Reading progress

I finished Cara Black’s Murder in the Marais.  This book has a wonderful sense of place, perhaps as strong and specific as that of Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series.   Knowing relatively little about the history of Paris, particularly in World War II aside from the highlights taught in survey classes, I found the background to the murders and the neighborhood dynamic to be fascinating.

It is, I believe, the first book in a mystery series with Aimee Leduc as protagonist.  I’m ambivalent about Aimee:  she seems very careless of her own personal safety, which makes for an interesting adventure novel but also verges on TSTL sometimes.  Although perhaps it is not appropriate to import that comparison or standard to a mystery or suspense novel where personal risk is an inherent element of the plot?

Even so,  I’ll be keeping an eye out for other books in the series.

 

I also skimmed The Abortionist’s Daughter.  I can’t remember where or when I bought this book.  Or maybe I acquired it at a conference.  In any case, I was expecting more mystery and suspense; while the Bad Guy was revealed in the end, he was pretty predictable.  And I found the title character, Megan, the daughter of the dead abortion provider, to be a not very sympathetic character:  impulsive, selfish, unable to think outside of herself, not as smart or unique as she thought herself.  But I suppose most people are like that at 19.  None of the characters were particularly sympathetic actually; even the victim, who was admirable in many ways, was hard to find sympathetic when seen through the eyes of the other characters.

 

Robin McKinley’s Chalice, Ilona Andrews’ Steel’s Edge, and Meljean Brook’s Demon Blood are next on my list for the 50 page test.  Chalice is…not engaging me right now.  After these three, I’m going to take a hard look at my collection of categories, including most of the back lists of Robyn Donald and Susan Napier.

Recently read: Strange Fortune

Title:  Strange Fortune

Author:  Josh Lanyon

Publication info:  (c) 2009, Blind Eye Books

Format:  trade paperback

Genre:  fantasy

Back cover copy:

Strange Days Indeed

Valentine Strange, late of his Majesty’s 21st Benhali Lancers, needs money.  Happily, the wealthy Holy Orders of Harappu are desperate to retrieve the diadem of the Goddess Purya from an ancient temple deep in the mountainous jungle  – an area Strange knows well from his days quelling rebellions.  The pay is too good and the job seems too easy for Strange to refuse.  But when Master Aleister Grimshaw, a dangerous witch from a traitorous lineage, joins the expedition, Strange begins to suspect that more is at stake than the retrieval of a mere relic.

Grimshaw knows an ancient evil surrounds the diadem — the same evil once hunted him and still haunts his mind.  However, experience has taught him to keep his suspicions to himself or risk being denounced as a madman.  Again.

Harried by curses, bandits and unnatural creatures, Strange and Grimshaw plunge onward.  But when a demonic power wakes and the civilized world descends into revolution, their tenuous friendship is threatened as each man must face the destruction of the life he has know.

The blurb is somewhat exaggerated IMO.

What did I think?  I enjoyed the book as speculative fiction set in an alternative colonial India in which magic and witches are active.  The adventure was engaging.  But the back copy led me to believe that there would be more…introspection, perhaps?  The relationship between the two men was pretty ancillary to the plot.  TBH, while I grasped the larger context of the civil conflict between the Albans and Hindush, some pieces of the plot (like Lady Isabella, and the mutineers) felt not-well-integrated.  I wonder if I knew more about the Anglo-Indian colonial experience, would I feel like the book was more cohesive?  Or maybe it is fine, just not up to the standard of the book I was rereading before this one, The Curse of Chalion, which is my absolute benchmark for fantasy as alternate histories of sorts.

What about the book as object?  Blind Eye Books is a reputable publishers and the book’s presentation is lovely.  I especially like the colors and patterns used to decorate the book cover, although I don’t love the cartoon style hero.  There were a fair number of either copy editing or typesetting misses, mostly little things like quotation marks facing the wrong way or being doubled, some dropped punctuation and missed letters and the like.

