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alfvaen · 3 months ago

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Heavy Novel

August was a heavy month. Bob Geldof said so, and it's hard to disagree. I read some books in an attempt to lighten the mood.

Potential spoilers within for Jo Clayton's diadem series, Tade Thompson's Rosewater/Wormwood series, Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series, and of course Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

R.A. Salvatore: The Crystal Shard, completed August 5

Once again it was time to try a new author…a male author, and not one of the complete unknowns relegated to the pool table. I was ready for another epic fantasy, and for a while I was considering Broken Blade by Kelly McCullough, but then I was on Tumblr and saw a bunch of posts about Drizzt do'Urden and remembered that I had this book on the shelf as well. I've been hearing things about R.A. Salvatore for a while now, but I confess that I never got too deeply into D&D novels the way I did (at some point) into Star Trek. I did read the Dragonlance books pretty slavishly for a while, but to diminishing returns (I gave up after the first Richard Knaak one, I recall); I tried the first Forgotten Realms one, Azure Bonds, and was kind of meh. And at first what I heard about Drizzt (my fingers keep wanting to type "Drizzy", lol) sounded kind of cringe to my newly-sophisticated palate. (Heavy irony there--I was still reading Piers Anthony and Jack L. Chalker for years, and I now find them both relatively cringe.)

I elected to start with the first published book, rather than the first chronologically. This is not a simple decision; I've gone back and forth on this over the years. For instance, back when I was first trying out the Darkover series, I found a chronological list in one of the books and thus decided to start with Darkover Landfall, which was a bad call; I recall it as being so heavily infected with prequelitis as to be practically incomprehensible on its own. (Readers of Dragonsdawn will find this a familiar experience.) I also read the Deryni books starting with Camber rather than Kelson (though on reread the first Kelson trilogy was noticeably worse writing, so maybe I dodged a bullet there). But when I read the Vorkosigan series for the first time, I read in strict publication order, which I guess is not the worst way to read them but I certainly don't do it that way any more.

So with the Drizzt books, I did some research. It seemed like in this book, and its Icewind Dale trilogy, Drizzt was part of an ensemble cast, as opposed to the prequel trilogy where he was the main character. In the end I went for this one on the publication-order theory. Also apparently there are a total of 39(!) Drizzt books.

For the most part the book is…about what I would expect for a D&D book. Characters mostly seem pretty flat, combats are done decently well, evil is evil, plot is mostly pretty predictable but with occasional twists. It wasn't bad, and I read it all the way through to the end, but I might have enjoyed it more when I was 17. (Or younger, but I would have been 17 when it came out, so…) The book does not pass the Bechdel test, because I believe we only get two named female characters if you include Gwenhwyfar the panther, and I don't think Catti-Brie ever talks to her. (Nor does she even get a whole hell of a lot to do--even her potential romantic subplot is vestigial.) The setting is not bad--Icewind Dale and its Ten-Towns region, whose leaders tend to squabble a lot over petty grievances and fishing rights, practically rings the truest of anything.

So now I'm reconsidering my starting point and may actually want to try the prequel trilogy to see if they're any good, because Drizzt did seem the closest to being an actual character. Even if the renegade Dark Elf who turned against his evil race/culture toward the light is a cliché, it feels like Drizzt might be the reason it's a cliché. Not sure if I'm going to buying any more of the books right away, but it turns out my brother-in-law has the whole series and so maybe I'll just arrange to borrow some from him.

Jo Clayton: Shadowplay, completed August 9

Back to a female author next, probably not epic fantasy because of the Drizzt book, and it felt too soon for another urban fantasy as well, which usually means going to science fiction, or occasionally mainstream or something. When I don't have a strong indication of what to read next, I will often sort my to-read shelf chronologically, with the books that have been there longest at the top, and see what leaps out at me. This time I apparently settled on Jo Clayton.

Jo Clayton's books were big mass-market books from the 1980s, and I saw them around all the time…through rarely in the right order. Like I'd look on the library paperback racks and see Changer's Moon (third in its trilogy) and Blue Magic (second in its trilogy). In her case I never tried to read them out of order, so sometimes it was a long time before I got to start them. But I did finish her Diadem series, nine books in all. In those books, we follow a woman named Aleytys who gets a mysterious diadem (high-tech because this is SF and totally not magical at all) and then gets sold into slavery or something? (It's been a while, so some of the details are vague.) After a few books she frees herself and joins the Star Hunters and then goes looking for justice (possibly against her mother, who may have been the one to sell her into slavery). The diadem contains the mental patterns of three other people, including Swardheld and Shadith, who have been trapped in there for decades or even centuries, and provide her aid and advice in her travels. Later in the series (spoilers!) she figures out how to extricate her helpers into physical bodies. Shadith ends up in the body of a teenage girl. And Shadowplay is the first book in her series.

