lot. The problematised power dynamics - particularly the sexual ones - squicked me the hell out. And while Belinda is well-drawn, and understandable even when she is acting in ways that are the opposite of sympathetic - well, let's just say I don't care for rape, however you play it, in the main protagonist of a novel, and I have a really hard time looking past that.
On the other hand, I didn't mind the thinly disguised Renaissance Europe half so much as I expected to, and found in disproportionately amusing that the Mary-Queen-of-Scots/Catherine de Medici composite/analogue - her son is first introduced to Belinda as 'James'.
14. Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness.
A Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. Lord Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, stands accused of murder. Interesting investigations ensue.
I'm halfway through two books by Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air and The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. Despite their incredible worldbuilding, great story, and interesting characters, they bid fair to be uncomforting, and so I have been putting them down and picking them up again whenever I feel I can stand some doom.
I do not like it when bad things happen to unobjectionable people for no good reason. I can't take much of it even in fiction, lately.