Would I recommend the book?  Yes.  With the caveat that it is not at all like Lanyon’s other work, so readers should not expect Adrien English-in-India.

Best books read this year

It’s a little early, since I could (theoretically) read something that wows me between now and NYE…but given my schedule and to-do list, that seems unlikely at the moment.  One hundred ten books read this year, fewer than last year once again, continuing the downward trend.  Most of the ratings were clumped in the middle.  One thing that stands out is that none of the In Death or NR books I read this year made the list.  Another is that there are no genre romances from traditional or NY publishers on the list, which says something about my reading (but I’m not sure what).

Books I enjoyed the most:

• Tigerland by Sean Kennedy (2012) — yes, review is still half-written
• Midnight Riot, Moon Over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch (2011, 2011, 2012 respectively)
• A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka (2005)
• Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik (2012)
• Irregulars: Stores by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (2012)
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2007)
• But My Boyfriend Is by K.A. Mitchell (2012)

Honorable Mentions:

• Broken Harbour by Tana French (2012)
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012)

(These last two were beautifully written and I appreciated them, but they aren’t books I’ll reread.)

Books that made me the cranky for a variety of reasons:

• Steamroller by Mary Calmes (2012)
• When in Doubt, Add Butter by Beth Harbison (2012)
• Bared to You by Sylvia Day (2012)
• Devils Punch by Ann Aguirre (2012)

Recently read

The Hot Floor by Josephine Myles

Really like this author’s voice, although not all the books I’ve tried work for me.  This one did for the most part.  It is one of very few m/m/m books that works as something other than straight up porn, or has the third character as anything other than a brief distraction.  I thought the narrator needed a little development or more background, but otherwise was pleased with this book.  (B-)

A Younger Man by Cameron Dane

This book succumbs to pretty stereotypical bifurcation of gay men into masculine tops and feminine bottoms, in terms of equating sexual behavior with public/daily life.   In addition to having all the traditional female characteristics, the younger man was a victim/martyr (I think I was supposed to sympathize but it was Too Much) who engaged in TSTL behavior to create the two big outside conflicts.  The logic behind one Big Conflict was lacking and also playing into the Evil Woman m/m fiction trope.  Also, there was way too much sex on the page – which bogged down the pacing and made the book drag.  (D+)

Mourning Heaven by Amy Lane

This book was a complete mess.  The narrator is an utter Mary Sue who is also spineless and a creepy voyeur.  The other main character needs serious mental health care:  there’s a difference between being damaged and being broken, and love isn’t a panacea, despite the narrator’s opinion and activities.  The women in the book are either: 1) victims; 2)  losers; 3) irresponsible sluts; or 4) close-minded bigots.  In fact, the women are to blame for pretty much every bad thing that happens in the book.  The whole thing was an angsty wankfest of misery with a chaser of painful, awkward, seriously squick-inducing sex.  I kept reading because of the train wreck factor – I wouldn’t recommend it and can’t say I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t look away.  (F)

As usual, YMMV.  Both of the train wrecks have gotten fairly high ratings at Good Reads and Amazon, so…

How hardcore are you if you keep getting rescued?

SPOILERS FOR THE QUEEN & COUNTRY SERIES AHOY.

I finished Greg Rucka’s The Last Run the other night.  It’s the third Tara Chace thriller novel; there’s also a graphic novel series that fills in her backstory and some of her adventures as a covert agent for Britain’s SIS.  Overall, I have really enjoyed the three books and the scattered graphic novels I’ve managed to find, the books more so than the graphic novels mostly because I prefer word to drawing but that’s just a matter of taste.

Tara Chase is an expert; at this point, five years have passed since A Gentleman’s Game, and she is Minder One, agent in charge of the team of three in her Ops group, and apparently fairly well-known within the espionage and intelligence community.  She gets the job done, even if in the end the outcome isn’t exactly as planned; she’s always moving, planning, thinking, reacting to changes in the situation.  And yet in both the second and third books, she’s caught and either tortured or in a very bad position, and has to be rescued.  She does a good job of evading capture for a while, and maneuvers to the point that she can be extracted or exfiltrated by her service (rather than be abandoned)…and yet she’s still being rescued.

