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hawkwing_lbBooks 2013: 39-42
39. Barbara Hambly, Good Man Friday. Severn House, 2013.
Another excellent installment in the Benjamin Janvier series. If you have not yet read the Benjamin Janvier mysteries, do so. They are seven different kinds of brilliant.
40. M.J. Locke, Up Against It. Tor, 2011. Copy courtesy of Tor.com.
READ THIS BOOK. Seriously. This is one of the best works of "hard" science fiction I've read. It's fully as good as anything else in the field - better than most, with well-developed, fully rounded characters, interestingly plausible science, and a smashing thriller plot. What I don't understand is why it's flown under the radar. It seems like a Terrible Oversight.
So go read it. Seriously. Probably you will like it, if you like Stross's less futureshocky SF, or Chris Moriarty, or, I think, Bear's Dust. Near-future near-space asteroid SF!
41. Steven L. Kent, The Clone Republic. Titan Books, 2013. (First published 2006.) Copy courtesy of Titan Books.
Oy. This book. This book is so bad. And so blind to its clueless white-guy misogyny and thoughtless colonialism. And tedious! I am composing a review. It may take some time, for I read this in search of light entertainment - the pull-quote-blurb compares it favourably to Jack Campbell - and instead come away feeling soiled and dehumanised.
Do not recommend.
nonfiction
42. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Virago, 1987.
Like any work of history that carries its narrative up to within a decade of its writing, its latter chapters and conclusion are doomed to age poorly. But the greater proportion of this book is a lucid, solid - at times brilliant - social history of women and madness in English culture.
Well recommended.
39. Barbara Hambly, Good Man Friday. Severn House, 2013.
Another excellent installment in the Benjamin Janvier series. If you have not yet read the Benjamin Janvier mysteries, do so. They are seven different kinds of brilliant.
40. M.J. Locke, Up Against It. Tor, 2011. Copy courtesy of Tor.com.
READ THIS BOOK. Seriously. This is one of the best works of "hard" science fiction I've read. It's fully as good as anything else in the field - better than most, with well-developed, fully rounded characters, interestingly plausible science, and a smashing thriller plot. What I don't understand is why it's flown under the radar. It seems like a Terrible Oversight.
So go read it. Seriously. Probably you will like it, if you like Stross's less futureshocky SF, or Chris Moriarty, or, I think, Bear's Dust. Near-future near-space asteroid SF!
41. Steven L. Kent, The Clone Republic. Titan Books, 2013. (First published 2006.) Copy courtesy of Titan Books.
Oy. This book. This book is so bad. And so blind to its clueless white-guy misogyny and thoughtless colonialism. And tedious! I am composing a review. It may take some time, for I read this in search of light entertainment - the pull-quote-blurb compares it favourably to Jack Campbell - and instead come away feeling soiled and dehumanised.
Do not recommend.
nonfiction
42. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Virago, 1987.
Like any work of history that carries its narrative up to within a decade of its writing, its latter chapters and conclusion are doomed to age poorly. But the greater proportion of this book is a lucid, solid - at times brilliant - social history of women and madness in English culture.
Well recommended.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 08:49 am (UTC)I have a lot of issues with that book and the way that people who are Not Historians of Psychiatry or aware that that's a field in which there's been a lot of work since take it as Eternal Gospel and the only thing they need to read.
It keeps coming up as a rec on a listserv I'm on, some 30 years since it first appeared, and I get increasingly grumpy about its appeal to literary scholars. It is one of several books in the same category: historians think they're over-simplistic but v seductive presentations of the All More Complicated historical narrative, but scholars in other fields treat them as Definitive.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 12:10 am (UTC)Yikes.
That is worse than the usual run of bad books. I am sorry.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 12:26 am (UTC)Someone must read these things. For the public good. To warn everyone else.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 04:52 am (UTC)I like that: it sounds like it would be a curse on the novel, except the author himself got there first.
Otherwise, yeesh.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 02:26 pm (UTC)