aelfgyfu_mead (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aelfgyfu_mead) wrote2014-08-02 08:58 pm
aelfgyfu_mead) wrote2014-08-02 08:58 pm
Entry tags:
Books!
I have not done a book entry in far too long. I'm pretty sure I'm missing some here. They tend to get put away and then I can't remember what I read when.
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
I can't remember who gave me this book. It's not one I'd have bought for myself, but I was glad I read it. I rate it moderately highly. The book features a first-person narrator, Jessie, returning to the home she has rarely even visited on a South Carolina barrier island because her mother has a serious problem. It's not a spoiler to tell you that she has an affair with a monk while there, because she tells you at the outset that's what happened. Oh, and she's married. The first few pages made me think that I did not want to read this book, but I persevered. These are some messed-up people, and the author doesn't pretend otherwise, but they're mostly messed-up people working through their issues and trying to do better, and that part really interests me: how people come out of a bad place in their lives or their heads. The characters develop believably, and I was surprised at how sympathetic I became to each of them.
My major quibble is that virtually the entire book is from Jessie's point of view, which is well handled, but for one section, we get someone else's. You don't get to do that as an author. You can choose multiple points of view from the outset, but then you have to give them throughout. You can choose a single point of view, but then you stick with it. You don't get to change once briefly. I understand that the author wanted to show what was going on in the head of a character who was never going to say it all, but I then kept waiting for that character's point of view to resurface, so the change threw me out of the fiction not only when it happened but at nearly every chapter break after that because I kept thinking about what the author was doing.
It was worth reading anyway. I'm curious whether any of you had read this and felt the same about the change, or felt that the switch was justified.
Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex: This book is in the Laundry Files series; you do have to read the others first for it to make sense, and you have to remember the others better than I am apt to do for it to make complete sense. I'd periodically ask Brilliant Husband "Do you remember if we saw this character in a previous book?" or "Do you remember what Bob is talking about when he says X?", and the answer was usually "I don't know" or "no." Oops.
The books in this series are pretty brutal and scary. They're also sometimes wickedly funny. The conceit is that this is a world where the elder gods are real but the vast majority of people don't know about them, and math and computer programs can work magic and make contact with terrible beings elsewhere. In this book, Bob Howard has to deal with an apparent evangelical Christian cult in the US and two free-lancers who may or may not be working with the Agency towards the same ends. Stross really hammers the evangelicals, but at the same time, these really are bad people, not real Christian evangelicals. The story is terrifying partly because so many elements are so believable.
Bob continues to get in over his head and then figure his way out again, as he always does, with help from friends (and allies and possibly enemies). He's a really likable and interesting character, and he has a morbid sense of humor that helps keep him sane (if he is still sane, which is sometimes unclear after all that has happened to him).
I recommend the series even though I'm not a horror fan, and I look forward to the next book.
Jim Butcher, Grave Peril and Summer Knight
I continue to be far behind on the Dresden Files books, but I'm enjoying watching Harry actually learn from his mistakes, which I feel that not enough characters in series do (especially on tv!) I'm really watching the character grow even as I learn more about his background. (I remain fascinated by how much they changed for sadly short-lived tv series and yet how much they kept the same.)
This series too mixes absolutely horrifying events with humor. They're a mix of horror and detective story, with a tremendously well-imagined, mostly urban world where magic exists but again, most people don't know about it.
Grave Peril introduces a character named Michael whom I really liked, and I was rather hoping to see him again; can anyone tell me if he returns later in the series? I can see why he might not. He could have been really dull because he's so, well, pure of heart, and yet he's not dull.
I am very eager to see Susan again, and I like how Murphy is developing, too. She's having to cope with drastic changes in her idea of how the world works, and Butcher doesn't kid around about how tough that is.
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (trilogy)
Several people had recommended this series to me, and perhaps an equal number complained about the anti-Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism tends to really get under my skin (unless it's Edmund Spenser, who is so long ago and so extreme in his depiction of the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon that I find him amusing), so I'd put off reading these until apparently everyone else already had. (That does make it easier to get the books from the library!) In the end, I felt that the Church in the books differed so much from Catholicism as I understand and practice it that I couldn't take it as criticism of my own church. That may just be me; I'm not saying other reactions aren't valid. I was relieved that it didn't bother me.