On one hand, Rucka does a great job of demonstrating how operations never go as planned, and the outcome is often not what was anticipated, resulting in possibly horrendous blowback.  And Chace is a great character, if a little underdrawn outside of professional accomplishments.  On the other hand, are there male spy protagonists who have to be rescued in the end?  I haven’t read a lot of espionage thrillers, not since back before Tom Clancy and Jack Ryan jumped the shark, so I can’t really compare.  And the ending of The Last Run makes sense in terms of the larger plot for the book and the story arc, assuming this is either the last book or a transition book.  But hovering in my mind is the question:  how often to badass spy heroes have to be rescued in the end, and would the story be different if Tara were Tim or Tom instead?

A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka

A while back, a member of my primary fandom who works in the entertainment industry and always writes very thoughtful posts about women in the entertainment industry linked to Greg Rucka’s interview in which in explains why/how he writes strong female characters.  And later she linked to this interview, in which Rucka talked about his protagonist Tara Chace in the Queen & Country series (graphic novels and regular novels).  There’s a lot to mull over between the two pieces, but this bit is what caught my attention:

“[Hollywood is] paralyzed by the fact that it’s a female lead. That’s what it comes down to—they’re paralyzed by the fact that the lead in Queen & Country is a woman and I’ve literally had conversations with executives where they’ve said, ‘Is there any way that we can get a man up there with her?’ and it’s like, ‘Well, sure. That’s not Queen & Country. Feel free to write that yourselves.’”

After reading that, I had to check out the book.

Title:  A Gentleman’s Game

Publishing info:  copyright 2004, published by Bantam

Based on the graphic novel series published by Oni Press

Excerpt available here.

When an unthinkable act of terror devastates London, nothing will stop Tara Chace from hunting down those responsible. Her job is simple: stop the terrorists before they strike a second time. To succeed, she’ll do anything and everything it takes. She’ll have to kill again. 

Only this time the personal stakes will be higher than ever before. For the terrorist counterstrike will require that Tara allow herself to be used as bait by the government she serves. This time she’s turning her very life into a weapon that can be used only once. But as she and her former mentor race toward destiny at a remote terrorist training camp in Saudi Arabia, Tara begins to question just who’s pulling the trigger—and who’s the real enemy. In this new kind of war, betrayal can take any form…including one’s duty to queen and country.

This blurb is…not entirely accurate.  Well, strictly speaking, it is, but it skips a huge amount of plot that comes before and also implies that Tara had a choice about being used as bait.  [Not so much.]

As you might guess, AGG is an espionage thriller set in the mid-00s.

Let’s start with the title.  Spying was considered “a gentleman’s game” by the British in earlier times — why?  Because it was a sophisticated undertaking suitable only for the sort of “gentlemen”?  One of the characters in the book, not a particularly sympathetic one, laments those lost days, now subsumed in more brutal counter-terrorism activity even as he contributes to the on-going demolition.  But it begs the question:  what is so “gentlemanly” about spying really?   And since the protagonist, the highest ranking active agent, is a woman, there’s just another step away from the traditional MI-6 spy culture.  Take yet another step away from the golden/glory days as the plot progresses and the underlying agreement between agency and agent is demolished.  By the end of the novel, there are no gentlemen and no games left.

The narration is done in third person, with the perspective of several characters.  Although Tara is the main character, readers get as much time in the head of her immediate supervisor and nearly as much in the mind of a third person.  There’s even a one-off scene with the POV of a fourth character, which is a little out of place but necessary for the narrative style.  Yet this does not scream of head-hopping, the way multiple POVs sometimes do.

