in-reading notes: murder in vein

There's something off about this book. The story's fine, the mystery is interesting, but the main character feels... hollow. Like all she does is react, while at the same time she doesn't have much in the way of internal monologue exccept for what she's physically doing, and it makes her sort of Mary-Sue-ish. Like Bella Swan from Twilight, though this is meant to be an adult book and isn't really that sort of vampire novel at all. I just feel like I don't need an avatar in the book world; I know who I am, and I don't need to ride someone else and fill in the gaps. Just show me who you are, Madison Rose.

Other than that, it's pretty interesting, and I'm liking the plot. I like also that the vampires are a married couple, which is a nice difference from most, and I like the Detective who seems to never sleep. He reminds me of an amalgam of people from the Blood Ties stories, and hopefully he'll get more page time in the second half.

I still don't understand why people keep basing vampire stories in LA, though. Anyway. Pet peeve.

Review is due Sunday or before, and the book comes out Sept 1, so there's still time for the end to totally win me over.

in-reading notes: black hole sun

The cover says it's like Mad Max, but it's totally not like that. It feels more like Firefly meets the down-fall side of 1984 or something like that-- the cleverness and moral ambiguity of Joss mashed up with the grey and crumbling distopias that are made of corporations and do their best to crush souls. Firefly if they were kids trapped on the Vogon homeworld by way of the Mars from Total Recall.

It's very interesting. My mind is already spinning off ideas for novels and histories and plotlines that could easily cover several books, and that's the sort of story I like best: the kind that sparks inspiration. Who wants a book that's closed and tells you everything? There's no room for your own ideas there.

I think this one will be done first (it's currently a rundown between this and Murder In Vein to see who gets read and reviewed first, but both are due by Sunday and come out on Sept 1).

in-reading notes: wintergirls

This book is harrowing. Not just because it's meant to be and has that built in contradiction between what she's saying and what she's doing (and I really love the strike-out in the text to show the disjunction between what she's thinking and what she's telling herself)-- but also because of how close to home it hits.

I was never intentionally anorexic, but it was ingrained enough that reading this book is hard. It's bringing up old thought patterns and the newer patterns that developed to deal with them-- while she's talking about not eating, all I want to do is eat to prove that I'm not like that anymore. It might be in part because I'm currently trying to lose weight, and the whole calorie-counting and food-choice-making feels a little too like anorexia sometimes, but this book is just too much sometimes.

But it's fiercely good. And frequently very beautiful. Which is part of the problem, I think. If it was relentlessly horrible, it wouldn't affect me so much.

omnitopia dawn by diane duane

This book... I really wanted to like it, but it just felt like so much of it was waiting for something to happen, that huge swathes of the book never actually did anything. It's past the half-way point before even the inkling of something happening happens, and then it really all doesn't come together until the second-to-last chapter. It's got a good idea, but it has trouble getting there, and I wish I was one of her advance-readers while she was writing it-- I think I could have convinced her to shift the focus and it would have been so much better. But maybe that's just my ego talking.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series, but if it's similarly slow, I doubt I'll care much past that.

Side note:
The cover of the book calls it a 'thriller'. Does that word mean 'extremely backloaded so that most of the rest of the book doesn't really matter when it comes down to it'? Because Impact was also called a thriller, and though I found it almost insufferable, while this one was just dull, they have the same dragging in the plot, the same idea that most of the book is just filler. If that's how it is, I think I don't care at all about thrillers, and they're mostly lazy writing and sort of an insult to the scifi tropes they seem to want to steal all over the place lately.

Official review here.

PS: There doesn't seem to be much sense to where the links go in. I'll have to play around with that, I think...

review: the charlatan's boy by jonathan rogers

This is one of those rare little books that is entirely charming. It's straightforward without being simple, and incredibly rich. I really loved reading it, and while doing my research for the turn in, I found out that there are more stories set in the same world-- a Trilogy called the Wilderking that also deals with feechies (which is now what I call my fish, and also what I think I'll call my children when I have them and they're being clever and wild).

It's worth the read. My full review is here.

And it has a lovely cover.

national geographic: july 2010

ancient human skull on the cover
table of contents here


Let me just say that I absolutely love NatGeo and I always have for as long as I can remember. Before I could read, I'd lay on my stomach on the floor at my Aunt Betty's house, looking at all the amazing pictures and being just stunned that the things in them were real, that one day I might get to see them for myself. Then, almost as soon as I could read, it seemed, I'd spend hours reading through the back issues that were always there, filling my head with information and big words and page after page of text. Maybe that's why I'm not afraid of text.

When I was maybe 17, I got my first subscription to them under my own name, and since then, I've had several. Not really consistent, since my income is not really consistent, but at least a year, at least every few years, and when I don't have a sub, I usually track down the new issues and get them individually at cover price. I've tracked down the issues from the years of birth for my entire immediate family (except my own, which seems to all be mythical). I've kept all the ones I've bought.

And my favorite ones are the ones that feature human history and archaeology. This issue doesn't disappoint, and it's beautiful. Well-written, told like the best story around, clear, informative, not too much slant that I can see (which either means it's pretty unslanted, or that my degree in anthropology slants in the same way and I don't notice it). Evocative. Exactly what I want from NatGeo. Even the little articles are amazing-- one about space junk, how it matters and how to deal with it-- a little one-pager about the worst places in America to be a pedestrian (with the top four all being in Florida!).

If I wind up working for a magazine, I want it to be NatGeo. I want to be able to say, 'I edited that to make it so pretty', or 'I wrote that article and it blends seamlessly with the 150 year history of the mag'.

I've got two more fresh issues to read, and another old one that I misplaced and never finished, and that right there is more than worth the time it takes to read a whole issue. It actually almost makes me wish I still had a two-hour each way bus ride to get to work!

currently reading: week 33, first half of august

Any minute now, my reading load doubles, at least. By the end of this month, I'll be caught up with reviewing, and next week I need to start reading the books for school, so, yeah. As of this moment, I'm reading Charlatan's Boy, which I'm thoroughly enjoying, still reading How to Write SF and F, starting on Murder In Vein, and I've got Wintergirls lurking, waiting to start Monday. And I just picked up City of Glass, which finally hit QP and matches the rest, and Heatwave, which is thin and beautifully cliched... though who knows when I'll get to read those two!

Linkies!
The Charlatan's Boy isn't available yet, so here's it's preemptive link

    

migration by james p hogan

This book started out like a medieval fantasy and ended like a space opera, and in between, it skipped eleven years and often read like a treatise on the way people could build a better society. Even so, though, it was an interesting read, and I come out with only two complaints, and they aren't even that bad: one, I wish that it's transformation from classic scifi mode to modern scifi mode had been more complete and it had kept going, and two, I wish the situation of robot religiosity had been handled in a less definitively anthropocentric way, but even that, with all it's big words, isn't really a problem in the context of the book-- it's really the only way things could have gone.

JP Hogan died recently, and it's sad that it means there probably won't be more of these stories of these people and their trip to another world for the first time in human history, but it's a pretty optimistic way to leave the fans, I think. We really can make things better.