I mostly enjoyed them. I'm going to assume that anyone who wants to read these books has already done so; if you haven't, back out now, because SPOILERS.
What I loved:
• The daemons: in the world of one of the two main characters, where we spend much of the trilogy, people's souls are external and material, in the forms of animals that stay close to them and converse with them. These are endlessly fascinating, as can be seen by their proliferation in fanfic; a number of writers mix them into universes that don't normally have daemons.
• Much of the world building: there are multiple universes, including one with an Oxford very much like ours but not exactly. Our world doesn't have a Jordan College at Oxford, or daemons, or any number of other things.
What I liked:
• Lyra and her friendship with Will.
• Will, most of the time.
What I didn't like:
• The way Lyra was repeatedly, explicitly characterized as a "savage" and the aggressive and effective ways that Mrs. Coulter used sex appeal. The books were sometimes a bit sexist, which surprised me. Also, at times it even seemed to me that Pullman wasn't fully aware of his characters. For a "savage" with virtually no formal education, Lyra was awfully smart and knowledgeable; for a girl the narrator told us repeatedly had little imagination, she was tremendously creative and quick in her problem-solving. The narrator blamed her, and she blamed herself, for things I don't think one could possibly foresee. He used much more positive descriptors for Will, with an exception that I'll cover below. Mrs. Coulter is both very well-educated and very smart, but she mostly seems to get her way because men who get close enough to touch her fall under her spell. Was I supposed to think this was magic? I kept thinking it was, but then she never seemed to have any actual magic beyond what anyone else had.
Also, Lyra loses agency for a big chunk of the third book, and I was frankly disgusted with Mrs. Coulter for doing that and a little bit with Pullman for writing it.
• Will is repeatedly characterized as a murderer, by himself and the narrator, when a man against whom he is defending himself trips over a cat, falls down the stairs, and breaks his neck. That takes no account of the fact that he never intended to kill the man or that he was acting in self-defense. The distinction matters a lot to me. I don't believe in "Stand Your Ground," and I'm in Florida, where people die because someone felt threatened. I do believe, however, that if an attacker dies when you are defending your own life or lives of family, you are not a murderer. If your intent was not to kill and something unexpected happens, you generally aren't a murderer as well. Intent matters! Will bears no responsibility for that man's death, in my mind, and I'm really not a champion of lethal self-defense.
• The third book is boring for long stretches. The second book moved really well; I don't know what went wrong here.
• Pullman's fall is two kids having sex? What the heck? He very much uses Christian language to indicate that the two of them going off and having consensual intimacy in the woods is their eating the apple of Eden. I don't see that as commensurate at all. You can make the case that Adam and Eve shouldn't have been judged harshly for disobedience, but their Fall was disobedience, not sex, and not just eating any old fruit (not an apple in the Hebrew Bible, by the way). I kept waiting for this Fall from what one of my friends had raved about the book, and I reached the end and said, "I guess that must have been it!"
I recommend the books with the caveats that I know some people find the church in them really offensive, I found moments of unexpected misogyny in the books, and the third book is a bit confused and too long. I felt like one of the major characters had kind of wandered in from another book; she's crucial to the plot, but her adventures don't coincide with the others very well.
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
This is a weird little YA novel or novelette. My mother read it by accident; it was apparently shelved as Mystery at her library, and by the time she had decided this wasn't a standard mystery, she was engrossed enough to finish it, which is kind of amazing because I've never known her to read SF or fantasy. I liked it. I was frustrated with poor decisions by the characters, but then I am constantly frustrated at children's decisions (and even college students' decisions), so it's not that it wasn't believable!
For the most part, I enjoyed it. I found it compelling: I had to keep reading and stayed up late to finish this one.
One element bothered me for which I should add a small SPOILER WARNING—seriously, YOU WILL BE SPOILED!