Readers get to know pieces of Tara Chace, mostly the pieces that are relevant to how she does her job and what makes her good at it, but not the whole of her.  Will more be revealed in later books?  I’m not sure it’s necessary.  She’s isolated and insulated by her job, yet also vulnerable because of it.  She’s extremely skilled yet also disposable, especially in the sense that there appears to be a high rate of burnout or turnover.  A love interest is presented in the book, and I felt quite ambivalent about it:  while it made sense in context, the outcome was somewhat predictable IMO.

Rucka’s writing didn’t strike me as particularly artful — there are no passages that I marked as favorites — but it flows well and the pacing is excellent.  Once I dug into the book, I couldn’t put it down.  He does a very good job of including enough politics, history, and background information about the tension and subtext of Saudi-UK-US-Israeli cooperation on terrorism to make the plot hang together without bogging the storyline down.  He also doesn’t get mired in technical information (Tom Clancy, I’m looking at your old Jack Ryan books) while including just enough for the various operations to make sense.

One of the largest issues, that of the rights of the individual in the face of national interests, of the dismantling of an institution’s modus operandi as an obstruction to political convenience, is resolved at the level of the character but unresolved on the national and international scale.  What will be the result of MI6 basically tossing Tara to the wolves?  I guess I’ll find out when I settle into the next book of the series.

I feel a glom of all Rucka’s work coming on.

Highly recommended.

Loved, liked, and meh

Book I read last week that I loved: Novik’s latest Temeraire book, Crucible of Gold 

Several years and books ago, Novik hinted about the alternate history of the New World as a result of the existence of dragons, and in this book readers get to learn more.  But better than that, the dull, dragging narrative and clunky pacing of the last book have vanished.  While I understand intellectually that Tongues of Serpents was a set up book, it needed better editing and pacing.  (Like the second and third books, which felt like a single long book chopped in two for marketing/business purposes, I wondered a little if it would have been better off coupled with either Victory of Eagles or Crucible for better pacing and plotting because it was a disappointment on its own — that seems to be the general consensus among the readers I know.)

Anyway, I love the way the Inca and Tswana dragons and their view of their human families are a foil for the European mindset about dragon ownership, and yet at the same time highlight the possessive natures of the dragons in Temeraire’s coterie.

One particular part left me goggle-eyed and startled, because I did NOT see that coming.  Not shocked or offended in any manner and it sort of fits in retrospect, but just startled.  Sort of the way I felt when JK Rowling casually announced that Dumbledore was gay.

And the ending was good, circling back perhaps to clear up some dangling threads in the next book.

The book I liked well enough:  Fair Game by Patricia Briggs

I liked but didn’t love this book and I haven’t quite figured out why beyond a few general quibbles.  First, Anna’s development from cowering and fearful in the first book of the series to organizing and managing in this third book.  Told not shown, and not particularly believable to me given how hard Briggs worked to present her as hesitant, self-doubting and reticent.  Second, in the early books, Anna’s delicacy and short stature were made much of IIRC but in this book she is average height or taller.  Did she suddenly have a growth spurt after maturity?  Lastly, I’m growing uncomfortable with serial killers and rapists in urban fantasy and Briggs’ use of rape and/or threatened sexual assault to the female narrators and characters in her books in particular.  It’s all down to personal taste and YMMV, obviously, since a lot of other readers really loved this book.

The meh book:  Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women by Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Some of the entries in this short survey are obvious (Joan of Arc); others are less so (Carry Nation); and still others are original and inspiring (Ida B. Wells).  The tone and style are extremely casual and informal, with the author making comparisons to Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, etc. — very pop culture referential, as if the author felt she had to equate each woman    It’s hard to condense the history of a complex character like Eleanor of Aquitaine to 15 pages or less, and the difficulty is very apparent here; in many of the biographies, the emphasis is on the trivial and the titillating rather than substance, which is an unfortunate waste of an opportunity.  There’s no significant analysis and the approach is not serious , and the bibliography and citations are somewhat lacking IMO.  Perhaps I’m the wrong audience; maybe a 20 year old who knows very little about history would be fascinated by this introduction to the wild women of days gone by.  Or maybe they could find the same information at Wikipedia for free.