Shadith is on her way to a university education (fitting for her young body, anyway) but in trying to evade a creepy and lecherous security guard at a transfer station, she ends up interrupting a kidnapping in progress and getting dragged along by the also-somewhat-creepy-but-at-least-not-lecherous leader of the kidnappers to a mysterious planet that seems to be in the middle of a period of unrest. It turns out the kidnapper is some sort of high-level snuff artist, who likes to instigate horrible events on innocent planets, film them with his tiny drone cameras, and then sell the footage to certain wealthy and jaded clients. Shadith and her fellow abductees are dropped in to play the roles of avatars of a particular trio of folklore figures from the planetary culture that turn up from time to time and trigger unrest. Luckily, Shadith and/or her current body have psionic abilities to to read and control the thoughts of others…though mostly she can't use it on sentients, so she limits it to animals, where it still frequently comes in handy.

It sounds interesting enough, but I don't think Clayton actually pulls it off. Shadith and her fellow "avatars", a hunter with two large cats and a falcon, and a reptilian fellow with some mind-clouding mental abilities of his own, keep trying to get off the planet without getting involved with the natives…which means that, as a reader, I didn't feel the need to get invested in the on-planet struggles until most of the way through the book. And I had trouble with the character and culture names, which may be a skill issue, but it was like they kept getting introduced in such a way that I didn't realize they'd be important later. Our trio keep escaping and getting recaptured, escaping and getting recaptured, until it feels less like try-fails to advance the plot and more like futile efforts to extricate themselves from it. And then, at the end, Aleytys shows up and rescues them, literally using the phrase "dea ex machina". Okay, it's true that Shadith had tried to contact her earlier and was hoping that she'd show up, but still, it felt like a bit of a cheat. Shadith does do some work to help in her own rescue, but it doesn't feel like enough.

At the end, our snuff-film director escapes, so presumably the rest of the trilogy is Shadith trying to hunt him down. I haven't quite given up on the series yet, but it'll probably be a while before I get around to reading Shadowspeer, the second book. (Hmmm…is that "shadow-speer", or "shadow's peer"? I'd always assume the former, whatever a "speer" was, but now I'm wondering. Echoes of Andrew Offutt's "Shadowspawn"…)

Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education, completed August 12

After the Jo Clayton I wanted something a little newer…but perhaps not an entirely new author. And there was this Naomi Novik book sitting there. I sometimes read books a little slower than other members of my family (which is still faster than most people, I imagine), and my wife and my eldest son at the very least, if not my younger son too, had already read this one. I took a little longer to finish the Temeraire series, which I thought was pretty good if not amazing, and then I decided to go through her two fairy-tale-esque standalones, Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which were both really good. This is the first book in the Scholomance series, which I keep conflating in my head with Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, which I also hadn't read yet, because my mind does that sometimes. (At least I'm pretty sure now that the Locked Tomb series is not written by Alix Harrow, though I have to look up the actual author every time still.)

I suspect that it would be accurate to say that this, a book about teenage wizards learning magic in a big magic school, might be vaguely Harry Potter-inspired. But if so, it's Harry Potter where Hogwarts has no actual professors, only spells that try to provide you with learning material and presumably somehow assess the assignments you submit. Oh, and there are "maleficaria", a.k.a. evil magic beasties, constantly trying to kill you if you let your guard down for even a second…and also you have to fight your way through a horde of them to graduate. Many wizards come from "enclaves", basically gated wizard communities intended to be defensible against maleficaria, though not all do; our protagonist, Galadriel, was raised by her mother in a commune after a "mal" killed her father, and she is apparently the subject of some prophecies that she will become a powerful force for evil. And she does have a talent for using "malia", which, unlike "mana" (which can be gained from a number of activites such as exercise, crocheting and other effortful exertions), is acquired by draining the life-force of other people, and is somewhat frowned upon.

Galadriel is in her junior year at the start of the book, trying her hardest not to give in to the ease of using malia, but she's an outsider in a place where being alone is a good way to get yourself killed by mals. And then New York enclave prodigy Orion Lake, who has the rare talent that he can gain mana by killing mals, bursts into her room to save her from a mal that she was planning to kill anyway, and keeps hanging around her because he's convinced she's going to turn evil. The whole thing annoys her, but she's not above using the perception that she and Orion are dating or something to weasel her way into some highly transactional relationships. Galadriel (or "El" as she prefers people call her) has built up quite a hard shell over the years, though, from a lot of childhood traumas that have taught her she can't rely on other people, particularly enclaves.

