between the rock and the cold, cold sea

The day started with swimming. Jumped in the sea, scream, stayed for a brief but numbling while, and then got out again into the hottest part of the day.

Then there was picnic, and walking on the beach. And after that there was gym. An hour and a half of gym.

Damn but I'm wrecked now. And unfit. But my brain appears to be recovering from the deadness it was suffering from at the end of the exams - during them, too, if I'm to be honest. So that's good, at least.

Books 91-92, Fiction 87, Non-fiction 5.

Actually not technically 91-92, since I read about six books before and during the exams, but cannot now speak coherently about them. Seeker's Mask by PC Hodgell is excellent, though.

Fiction:

87. Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky.

Reading this occasionally felt like an exercise in endurance. It is an epic, and I mean epic, SF novel, but unlike many SFian novels that spend pages describing their technology or what-have-you, this book is very strongly character centred. Interesting, and compelling, but long. The first Vinge book I've read, and I'd read more on the foot of it, but in smaller doses.

Non-fiction:

5. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750

This is one of those history books that should be marked 'not for beginners'. As it happens, it's the first book on maritime history I've ever read, and while it is a very solid description and analysis of maritime economic, social and labour relations of the period, it's not the most forgiving introduction to the topic.

The chapters on the 'Seaman as Collective Labourer', the 'Seaman as the Spirit of Rebellion' and the 'Seaman as Pirate' are especially interesting and illuminative of cultural formation processes and labour relations of the period. Fascinating stuff.

Recommended for the well-read layperson, not as an introduction.

Books 86-90, Fiction 82-86.

82. Alma Alexander, Gift of the Unmage.

The world needs more YA books like this.

Gift of the Unmage is thoughtful and almost mannerly in its pacing, but the quality of language is such that I feel in love with it from nearly the first page.

Thea Winthrope is the seventh child of two seventh children. As such, she should be a veritable prodigy of magical talent. But she's not. How she's not, and what she learns about herself, and what happens next - that's what the book's about.

And now I'm making a mess of trying to describe this book, because it's lovely and layered and really, excellent.

83-85. Carrie Vaughn, Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday.

I love urban fantasy. But I prefer urban fantasy, not what they call 'paranormal romance'. Vaughn? Delivers urban fantasy.

Kitty is lovely and snarky and vulnerable. Vaughn has done her wolf research, and her radio talkshow research. And her government research, too. They're light books, easy reading, but I have the feeling that Vaughn also knows her genre and is deliberately subverting a few stereotypes (or tropes, if you prefer) - or more than a few. The vampire Alette in Kitty Goes to Washington, for example. Not your average vampire.

Recommended.

86. Tanya Huff, Smoke and Shadows.

Read this out of sequence, after reading Smoke and Mirrors. It's another of the urban fantasy (not paranormal romance) that I love so well, and Smoke and Shadows is a lovely addition to the subgenre. Okay, so the whole wizard-and-threat-from-another-world might be over the top, but that's why I love it. That, and the genre references, and the fact that it takes place on the set of a vampire detective TV show. How could you not love that?

Very fun.

*

In other news, I'm currently comtemplating which books I should get Hodges Figgis to order in for me, so I need never fear keeping money in my pocket. (They appear to be able to order up to six months in advance.)

So. Suggestions? Recommendations?

I sometimes wonder if my old secondary school would have censored the books available in their tiny library, if they'd had the time and money for such pursuits. Being a Loreto school, with all that Catholic ethos seeping out of the walls, it's possible, but I like to think not: I found Clancy's The Hunt for the Red October there when I was thirteen, and if not one of Jean Auel's books, then one so similar that time has blurred the distinction in my memory.

But the library was only open at lunchtime, and in later years closed more lunchtimes than not, and the selection was always terribly constrained: the school always - what school doesn't? - suffered from a lack of funding for anything but absolute essentials.

I suppose I can't blame them for not considering the library as essential as other things, such as photocopying and sports equipment and fixing the leaks in the roof, not to mention building new buildings to cope with student numbers - when I was there, they had permanent facilities for 500, and a student body of 1000; now they have permanent facilities for about 700, and a student body of around 1200. Talk about running just to stay in place.

Anyway. When I was reorganising my bookshelves last summer, and starting to keep a running catalogue, I brought them down a couple of boxes' worth of stuff I wasn't going to read again. Not much: twenty or thirty or however many books it was is a drop in the bucket. And all of them were fiction, and none of them were really specifically YA. I mean, I'd read them as an adolescent, but this is me: I read without discrimination and way above my (supposed) age level, having been fortunate enough to have an indulgent parent who made me free with the adult section of the public library from about the age of nine.