I could not believe the narrator's father apparently having sex with Ursula Monkton and the casual way it's handled. The boy is at the time too young to understand what he's seeing, and I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of Ursula's insistence that no one did anything they didn't want to. Surely it's just bluster, right? Surely his father didn't want to drown him in the bathtub either! I probably wouldn't notice it so much except that I thought there was an instance of dubious consent at the beginning of Stardust that was handled as if having sex with someone while enchanted is really okay, and I think it's really not okay. His father having sex with Ursula Monkton is not okay. It's as if it never happened, and so too is the father's near drowning of the narrator, but neither of those things is okay. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel that way, or not, but two YA novels by Neil Gaiman with at best dubious consent is two too many.
Ed Brubaker, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Red Menace
I'm not a big comic book/graphic novel reader. We have a set of four huge X-Men collections, and I enjoyed reading those but then started forgetting things that I probably ought to have remembered and got lost.
These I picked up after seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and totally wanting to see more of Steve and Bucky and Natasha and Sam, which means I'm already wanting the wrong things because Natasha and Sam haven't even appeared (yet) and the comics go in different directions from the movie. (I have been properly warned by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sholio that Black Widow doesn't show up much in these comics and isn't as well done as in the movies.)
As with Dresden Files, I am amazed at how much they simultaneously changed and kept the same: Bucky's back story is totally different, meaning his relationship with Steve developed very differently, and yet they kept a lot of character elements the same and even used a few lines straight from the comic book (most notably "Who the hell is Bucky?" although I suppose that one was relatively easy to keep). Sharon Carter is here too but also has a very different back story and relationship with Steve. There's a bunch of other characters that aren't in the movies (yet), but I've really enjoyed the comics. I've ordered the next few from the Evil Empire (Amazon) finally, after going a couple of rounds with the local independent comic book stores, which did produce what I ordered eventually. (I still had gift card money at Amazon.)
I was struck by one particular visual call-back from the end of Red Menace to near the end of The Winter Soldier where they did something very clever SPOILER WARNING! YOU WILL BE SPOILED!
Bucky riding the robot near the end of Red Menace is very much like Bucky on the missile in The Winter Soldier when Steve finally recalls what really happened. This time, of course, it's reversed: Bucky isn't trapped but in control, Bucky isn't being blown up but redeeming himself.
I'm looking forward to reading more of these.
Charles Stross, Halting State
I cannot stand second-person narration. I generally avoid fanfic written that way, and I have less than zero interest in most novels written in that mode. I started the darned book with Brilliant Husband assuring me that not all the points of view were in second person. Guess what? All three of them are. By the time I realized that, I had been sucked in, so I kept going.
I found Halting State surprisingly effective given that I was kind of hate-reading it. At one point the paranoia really got to me and I was kind of freaking out. It's not horror, it's SF—but it imagines some deeply chilling possibilities that seemed all too real one evening while I was alone. There was a night I had to finish it because I wasn't going to sleep if I didn't.
We've got a pretty standard Stross protagonist here: a geek guy who works with a woman smarter and stronger than he is, except maybe at the geekiest stuff. Yet we also get her point of view, and the point of view of a police sergeant, meaning two of the three narrators are women (if I can call second-person points of view "narrators"). The police sergeant has a Scots accent and sometimes thinks in it, and I'm curious what Scots might think of his handling of this. I don't supposeloriel_eris has read the book and is reading this post?
I still don't like second-person narration, but he's got a sequel, called Rule 34, and I think I am legally required to read a novel titled Rule 34 or they take away my fandom card.
Nicole Griffith, Hild
I had to read this one, or they take away my Anglo-Saxonist card. I have very mixed feelings about this book. It's meticulously researched—and you can tell, which isn't a point in its favor. I really didn't need that level of detail about making cheese or anything else in Anglo-Saxon England. Also, I've read Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People several times, so I knew the characters in much different lights: I knew Hild as an adult, and a powerful abbess, not a child who is still only a teenager at the end of this novel. I knew Paulinus as a good guy, not a humorless B-movie villain. I didn't like the way in which another character from Bede got shoehorned in; it felt like Muppet Babies or a bad fanfic, giving in to the desire to have characters meet before they really should. And I hated something at the end which I'll put below because it's a spoiler, obviously. I'm not pleased with the treatment of faith in the book. Many of the characters seem very modern, adopting beliefs quite pragmatically without any actual faith and with doses of skepticism. It's not that I think early medieval people were gullible so much as I think that their thought processes were not always so much like ours.