The book is a lot of fun, and really didn't make me think of Hogwarts all that much while I was reading; it is too much its own thing. Characters die, but overall the progression is towards hope. Highly looking forward to reading the other two books in the series. (The next book is called The Last Graduate and I'm already speculating as to what that might mean…)

Lois McMaster Bujold: CryoBurn, completed August 16

Almost done the Vorkosigan reread, and into the part that feels more like a slog, because this is probably one of my least favourite books in the series. I mean, most of the book is just meh, and the best part is really the post-denouement twist that hits with the last line of the book proper, and is then dealt with in a short epilogue. After maybe the first few pages Miles rarely feels like he's in jeopardy, and the tension just ratchets down throughout the book.

Probably what she is doing here is an attempt to explore some of the ramifications of cryofreezing the way she did many of the implications of the uterine replicator, so we go to a planet, New Hope a.k.a. Kibou-Daini, where people routinely get themselves frozen if they're ill or old, or feel like they might become ill or old in the future. The worst part of the whole setup is the fact that people who are frozen are allowed to assign a proxy to vote for them (since they're technically not dead), which ends up being the corporation who has custody of their frozen body. And with corporate mergers, those voting blocs have become intensely concentrated. Sure, that's fine. But I just couldn't get too invested in the plot.

Miles is on Kibou-Daini investigating a company that's trying to set up this scheme on Komarr, and through one of those series of coincidences that I don't care for, ends up meeting a runaway boy named Jin whose mother was frozen to stop her blowing the whistle on a particularly egregious corporate failure. The only part which is not an implausible coincidence is that it's a different company than the Komarr one. We get POV from Miles, Jin, and also Roic, and we get guest appearances from Mark, Kareen Koudelka, and Raven Durona. It has its moments, but it's very lightweight.

And then, yeah, there's a painful event at the very end and an epilogue in the form of five drabbles. (I'm not sure whether to give it away here or not, given what a gutpunch it was on first read, but it's also entirely the basis for the plot of Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen, so I won't be able to talk about that book without giving it away… I guess it can wait until I get there, though. Which will, by this point, be next month.)

Tade Thompson: The Rosewater Redemption, completed August 21

As I've mentioned before, I seem to have a harder time finding male authors for my diversity slot than I do female ones. Tade Thompson's Rosewater trilogy (well, Wormwood Trilogy, technically, but they all have "Rosewater" in the title) is something that would otherwise have been on the bubble, but I've kept going on it because of this particular scarcity, mostly from the library. For whatever reason (perhaps because I'm currently following Tade Thompson on Bluesky) I decided to go with this one, given that the book was available at the library and I requested it with enough lead time for it to come in promptly.

The Wormwood books are set in Nigeria, where a gigantic alien entity named Wormwood (hence the series title) has relocated after its initial appearance in London. It starts healing people who come to it, leading to the formation of a shanty town outside its boundaries called Rosewater (ironic name based on the fact that it stinks) (hence the book titles). The first book, Rosewater, is all from the POV of a man named Kaaro, who has some psychic abilities based on alien biotechnology; the second book, The Rosewater Insurrection, is a multi-POV book about Rosewater's growth as a power and its struggles against the Nigerian government, and Wormwood's real goals. This book also seems to be multi-POV, but one of them gets to be first-person, and is the mysterious "Bicycle Girl" who showed up in earlier books and whose backstory is now delved into.

Sadly, the plot of this one is a bit scattered; with all of the characters from the previous two books, it feels like we're just visiting them in random order, and few of them get much shrift. There is a resolution of sorts, in the end, but it's slow to manifest and frankly I'm not sure if anyone gets "redeemed" per se. As series conclusions go, I've seen worse (cough The Sacred Band cough), but it still doesn't pack the punch of eiher of the first two books.

Garth Nix: Sabriel, completed August 25

I picked this one up next mostly because it came up when my wife was helping me organize my to-read shelf. This is not just a virtual shelf on Goodreads, and it's not a single shelf of books. It's not even a single bookshelf. No, it's two small bookshelves and a overflow shelf. At some point I did just keep the books I was planning to read on the shelves with the rest of them, but at some point, probably when I was transitioning from "read books in a strict sequence" to "pick the next book from a shortlist" mode. Currently it is organized by gender (since that informs my current reading schedule), then more or less by genre, and then by title. But besides the physical shelf I do maintain a Goodreads shelf, and a spreadsheet where I can keep track of things like when the book was acquired and the like. And sometimes they get out of sync, so I was sitting in front of the spreadsheet while my wife was going over the physical shelves. She found some on the shelf that weren't in the spreadsheet, I found some that were in the spreadsheet but not on the shelf, and we reconciled them. But she quibbled with the placement of Sabriel with the adult epic fantasy novels rather than the YA novels, so I decided I'd read it soon and settle the matter to my satisfaction.