I have another box I'm meaning to ask if they'd like. And at the same time I wish I could do more. I wish I could get them copies of decent YA fiction like Westerfeld's or Pierce's or Nix's or Larbalestier's stuff. I wish I could get them copies of science and history books appropriate to and exceeding the scope of the courses covered; I wish I could get them copies of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs (which I am convinced everyone should read, but I'm too selfish to give up my own copies).

But it's useless to wish. I may as well ask for the moon on a string, since I'm selfish enough to want to provide for my own entertainment first, and after that? Not going to be enough left in the budget to equip the old shithole.

(Okay, 'shithole' is uncharitable of me. They're just about in the top two hundred in the country for sending students to the colleges, they have brilliant, motivated teachers, a not insignificant number of whom are past pupils, and they facilitated my acquisition of a respectable education remarkably well, considering the sheer number of students they had to deal with. And I still feel indebted to them for that, because if I hadn't had good teachers... Well. Woman cannot live on books alone, is all I'm saying.)

And that is sufficient maundering upon inadequacy for one night.

*

Books 77-85: Fiction 74-81, Non-Fiction 4.

Fiction:

74. Justina Robson, Living Next-Door to the God of Love

I can has envy now?

This is one weird book. I liked it a lot, really, but I'm not at all sure what was going on there. I have a feeling that this might be because I was reading it in snatches, or because I'm not quite clever enough to follow everything that was going on. The worldbuilding was amazing. The prose, in places, likewise. The characters made me cry. It was all kind of shiny and scintillating and glittering and here a couple of weeks later I'm still thinking about it.

75. Robert Charles Wilson, Spin.

Heavy with the tech-shiny and stylistic-shiny. Light with the characterisation. It took me months to work up enough motivation to get to the end. Most because, I think, Tyler Dupree is a fairly boring guy. He's not engaged; he's an observer. And when he does engage, I find myself disbelieving him.

Also, when you're working up to the end of the world? The deus ex machina save really isn't my cup of tea.

76. Mercedes Lackey, Jinx High.

Engaging light entertainment, fortunately light on the preachiness that seems to have become so common in the more recent Lackey novels that I've read. Also fortunately from the time before Urban Fantasy was Sexy.

77. Rachel Caine, Firestorm.

The not-half-bad fifth book in the Weather Warden series. The constant ratcheting up of danger is starting to get just a little old - each book being higher-stakes than the last, or so it seems - but an enjoyable read, nonetheless. Though I'm also starting to find the non-human hot boy! love interest a little old, too.

78. Patricia Briggs, Blood Bound

Speaking of non-human hot boy! love interests...

Actually, that's not fair. Very little of the book or its plot - which is more than sufficiently plotty, involving vampire sorcerers and demons and other such things - has to do with the two werewolfy possible love interests. I'm just starting to get a little tired of the trope. Entertaining light reading.

79. C.E. Murphy, Coyote Dreams.

Thank heavens for one author who doesn't do non-human hot boy! love interests. And so far vampires and werewolves seem to be distinctly absent, for which I'm also grateful.

Coyote Dreams is the third book concerning Joanne Walker, reluctant shaman and police officer in Seattle. It's a much more polished book than its predecessors, a very smooth and compelling read, and interesting use of myth. Liked it lots.

80. Garth Nix, Mister Monday.

Strange and interesting. And compelling, if rough in spots. And I do want to find out what comes next.

81. Tanya Huff, Smoke and Mirrors.

Am I reduced to singing paeans of praise for urban fantasy that avoids the SexyNon-Human! route? It seems so, but Smoke and Mirrors deserves praise on its own merits. It is an extraordinarily compelling haunted house story, and I recommend it.

Non-fiction:

4. Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage.

The subtitle is slightly misleading: this isn't a book about the birth of modern espionage, per se. Or at least, it fails to connect its material to any such thesis. Rather, it seems that Budiansky is indulging the urge to geek shamelessly about Sir Francis and - in large part - about Mary Queen of Scots, and the various plots and strategems of the times.

It's interesting and a good, fast read, if not perhaps quite as rigourously academic as one might prefer. (Footnotes! Where are my footnotes?! I never trust a history book without them!) Nor does it give quite as much context as one might prefer. But that's okay: it was, at least, entertainingly informative.

*

I have been adopted by a catling. It seems the powers that be have decided I am now owned by two cats, not one.