I found Hild herself very engaging; I didn't always agree with her decisions, but I feel strong sympathy for her. I was sometimes put off by her mother, but then, so was she. I like Cian except that he's almost too stupid about some things to go on living. Some of the characters not from Bede are really interesting, and Griffith is doing very interesting things with the ethnic/racial politics of a fairly new Anglo-Saxon dominance over a largely Celtic people.
I learned at the end that the author apparently has a lot more to write about Hild, so I will probably have to read at least one more book, and I have similarly mixed feelings about that. I do want to know how we get from the end of this novel to where we see Hild in the HE, but I'm not at all sure I'll like it.
THERE BE SPOILERS HERE! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Two things I didn't like:
1. Griffith seems to be finessing the issue of Hild's visions: a few are clearly concocted, not visions at all but things she claims are visions to make her knowledge and insights valuable in a society that wouldn't listen to a girl or woman otherwise. Others seem more mystical, but it's not even clear to me what Hild thinks they are.
2. I found the ending repulsive. I already had trouble believing that Cian had no clue they were half-sibings, and I could not believe Hild and her mother went through with her marrying her half-brother. I think most cultures have an incest taboo for really good reasons, and it's not something I want to read about. I think Hild should have told him and not consummated the marriage. Yes, that might have endangered his life, but if he can't figure out what everyone else either knows or suspects, he really is too stupid to live, and this boy should definitely not pass on his genes. Ick. I'd rather not read a sequel that starts this way; my hope is that it will get that marriage out of the way right quick.
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
I can't remember who gave me this book. It's not one I'd have bought for myself, but I was glad I read it. I rate it moderately highly. The book features a first-person narrator, Jessie, returning to the home she has rarely even visited on a South Carolina barrier island because her mother has a serious problem. It's not a spoiler to tell you that she has an affair with a monk while there, because she tells you at the outset that's what happened. Oh, and she's married. The first few pages made me think that I did not want to read this book, but I persevered. These are some messed-up people, and the author doesn't pretend otherwise, but they're mostly messed-up people working through their issues and trying to do better, and that part really interests me: how people come out of a bad place in their lives or their heads. The characters develop believably, and I was surprised at how sympathetic I became to each of them.
My major quibble is that virtually the entire book is from Jessie's point of view, which is well handled, but for one section, we get someone else's. You don't get to do that as an author. You can choose multiple points of view from the outset, but then you have to give them throughout. You can choose a single point of view, but then you stick with it. You don't get to change once briefly. I understand that the author wanted to show what was going on in the head of a character who was never going to say it all, but I then kept waiting for that character's point of view to resurface, so the change threw me out of the fiction not only when it happened but at nearly every chapter break after that because I kept thinking about what the author was doing.
It was worth reading anyway. I'm curious whether any of you had read this and felt the same about the change, or felt that the switch was justified.
Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex: This book is in the Laundry Files series; you do have to read the others first for it to make sense, and you have to remember the others better than I am apt to do for it to make complete sense. I'd periodically ask Brilliant Husband "Do you remember if we saw this character in a previous book?" or "Do you remember what Bob is talking about when he says X?", and the answer was usually "I don't know" or "no." Oops.
The books in this series are pretty brutal and scary. They're also sometimes wickedly funny. The conceit is that this is a world where the elder gods are real but the vast majority of people don't know about them, and math and computer programs can work magic and make contact with terrible beings elsewhere. In this book, Bob Howard has to deal with an apparent evangelical Christian cult in the US and two free-lancers who may or may not be working with the Agency towards the same ends. Stross really hammers the evangelicals, but at the same time, these really are bad people, not real Christian evangelicals. The story is terrifying partly because so many elements are so believable.
Bob continues to get in over his head and then figure his way out again, as he always does, with help from friends (and allies and possibly enemies). He's a really likable and interesting character, and he has a morbid sense of humor that helps keep him sane (if he is still sane, which is sometimes unclear after all that has happened to him).
I recommend the series even though I'm not a horror fan, and I look forward to the next book.
Jim Butcher, Grave Peril and Summer Knight
I continue to be far behind on the Dresden Files books, but I'm enjoying watching Harry actually learn from his mistakes, which I feel that not enough characters in series do (especially on tv!) I'm really watching the character grow even as I learn more about his background. (I remain fascinated by how much they changed for sadly short-lived tv series and yet how much they kept the same.)
