October Books (Part 2)
Nov. 19th, 2006 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienJo Walton, Farthing
What can I say about this that hasn't already been said better? It isn't flawless -- and the whole wren-robin confusion was not good for my suspension of disbelief --- but it's beautifully done, full of telling details and good tea, as well as grimly thought-provoking.
Karen Traviss, Matriarch
This series just keeps getting better, full of brutal ethical dilemmas and vividly evoked alien worlds.
Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron
Interesting twist on urban faerie fantasy; very few tropes that haven't turned up elsewhere (a unicorn, a dragon, bards, a pooka, Arthur Pendragon), but they're put together in original ways.
Peter Hessler, River Town
Memoir of two years teaching English lit in a backwater industrial town
in China, in the early days of the opening-up of the country to the West.
Fascinating and evocative of the joys and frustrations of living as a foreigner in a place unused to them, and as a young American in a society still firmly under the thumb of the Communist Party. The extracts from student essays are sometimes amusing and often poignant. I got a faint and possibly unfair impression that the author's written English had suffered a little from spending so much time among Chinese students; there was something oddly uniform and simplified about the sentence structure.
Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Fury
More interstitial Sharpe from relatively early in the Peninsular War, not the most satisfying of the series by a long way; the last third of the book deals with a historical battle, in the usual gory and explosive detail, but it doesn't seem all that well integrated with the rest of the story. It's hard to fit character development into a squeezed-in story like this; it's more a case of going over the lines again, scoring them deeper and blacker, at the risk of pushing the portrait over into caricature.
Oddly, this one doesn't end by echoing the title.
What can I say about this that hasn't already been said better? It isn't flawless -- and the whole wren-robin confusion was not good for my suspension of disbelief --- but it's beautifully done, full of telling details and good tea, as well as grimly thought-provoking.
Karen Traviss, Matriarch
This series just keeps getting better, full of brutal ethical dilemmas and vividly evoked alien worlds.
Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron
Interesting twist on urban faerie fantasy; very few tropes that haven't turned up elsewhere (a unicorn, a dragon, bards, a pooka, Arthur Pendragon), but they're put together in original ways.
Peter Hessler, River Town
Memoir of two years teaching English lit in a backwater industrial town
in China, in the early days of the opening-up of the country to the West.
Fascinating and evocative of the joys and frustrations of living as a foreigner in a place unused to them, and as a young American in a society still firmly under the thumb of the Communist Party. The extracts from student essays are sometimes amusing and often poignant. I got a faint and possibly unfair impression that the author's written English had suffered a little from spending so much time among Chinese students; there was something oddly uniform and simplified about the sentence structure.
Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Fury
More interstitial Sharpe from relatively early in the Peninsular War, not the most satisfying of the series by a long way; the last third of the book deals with a historical battle, in the usual gory and explosive detail, but it doesn't seem all that well integrated with the rest of the story. It's hard to fit character development into a squeezed-in story like this; it's more a case of going over the lines again, scoring them deeper and blacker, at the risk of pushing the portrait over into caricature.
Oddly, this one doesn't end by echoing the title.