Making me cry: The Fault in Our Stars

I didn’t *love* Will Grayson, Will Grayson, a collaboration between John Green and David Levitan, I liked Green’s portion enough to be willing to try something else he’s written.  Yes, yes, he’s apparently a Big Deal in YA but I’m fairly disconnected from YA and also from a lot of other genre fiction.  His new book is The Fault in Our Stars.

It made me cry.

I seldom cry.

And I could not tell you when a book (or film) last made me cry or even feel a little misty-eyed.

Hazel Grace is a sympathetic narrator: she has accepted that she’s living on borrowed time* and even though she recognizes the unfairness and gets angry, she just keeps living.  Community college, favorite TV shows, keeping up an awkward friendship with an ex-classmate, going to Support Group.  She’s smart and snarky and a little bit unbelievably mature and verbose for her age, but still a great character.

And then there is Augustus Waters.  He steals the book from her.  Also smart and quirky and funny and an utter boy (although also a little too mature and well-spoken for his age, but forgiveably so).

While there is a very tender (and sexy) love story in TFiOS, this is absolutely not genre romance.  There is no HEA; Grace reminds readers constantly by her very presence and the medical equipment she drags along behind her that there will be no ever after.

I’m not entirely certain what to think of the drunken, reclusive author who has a major role but only a small speaking part in the book.  He’s a monumental jerk to Hazel and Augustus, but he also highlights the end point and limitation of works of fiction.   Because fiction isn’t real, and even though a reader can imagine “what happens next”, it’s the author’s prerogative to write (or not) whatever the next is.  And in his case, there was no next, despite how his opus ended.

In his author note at the outset of the book, Green warns readers not to read his personal life into the book, which I have not done.  But the fiction within the fiction made me wonder about Green’s position on fan fiction and its role in his popularity (or not).

 

 

*In this, she reminds me of Cazaril in The Curse of Chalion, who when reminded by another character that he was carrying a demon within and would likely die soon, remarked that this made him no different than anyone else since life was uncertain and they could all die at anytime, his death was just a little sooner and more likely than those around him.

 

A different sort of HP?

His Marriage Ultimatum by Helen Brooks (c)2006

Another book picked up as part of the Great Book Purge of 2012.  I could probably count this as part of the TBR challenge that SuperLibrarian is hosting, although I’m posting a day early.

This reads like a pretty typical backblurb for Harlequin Presents:

A bride for the taking?

Carter Blake is sued to getting his own way — he didn’t become a billionaire by taking no for an answer!  And he has to have shy, virginal Liberty Fox.  He’ll charm and seduce her into becoming his…

But Liberty is not ripe for Carter’s picking. To possess her, Carter is forced to make one final ultimatum…he will have her and hold her in matrimony. . . if that’s what it takes!

Billionaires! Virgins! Ultimatums!  Oh my!

Except.

1.  Although the hero is very wealthy and became so after a youth of relative poverty on a council estate, it isn’t explicitly stated (that I recall) that he’s a billionaire.  A mention of his first million and his connections in various places, as well as a vague statement about real estate and entrepreneur are really it.  Beyond that, it’s very clear that he is New Money, and that he’s not that far removed from the poverty of his youth and some of the people who knew him at the time.

2.  Liberty Fox is not shy.  At no point was she ever shy with Carter.  In fact, she’s pretty belligerent and mouthy with him at the outset of the book, giving him a hard time about anything and everything she can.  And even once the belligerence is gone, she remains pretty resistant to following where he’s leading.

3.  There wasn’t really much overt seduction.  There is no sex (and just a little foreplay) until the very last pages of the book.  And it was marital sex.