This series too mixes absolutely horrifying events with humor. They're a mix of horror and detective story, with a tremendously well-imagined, mostly urban world where magic exists but again, most people don't know about it.
Grave Peril introduces a character named Michael whom I really liked, and I was rather hoping to see him again; can anyone tell me if he returns later in the series? I can see why he might not. He could have been really dull because he's so, well, pure of heart, and yet he's not dull.
I am very eager to see Susan again, and I like how Murphy is developing, too. She's having to cope with drastic changes in her idea of how the world works, and Butcher doesn't kid around about how tough that is.
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (trilogy)
Several people had recommended this series to me, and perhaps an equal number complained about the anti-Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism tends to really get under my skin (unless it's Edmund Spenser, who is so long ago and so extreme in his depiction of the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon that I find him amusing), so I'd put off reading these until apparently everyone else already had. (That does make it easier to get the books from the library!) In the end, I felt that the Church in the books differed so much from Catholicism as I understand and practice it that I couldn't take it as criticism of my own church. That may just be me; I'm not saying other reactions aren't valid. I was relieved that it didn't bother me.
I mostly enjoyed them. I'm going to assume that anyone who wants to read these books has already done so; if you haven't, back out now, because SPOILERS.
What I loved:
• The daemons: in the world of one of the two main characters, where we spend much of the trilogy, people's souls are external and material, in the forms of animals that stay close to them and converse with them. These are endlessly fascinating, as can be seen by their proliferation in fanfic; a number of writers mix them into universes that don't normally have daemons.
• Much of the world building: there are multiple universes, including one with an Oxford very much like ours but not exactly. Our world doesn't have a Jordan College at Oxford, or daemons, or any number of other things.
What I liked:
• Lyra and her friendship with Will.
• Will, most of the time.
What I didn't like:
• The way Lyra was repeatedly, explicitly characterized as a "savage" and the aggressive and effective ways that Mrs. Coulter used sex appeal. The books were sometimes a bit sexist, which surprised me. Also, at times it even seemed to me that Pullman wasn't fully aware of his characters. For a "savage" with virtually no formal education, Lyra was awfully smart and knowledgeable; for a girl the narrator told us repeatedly had little imagination, she was tremendously creative and quick in her problem-solving. The narrator blamed her, and she blamed herself, for things I don't think one could possibly foresee. He used much more positive descriptors for Will, with an exception that I'll cover below. Mrs. Coulter is both very well-educated and very smart, but she mostly seems to get her way because men who get close enough to touch her fall under her spell. Was I supposed to think this was magic? I kept thinking it was, but then she never seemed to have any actual magic beyond what anyone else had.
Also, Lyra loses agency for a big chunk of the third book, and I was frankly disgusted with Mrs. Coulter for doing that and a little bit with Pullman for writing it.
• Will is repeatedly characterized as a murderer, by himself and the narrator, when a man against whom he is defending himself trips over a cat, falls down the stairs, and breaks his neck. That takes no account of the fact that he never intended to kill the man or that he was acting in self-defense. The distinction matters a lot to me. I don't believe in "Stand Your Ground," and I'm in Florida, where people die because someone felt threatened. I do believe, however, that if an attacker dies when you are defending your own life or lives of family, you are not a murderer. If your intent was not to kill and something unexpected happens, you generally aren't a murderer as well. Intent matters! Will bears no responsibility for that man's death, in my mind, and I'm really not a champion of lethal self-defense.
• The third book is boring for long stretches. The second book moved really well; I don't know what went wrong here.
• Pullman's fall is two kids having sex? What the heck? He very much uses Christian language to indicate that the two of them going off and having consensual intimacy in the woods is their eating the apple of Eden. I don't see that as commensurate at all. You can make the case that Adam and Eve shouldn't have been judged harshly for disobedience, but their Fall was disobedience, not sex, and not just eating any old fruit (not an apple in the Hebrew Bible, by the way). I kept waiting for this Fall from what one of my friends had raved about the book, and I reached the end and said, "I guess that must have been it!"
