March/April Bookpost
May. 5th, 2008 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienWalter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books
The tale of an aspiring author whose quest for the author of one perfect fragment leads him into the book-filled catacombs below the book-obsessed city of Bookholm. Great fun, with delightful woodcut-style illustrations, though I'm not sure how much of the credit for the literary puns and anagrams should go to the translator -- it was originally written in German, but the references are all to English literature.
Dudley Pope, Ramage's Devil
Caught on honeymoon in France when war breaks out again, Ramage escapes and goes after his imprisoned host on a chase to Devil's Island, ditching his new bride without a backward glance as soon as duty calls, and scamming the drunken, stupid French out of their ships in his usual style. (I'm coming to the conclusion that Pope didn't really like writing battles, which is a bit of a handicap for a naval novelist.)
Alan Campbell, Scar Night
Dark and gory fantasy with city-as-character and characters as caricatures, reminiscent of Mieville and Peake and maybe a little of Erikson, with an unusual take on the undead; also airships. It was a compelling read with some vivid imagery, but felt a little derivative, not quite up to the standard of any of the things it emulates.
Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm, The Gypsy
A crusty old cop and his old and new partners cross path with an amnesiac gypsy and tangle with gypsy mythology in a midwestern city; the story slips back and forth between everyday reality and the world of myth with a hallucinatory ease that makes the story hard to follow.
Elizabeth Bear, Dust
On a wrecked generation ship orbiting a doomed star, the descendants -- genetically altered and nanotech-infested -- of the crew and the fragmented remnants of the AI battle and consume one another. Can they come together in time to save the ship before the star goes nova? The voice is high fantasy, with what I think are echoes of Amber; there's plenty of wonder and tragedy to go around.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting
A plucky band of scientific policy wonks central-plan their way out of global warming with the help of a group of Buddhist monks; one of the protagonists has his love-life complicated by some kind of black-ops internal espionage unit. Satisfying but not entirely believable conclusion to the trilogy.
Jane Austen, Emma (reread)
I was very young when I first read this, and I'm not sure I really realized what a dreadful snob Emma was, back then. I was also intrigued to notice that Mr. Knightley actually gets something verging on POV here and there, though it's pretty loose and indirect.
Mindy Klasky, The Glasswright's Apprentice
When her guild is implicated in the murder of the crown prince, thirteen-year-old Ranu, merchant's daughter turned craft apprentice, finds herself on the streets sampling the lives of the other castes in her caste-bound city and moving from beggary and thieving to the palace. I found it rather hard to identify with Rani as protagonist; I suppose the combination of scary competence with utter cluelessness about the implications of her actions makes sense for someone that age, but it didn't make me like her. It isn't quite a fantasy without magic, but the magic is mostly low-key, and doesn't really play a part in the plot until the very end.
Karen Traviss, Judge
Final entry in the series that started with City of Pearl, and a little disappointing; after five books of ever-escalating tension, there are no painless answers, but it still felt a anticlimactic in places. The end kept me up hours after I should have been asleep, though, and brought tears to my eyes more than once.
Charles Stross, Halting State
Near-future thriller set in Edinburgh and cyberspace, with an unusual revolving-second-person narrator that wasn't quite as offputting as you'd think, though I wasn't completely convinced by it.
The tale of an aspiring author whose quest for the author of one perfect fragment leads him into the book-filled catacombs below the book-obsessed city of Bookholm. Great fun, with delightful woodcut-style illustrations, though I'm not sure how much of the credit for the literary puns and anagrams should go to the translator -- it was originally written in German, but the references are all to English literature.
Dudley Pope, Ramage's Devil
Caught on honeymoon in France when war breaks out again, Ramage escapes and goes after his imprisoned host on a chase to Devil's Island, ditching his new bride without a backward glance as soon as duty calls, and scamming the drunken, stupid French out of their ships in his usual style. (I'm coming to the conclusion that Pope didn't really like writing battles, which is a bit of a handicap for a naval novelist.)
Alan Campbell, Scar Night
Dark and gory fantasy with city-as-character and characters as caricatures, reminiscent of Mieville and Peake and maybe a little of Erikson, with an unusual take on the undead; also airships. It was a compelling read with some vivid imagery, but felt a little derivative, not quite up to the standard of any of the things it emulates.
Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm, The Gypsy
A crusty old cop and his old and new partners cross path with an amnesiac gypsy and tangle with gypsy mythology in a midwestern city; the story slips back and forth between everyday reality and the world of myth with a hallucinatory ease that makes the story hard to follow.
Elizabeth Bear, Dust
On a wrecked generation ship orbiting a doomed star, the descendants -- genetically altered and nanotech-infested -- of the crew and the fragmented remnants of the AI battle and consume one another. Can they come together in time to save the ship before the star goes nova? The voice is high fantasy, with what I think are echoes of Amber; there's plenty of wonder and tragedy to go around.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting
A plucky band of scientific policy wonks central-plan their way out of global warming with the help of a group of Buddhist monks; one of the protagonists has his love-life complicated by some kind of black-ops internal espionage unit. Satisfying but not entirely believable conclusion to the trilogy.
Jane Austen, Emma (reread)
I was very young when I first read this, and I'm not sure I really realized what a dreadful snob Emma was, back then. I was also intrigued to notice that Mr. Knightley actually gets something verging on POV here and there, though it's pretty loose and indirect.
Mindy Klasky, The Glasswright's Apprentice
When her guild is implicated in the murder of the crown prince, thirteen-year-old Ranu, merchant's daughter turned craft apprentice, finds herself on the streets sampling the lives of the other castes in her caste-bound city and moving from beggary and thieving to the palace. I found it rather hard to identify with Rani as protagonist; I suppose the combination of scary competence with utter cluelessness about the implications of her actions makes sense for someone that age, but it didn't make me like her. It isn't quite a fantasy without magic, but the magic is mostly low-key, and doesn't really play a part in the plot until the very end.
Karen Traviss, Judge
Final entry in the series that started with City of Pearl, and a little disappointing; after five books of ever-escalating tension, there are no painless answers, but it still felt a anticlimactic in places. The end kept me up hours after I should have been asleep, though, and brought tears to my eyes more than once.
Charles Stross, Halting State
Near-future thriller set in Edinburgh and cyberspace, with an unusual revolving-second-person narrator that wasn't quite as offputting as you'd think, though I wasn't completely convinced by it.
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Date: 2008-05-07 05:39 am (UTC)