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hawkwing_lbAnd ne'er a word I spoke, tumbling down
Lately, I've been reading for comfort - Procrustean reading, to borrow![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny's terminology. Which means Air and Spin and A Dead Man in Deptford, among others, are staring down at me from my TBR shelf while I devour space opera and character-heavy fantasy. With one exception: Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds.
I don't read horror, normally. Or ghost stories, or anything in that vein. When I do read them, I don't enjoy them - I really don't enjoy having the shit creeped out of me.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds is eerie as all hell in places, but it never crosses the line into 'Not reading this after dark. Hell, not reading this in daylight, either,' territory. Largely because the heroine, Eden Moore, comes across as so genuinely capable that I couldn't help believing that when she found out what was going on, she was going to deal it.
I can like a character like that. In fact, I can like a book like that, too.
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley. Never read anything of hers before, but whoa, this one is good. Lyrical language, dragons, heroic quests, a believably screwed-up and determined protagonist. Complexity and simplicity. Liked. Muchly.
Catherine Asaro, Primary Inversion. Probably the best of the Ruby Dynasty/Skolian Empire books I've read so far. And while it may be space opera, the better part of the action is emotional. Also, as a character? Soz Valdoria is probably the most interesting and well-realised one Asaro's written.
Naomi Kritzer (naomikritzer), the Dead Rivers Trilogy: Freedom's Gate, Freedom's Apprentice, and Freedom's Sisters.
I have a feeling that this trilogy is going to be part of my comfort re-reading for months, if not years, to come. Partly because I'm studying ancient history, and to have a set of books with their worldbuilding based on the what-if of Alexander living to old age, and set in an alternate Central-Asian steppes makes me feel all warm and geeky inside. And partly because --
Well. The main character, Lauria, a half-blood Greek, tracked and brought back escaped slaves for her employer, a Greek border commander by the name of Kyros, until he sends her to infiltrate and spy on the nomadic Alashi by posing as an escaped slave. The short time she spends posing as a slave, and her friendship with another former slave by the name of Tamar, coupled with the time she spends with the Alashi, wreaks a profound change on how she views the world she used to belong to.
The trilogy's about freedom and betrayal and friendship and injustice. And I have to say, I really, really liked it.
...I've just realised something about my reading preferences. The books I really like, the ones I like best - they either have female main characters, or they're by female authors (or female co-authors). The ones I fall head-over-heels for, usually both.
Head-over-heels fallen for:
Elizabeth Bear, the Jenny Casey books, Blood and Iron.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the Liaden universe books, The Tomorrow Log.
Lois McMaster Bujold, with particular attention to Paladin of Souls, Shards of Honor, and Komarr.
To a lesser extent, Sarah Monette, Wen Spencer's Ukiah Oregon books, Naomi Novik, Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History and the White Crow and Orthe collections, Madeleine E. Robins' Sarah Tolerance books, Karen Traviss' City of Pearl and Crossing the Line and now, Naomi Kritzer.*
Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora and David Drake's Lord of the Isles sequence mark the exceptions to the rule.
Which sort of helps explain why seven out of ten of the books on my yet-to-be-read shelf are written by men. But not really, since I have no real idea why I go back to the guys less frequently and with less great enthusiasm, in general, than the women.
And now, the non-fiction:
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac. Aubrac's account of her Resistance activity during the nine months of her second pregnancy, where she met 'Max' (the alias of Jean Moulin, DeGaulle's envoy to and negotiator with the various resistance réseaux, who was arrested, tortured and killed by the Germans in France), assisted with the running of the local resistance, organised an attack to break her husband out of prison after his arrest (his third and most serious, as he was arrested in the company of Moulin), taught classes at the local lycée, and keep her family fed and together. Fascinating read.
Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. A memoir of the gulag. Ginzburg recounts her arrest in the thirties (February 1937) during Stalin's purges, her initial interrogation, trial and sentencing (ten years under section 8 of Article 58 - the then maximum, it changed to twenty-five years with the year, short of death - the statute under which, ludicrously, thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people were charged with terrorism or counter-revolutionary activity); her time in the Butyrki and the Lefortovo, and, after her sentence was pronounced, her two years in solitary in Yaroslavl until her transfer to the Magadan and Elgen hard labour camps in the Kolyma region.
Ginzburg was and remained a committed Communist. Journey ends in or around the early 1940s, when she escaped death by starvation and overwork by getting a 'trusty' job as medical attendant to the children of inmates at Elgen. In the (very short) epilogue, she says she spent eighteen years in the Gulag, making this remarkably incomplete as an autobiography, and remarkably unsatisfying as either history or memoir.
It is, however, quite fascinating as both.
Next up... Hmm. Plutarch, I suppose. Roman Lives. Or maybe McIntosh's Sisterhood of Spies, or Rediker's pirate history, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Or A History of the Ancient Near East, if I'm feeling virtuous, or maybe Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity.
Or Harvey's American War of Independence history, A Few Bloody Noses. Or the one about Byzantine empresses, Herrin's Women in Purple. Or The Bible and the Ancient Near East. Or Ancient Mesopotamia. Or or or or --
-- Which to choose? So many books, so many. How am I supposed to pick just one (or two, rather, since the Plutarch is Designated Scholarly Reading Material, which really should be read for college)?
Um. Suggestions? Are solicited?
----
*Not all of these are precisely comfort reading, I must admit.
----
Oh, I'm reminded. The Admissions Office is pleased to inform me that the Senior Lecturer is permitting me to make the course transfer I applied for last May.
Last May. Oh, wheels of bureaucracy, who grindeth slow and exceedingly fine - thanks so much for letting me spend the last three months (three months!) worrying about this.