4.  The blurb implies that he’s forced to propose, when in fact, he proposes because he wants to and has to work to get her to even consider marriage.  He’s the one who realizes he loves her first, who wants to make things permanent, who acknowledges that their original agreement (nothing heavy) isn’t working for him any more.

I especially loved this passage early on, when the two are discussing the viability of long term relationships and marriage:

“You’re saying you would voluntarily choose a solitary lifestyle?” Well you have, the voice outside himself pointed out sharply, and when he answered it with, But I’m a man, that’s different, he felt instantly appalled at himself.  Both in his work life and his love life he had always held to the view that women were equal with men in every way, and it was galling to discover he was as male chauvinist at heart as the next man.  More than galling.

Readers get a fair amount of Carter’s POV, which is a positive aspect:  he’s by turns bewildered by his attraction to this woman, and frustrated by her intransigence when it comes to any sort of commitment, and yet also just completely gobsmacked by her.  Liberty is a pretty sympathetic heroine, too:  she’s got mommy issues but recognizes them, appears to be good at her job, self-sufficient and with a life that suits her…until Carter comes along.

Would I recommend this book to the average reader?  Maybe not, because it does contain some standard HP tropes (billionaire, virgin, etc.).  But I would recommend it to other HP readers.

 

In an effort to get beyond the bad mood

+  The grass at Wimbledon in the opening rounds is gorgeous, no brown patches yet.  I can’t remember, did I ever post any of the photos I took when I visited last year?  Ironically, the tour stopped on Court 18 so we could see a court at eye level and touch the grass (no pulling) — this was, of course, four months before the historic Isner/Mahut match.  (Which was a long match, but wouldn’t necessarily be on my list of "great" matches.)  Fernando  managed to dig himself out of a hole and win in five against Radek Stepanek.  Sam Stosur seemed to have left her serve and her forehand and her entire game in Australia, and went out early.  Daveeeed won in straight sets.  \o/  

 

+  If you have a subscription to the NY Times, check out Christopher Clarey’s pieces on the differences between the racquets of the top four players.  And his other writing, too, of course.  And Tignor over at tennis.com; I like his writing enough that I’ve got his MacEnroe/Borg book, High Strung, TBR despite the fact that I can’t stand MacEnroe and have to put him on mute whenever he’s commenting (read: bloviating) for a match.

+ \o/ for the IASPR conference coming up.  Must print the schedule and double check reservations and also make sure to sign up for the group dinner on Monday.

+  Ordered a retirement gift for the retiring boss.  Who is also my friend and whom I’ll continue to see outside work.  But still.

+  B&N posted a net loss last quarter, despite an increase in sales.  I’ll be interested in reading their SEC filings.

+  I read Josh Lanyon’s Come Unto These Yellow Sands, which I really enjoyed.  The recovering addict hero may be my favorite of his narrators to date, which is a little surprising to me for a variety of reasons, mostly related to real-life issues that don’t need to be rehashed here.  I pre-ordered it and then forgot about it, and it appeared on my Kindle when I turned it on the other day.  I’ve been sort of "off" Lanyon lately, because the last couple books I tried, historicals, didn’t really work for me.  His contemporaries work much better for me.  It’s a little odd, since it’s the same voice and writing style.  Maybe the problem is my approach to reading the historicals and my general lack of interest in noire?  The historicals do seem noire-ish or noire-lite to me.  Or maybe I’m confusing eras and styles.

+  Attempted to read an Ellora’s Cave book.  It came well-recommended by a GLBT review website that I need to just delete from my Google Reader.  But it was set in New Zealand and had professional rugby players as protagonists, which was what interested me.  Still, the price was ridiculous, the length extremely short and the plot and writing elementary.  Waste of a good potential story line.  Eh, just a reminder to myself to not attempt EC books and to completely ignore the "reviews" and use that website as a a publishing/release info resource only.

 

+  I forgot to mention:  I got a concert call last week!  Panic! playing "Carry On My Wayward Son".  It was awesome!