I have read Garth Nix before, but mostly his middle-grade ones; I got them for my oldest son, starting with Mister Monday from the "Keys To The Kingdom" series, and he liked them, but I only got up to Sir Thursday before deciding I was tired of them. I had also read A Confusion of Princes, which had an interesting promotional campaign consistent of a Facebook game called "Imperial Galaxy" where you were an officer in a fleet ship. I was actually in Nix's own fleet, though my immediate commander was Arthur Slade; I enjoyed the game, but everyone else I tried to recruit to play it apparently didn't because I ended up with a bunch of inactive players in my fleet as dead weight. (Ah, Facebook games. They were their own particular thing.) Anyway, I had picked up Sabriel at some point, and I thought it was adult fantasy, so I decided to try it next.

But I guess perhaps it is actually young adult; at least, the main character is. The titular character is a girl whose mother died when she was born, and she herself was only saved from death when the mysterious Abhorsen (her father, apparently) showed up and ventured into the land of death to retrieve her. As a result of this experience, she is excessively pale and has a natural talent for necromancy. Oddly, this world is divided into the magic-laden Old Kingdom and the magic-poor Ancelstierre, and Sabriel grows up in a boarding school in a land of cars and guns (though no computers yet that I've seen), but close enough to the border wall that there is still some magic available for her to learn. When, in her Year Six, she receives a message that her father has gone missing, she has to leave school and return to the Old Kingdom to try to rescue him from the land of the dead.

It's a really good book, with some breakneck oh-my-god-please-let-her-rest sequences in it, a talking cat who is more than they seem, a nail-biting finale, intriguing worldbuilding, and barely a word wasted. One scene where she's listening to the people in the next room having sex makes it a little doubtful for YA but who knows, these days. And a little bit of head-hopping in one important scene, but it's probably fine. Apparently there are like five more books in the series? (And here I thought it was just a trilogy…) Apparently there's a reasonable-priced four-volume ebook omnibus available so probably we'll just do that. (Yes, my wife has read it now too, and my son probably will soon.)

Kim Harrison: Every Which Way But Dead, completed August 31

Between the YA-ish fantasy and the upcoming Vorkosigan reread, it seemed like the next book should probably be urban fantasy, with a female author. As I probably mentioned a little while ago when talking about the Faith Hunter series, I have started a lot of these series and have mostly not gotten super invested in any one of them to give it priority over the rest. Maybe the Tobey Daye (Seanan McGuire) and Kate Daniels (Ilona Andrew) are picking up a little, but mostly I can take or leave them. So I ended up just picking the "oldest" one of them which, now that I read a little further in the Faith Hunter series, is Kim Harrison's "Rachel Morgan/The Hollows" series.

Since I do read these books fairly well spaced apart, I do like a good recap game to remind me what happened previously. This book is mostly doing a decent job, though we start right out of the gate with a high-stress situation, Rachel having to confront the demon she made a bad deal with in the previous book to save people's lives and take a bag guy down. But we are quickly reacquainted with her vampire housemate and professional partner Ivy and other recurring characters.

The plot of the book seems to wander a lot, though. ("Every which way", like the title, perhaps?) Dealing with the demon's castoff, getting a contract from a famous musician for concert security, going on a date (with another vampire) which ends badly, meeting some of Ivy's family… She keeps shooting herself in the foot and endangering herself through sheer thoughtless stupidity. By halfway through the book it's not clear where it's going. And by the end, there have been some exciting scenes, but it feels like there's not much of a through-line. One job that Rachel was hired for didn't even happen in the book but was mentioned in the denouement like an afterthought.

I haven't quite given up on the series, but I am not inspired to speed up my reading pace.

So kind of a mixed month, with two great books and a handful of meh ones. Sometimes it do be that way.

I also finished the Dan Gardner Risk book. I quite appreciate what it has to say about how we fail to assess potential risks accurately. I feel more informed for reading it, which is to say that I'm probably in the state of thinking that I assess risks more accurately when I'm actually just as likely to make inaccurate estimates despite all my awareness of logical fallacies. I'd like to see an updated version of the book, or at least a discussion in the same vein, that deals with things like Covid-19, and whether the author still thinks of school shootings as an overblown risk.

I got An Immense World by Ed Yong as a birthday present, but I haven't started yet. Trying to read another month of comics on Marvel Unlimited instead (April 1994), though I spend a lot of time with the Simon Tatham's Puzzles app.

#books #reading #R.A. Salvatore #Drizzt do'Urden #Jo Clayton #Diadem #Shadith #Naomi Novik #Scholomance #Loid McMaster Bujold #Vorkosigan Saga #Tade Thompson #Wormwood #Rosewater #Garth Nix #Sabriel #Kim Harrison #Rachel Morgan #The Hollows

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