Lately, I've been reading for comfort - Procrustean reading, to borrow
truepenny's terminology. Which means Air and Spin and A Dead Man in Deptford, among others, are staring down at me from my TBR shelf while I devour space opera and character-heavy fantasy. With one exception: Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds.I don't read horror, normally. Or ghost stories, or anything in that vein. When I do read them, I don't enjoy them - I really don't enjoy having the shit creeped out of me.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds is eerie as all hell in places, but it never crosses the line into 'Not reading this after dark. Hell, not reading this in daylight, either,' territory. Largely because the heroine, Eden Moore, comes across as so genuinely capable that I couldn't help believing that when she found out what was going on, she was going to deal it.
I can like a character like that. In fact, I can like a book like that, too.
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley. Never read anything of hers before, but whoa, this one is good. Lyrical language, dragons, heroic quests, a believably screwed-up and determined protagonist. Complexity and simplicity. Liked. Muchly.
Catherine Asaro, Primary Inversion. Probably the best of the Ruby Dynasty/Skolian Empire books I've read so far. And while it may be space opera, the better part of the action is emotional. Also, as a character? Soz Valdoria is probably the most interesting and well-realised one Asaro's written.
Naomi Kritzer (
naomikritzer), the Dead Rivers Trilogy: Freedom's Gate, Freedom's Apprentice, and Freedom's Sisters.I have a feeling that this trilogy is going to be part of my comfort re-reading for months, if not years, to come. Partly because I'm studying ancient history, and to have a set of books with their worldbuilding based on the what-if of Alexander living to old age, and set in an alternate Central-Asian steppes makes me feel all warm and geeky inside. And partly because --
Well. The main character, Lauria, a half-blood Greek, tracked and brought back escaped slaves for her employer, a Greek border commander by the name of Kyros, until he sends her to infiltrate and spy on the nomadic Alashi by posing as an escaped slave. The short time she spends posing as a slave, and her friendship with another former slave by the name of Tamar, coupled with the time she spends with the Alashi, wreaks a profound change on how she views the world she used to belong to.
The trilogy's about freedom and betrayal and friendship and injustice. And I have to say, I really, really liked it.
...I've just realised something about my reading preferences. The books I really like, the ones I like best - they either have female main characters, or they're by female authors (or female co-authors). The ones I fall head-over-heels for, usually both.
Head-over-heels fallen for:
Elizabeth Bear, the Jenny Casey books, Blood and Iron.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the Liaden universe books, The Tomorrow Log.
Lois McMaster Bujold, with particular attention to Paladin of Souls, Shards of Honor, and Komarr.
To a lesser extent, Sarah Monette, Wen Spencer's Ukiah Oregon books, Naomi Novik, Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History and the White Crow and Orthe collections, Madeleine E. Robins' Sarah Tolerance books, Karen Traviss' City of Pearl and Crossing the Line and now, Naomi Kritzer.*
Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora and David Drake's Lord of the Isles sequence mark the exceptions to the rule.
Which sort of helps explain why seven out of ten of the books on my yet-to-be-read shelf are written by men. But not really, since I have no real idea why I go back to the guys less frequently and with less great enthusiasm, in general, than the women.
And now, the non-fiction:
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac. Aubrac's account of her Resistance activity during the nine months of her second pregnancy, where she met 'Max' (the alias of Jean Moulin, DeGaulle's envoy to and negotiator with the various resistance réseaux, who was arrested, tortured and killed by the Germans in France), assisted with the running of the local resistance, organised an attack to break her husband out of prison after his arrest (his third and most serious, as he was arrested in the company of Moulin), taught classes at the local lycée, and keep her family fed and together. Fascinating read.
Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. A memoir of the gulag. Ginzburg recounts her arrest in the thirties (February 1937) during Stalin's purges, her initial interrogation, trial and sentencing (ten years under section 8 of Article 58 - the then maximum, it changed to twenty-five years with the year, short of death - the statute under which, ludicrously, thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people were charged with terrorism or counter-revolutionary activity); her time in the Butyrki and the Lefortovo, and, after her sentence was pronounced, her two years in solitary in Yaroslavl until her transfer to the Magadan and Elgen hard labour camps in the Kolyma region.
Ginzburg was and remained a committed Communist. Journey ends in or around the early 1940s, when she escaped death by starvation and overwork by getting a 'trusty' job as medical attendant to the children of inmates at Elgen. In the (very short) epilogue, she says she spent eighteen years in the Gulag, making this remarkably incomplete as an autobiography, and remarkably unsatisfying as either history or memoir.
It is, however, quite fascinating as both.
Next up... Hmm. Plutarch, I suppose. Roman Lives. Or maybe McIntosh's Sisterhood of Spies, or Rediker's pirate history, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Or A History of the Ancient Near East, if I'm feeling virtuous, or maybe Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity.
Or Harvey's American War of Independence history, A Few Bloody Noses. Or the one about Byzantine empresses, Herrin's Women in Purple. Or The Bible and the Ancient Near East. Or Ancient Mesopotamia. Or or or or --
-- Which to choose? So many books, so many. How am I supposed to pick just one (or two, rather, since the Plutarch is Designated Scholarly Reading Material, which really should be read for college)?
Um. Suggestions? Are solicited?
----
*Not all of these are precisely comfort reading, I must admit.
----
Oh, I'm reminded. The Admissions Office is pleased to inform me that the Senior Lecturer is permitting me to make the course transfer I applied for last May.
Last May. Oh, wheels of bureaucracy, who grindeth slow and exceedingly fine - thanks so much for letting me spend the last three months (three months!) worrying about this.
