Ookings of d00m

1. Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

reread.

2. Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

reread.

3. First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher

The Codex alera series is finally brought to a satisfying conclusion. Especially after re-reading all of the books in one shot, I found it really interesating a) how many world details are still unexplained, and b) how much happens off-screen. A lot of important events (graduation, weddings, attempted assassinations, etc.) happen off-screen, and are just casually mentioned as having happened. This might bother me, except that the series was already six books long - if Butcher hadn't trimmed so carefully, the series would have had to be a lot longer. I think Butcher did a good job of focusing on the dramatically interesting events, as opposed to those important tothe characters. All in all, I heartily recommend this series.

4. Stiff by Mary Roach

Roach investigates the science and business of death. She is, as always, engaging, thoughtful and wonderful to read. Be warned, though, the book is pretty graphic in its discussion of dead bodies.

5. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

YA novel, steampunk done right. Darwinian bio-ships and mechanical walkers! Set at the beginning of WW1.

Now I'm all out of Mary Roach books to read, so I need to go get more non-fiction. come to think of it, I'm out of fiction to read, too, once I finish the Zelanzy short story book I'm on now.

I need to sit down and go through the Stephen Brust Dragaera novels and figure out which ones I have read and which I have not, and pick them all up. I notice that Indigo has none of them, but at least amazon seems to carry them.

At Thanksgiving, I picked up three books without reading the back blurb or looking at the cover art. I picked them up because all three authors were folks who seem to be highly regarded by folks I like, and authors I had never read a novel by. Scalzi's Old Man's War was the first of the three.

29. Escapement by Jay Lake

I wanted to like this book. Steampunk! Submarines! Airships! It just didn't work for me, though. I found that I didn't connect with any of the characters. I didn't buy into the setting (a world where literal clockwork makes everything go, and a giant wall divides the north and south hemispheres concealing much of Earth's gears etc.). In some settings, magic gets turned into technology (Mieville's New Crobuzon, Brust's Dragaera, Butcher's Alera), and that really works for me. Here, Lake does the opposite - technology gets abstracted into magic (and not in a Clarke-ian way, either), and I found it irritating. The female characters spent what seemed like an unreasonable amount of time self-consciously examining the injustice of the patriarchy to a degree that felt anachronistic.

30. Bone Dance by Emma Bull

I think Emma Bull is getting adopted into my list of "My People" authors. She was already on the nomination list for her work on Shadow Unit, but I think Bone Dance may have cinched it. "My People" authors write characters who feel like people I could know and get along with, who react in a way that I expect people to react in. In the set of three new authors, Bull is the clear winner. I will be buying more of her books. And reading the rest of Shadow Unit S2 if I have to convert it to ebook format myself.

31. Spook by Mary Roach

Mary Roach, a skeptic, looks into spiritualism and evidence for life after death. I'll be honest - if Mary Roach wrote a book called "Toast", I would read it, and probably enjoy it. She's an indrebily engaging author. Spook wasn't quite as rivetting as Bonk, but it was still pretty good.

32. Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

SQUEE. Book 5 in the Codex Alera. This round brings out a lot of the best stuff in the series. I am fighting to hold to my policy of not buying hardcovers. But book 5 came out in paperback the same day book 6 came out in hardcover. I am not sure how long I can wait to read book 6 (which ends the series).

33. Makers by Cory Doctorow (ebook)

Wow. While Cory's previous books didn't suck, this one shows some major technical skills. Makers solves some of the issues I had with previous Doctorow books - like Spider Robinson, a lot of Doctorow's work is just too fundamentally optimistic about the human condition. Makers is certianly not a a mope-fest, but the way the characters evolve and act feels a lot more real. The characters make mistakes, and sometimes they just can't fix things. Sometimes things that don't make sense happen, but they feel like the way things don't make sense in the real world. Unlike Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the Disney love in Makers didn't bug me. Defintely worth reading, and, in my opinon, Doctorow's best work so far.

Booklog update (where booklog refers to books I've read, as opposed to book*list* which is books I *want* to read. Arbitrary distinction, I know).

1.The Book of Lies by Disinformation Press (Richard Metzger, ed.)

There's going to be an essay-by-essay review of this later. I'm glad to be finished with this one, while it wasn't as bad as Everything You Know Is Wrong. Also, it's not *that* Book of Lies - this is, you know, the other one.

2.Cursor's Fury by Jim Butcher

The third in the Codex Alera series. I didn't like this as much as I did the first two - I felt the romance plots were sort of tacked on to the military fiction that dominated. I'm still attached enough to the bigger story arc and characters to keep going though. I certainly didn't hate it, and I'm definitely going to read book 4 when it's in paperback.

3.Tourmaline by Paul Park

The mediocre follow-up to the promising A Princess of Roumania. Park seems dead set on stripping all the characters of everything that made them engaging and interesting int he first book. I still think the setting is cool, but the charcters are sort of having the plot happen *at* them; they seem to have no agency whatsoever, and by the end I was getting a little annoyed. I would have been willing to tough it out for the third book, White Tyger, except that I discovered that it is not a trilogy - there's a fourth book coming, and no indication of how many books long the series will be. I'm not willing to make that kind of a commitment of my meagre reading time to a series that isn't working for me any more.

Book of Lies dragged in large chunks, so I read the other two in bits and pieces on weekends while avoid the Book of Lies. I'm most of the way done another "not serious" book, so when that's done, I'll have to go back to something more serious. But definitely not something that was put out by Disinformation Press. I'm thinking a nice light book on cultural or gender studies.

Recent Books

• The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. One of the most upsetting books I've read in a while. Written in the early 70s, a lot of the content seems pretty familiar. Brunner paints a picture of the world in environmental crisis, with the US at the forefront of the destruction, thanks to its economic position and a government that's spending more time and money on a foreign war than the devastation and collapse at home. Some things, Brunner gets right - we're living them now. Predictions that seem wrong - from my incredibly privileged position as a well-off white Canadian male, I think racism and sexism are less severe today than he paints them to be in the book. Brunner severely underestimates the forces of globalization - not only are the US and Canada still polluting like mad, the various large, populous "developing" nations like China are rapidly mobilizing themselves so that they'll be able to enjoy the same ecocidal standard of living we enjoy here. The scariest part, for me, is that the characters in the book are trying to make things better, trying to be "good consumers", buying organic foods, less toxic cars, etc. The sorts of things I try to do, and see my friends try to do. And it doesn't help. Nowhere near enough. The only solution for "how to improve things" presented on the book is pretty grim, though I suspect that it will not be enough. This book was unsettling before Katrina levelled NOLA and turned it into a toxic lake. Now? I can't help but read it as "You may already be this fucked."


• Grave Peril by Jim Butcher. A much lighter read, thank the gods. Butcher proves yet again that he can write better Anita Blake books than LKH can (which is to say, he's writing books about characters, with plot in them, and not just arguably hot sex). I caught a couple continuity errors early in the book - I've forgotten one, but the other really bugged me, for obvious reasons - if a girl is wearing combat boots, an observer will not be able to see the tattoo on her ankle. I worry slightly that Harry Dresden is going to start "levelling up" as I move through the series the way Anita Blake did, but this is book three, and the power creep has been pretty calm so far, and Dresden seems to be making his savings throw vs. Gary Stu-ism.

Next up, another Charlie Stross, then some serious thinking about Punk.