I recommend the books with the caveats that I know some people find the church in them really offensive, I found moments of unexpected misogyny in the books, and the third book is a bit confused and too long. I felt like one of the major characters had kind of wandered in from another book; she's crucial to the plot, but her adventures don't coincide with the others very well.
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
This is a weird little YA novel or novelette. My mother read it by accident; it was apparently shelved as Mystery at her library, and by the time she had decided this wasn't a standard mystery, she was engrossed enough to finish it, which is kind of amazing because I've never known her to read SF or fantasy. I liked it. I was frustrated with poor decisions by the characters, but then I am constantly frustrated at children's decisions (and even college students' decisions), so it's not that it wasn't believable!
For the most part, I enjoyed it. I found it compelling: I had to keep reading and stayed up late to finish this one.
One element bothered me for which I should add a small SPOILER WARNING—seriously, YOU WILL BE SPOILED!
I could not believe the narrator's father apparently having sex with Ursula Monkton and the casual way it's handled. The boy is at the time too young to understand what he's seeing, and I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of Ursula's insistence that no one did anything they didn't want to. Surely it's just bluster, right? Surely his father didn't want to drown him in the bathtub either! I probably wouldn't notice it so much except that I thought there was an instance of dubious consent at the beginning of Stardust that was handled as if having sex with someone while enchanted is really okay, and I think it's really not okay. His father having sex with Ursula Monkton is not okay. It's as if it never happened, and so too is the father's near drowning of the narrator, but neither of those things is okay. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel that way, or not, but two YA novels by Neil Gaiman with at best dubious consent is two too many.
Ed Brubaker, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Red Menace
I'm not a big comic book/graphic novel reader. We have a set of four huge X-Men collections, and I enjoyed reading those but then started forgetting things that I probably ought to have remembered and got lost.
These I picked up after seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and totally wanting to see more of Steve and Bucky and Natasha and Sam, which means I'm already wanting the wrong things because Natasha and Sam haven't even appeared (yet) and the comics go in different directions from the movie. (I have been properly warned by
sholio that Black Widow doesn't show up much in these comics and isn't as well done as in the movies.)As with Dresden Files, I am amazed at how much they simultaneously changed and kept the same: Bucky's back story is totally different, meaning his relationship with Steve developed very differently, and yet they kept a lot of character elements the same and even used a few lines straight from the comic book (most notably "Who the hell is Bucky?" although I suppose that one was relatively easy to keep). Sharon Carter is here too but also has a very different back story and relationship with Steve. There's a bunch of other characters that aren't in the movies (yet), but I've really enjoyed the comics. I've ordered the next few from the Evil Empire (Amazon) finally, after going a couple of rounds with the local independent comic book stores, which did produce what I ordered eventually. (I still had gift card money at Amazon.)
I was struck by one particular visual call-back from the end of Red Menace to near the end of The Winter Soldier where they did something very clever SPOILER WARNING! YOU WILL BE SPOILED!
Bucky riding the robot near the end of Red Menace is very much like Bucky on the missile in The Winter Soldier when Steve finally recalls what really happened. This time, of course, it's reversed: Bucky isn't trapped but in control, Bucky isn't being blown up but redeeming himself.
I'm looking forward to reading more of these.
Charles Stross, Halting State
I cannot stand second-person narration. I generally avoid fanfic written that way, and I have less than zero interest in most novels written in that mode. I started the darned book with Brilliant Husband assuring me that not all the points of view were in second person. Guess what? All three of them are. By the time I realized that, I had been sucked in, so I kept going.
I found Halting State surprisingly effective given that I was kind of hate-reading it. At one point the paranoia really got to me and I was kind of freaking out. It's not horror, it's SF—but it imagines some deeply chilling possibilities that seemed all too real one evening while I was alone. There was a night I had to finish it because I wasn't going to sleep if I didn't.
We've got a pretty standard Stross protagonist here: a geek guy who works with a woman smarter and stronger than he is, except maybe at the geekiest stuff. Yet we also get her point of view, and the point of view of a police sergeant, meaning two of the three narrators are women (if I can call second-person points of view "narrators"). The police sergeant has a Scots accent and sometimes thinks in it, and I'm curious what Scots might think of his handling of this. I don't suppose
loriel_eris has read the book and is reading this post? I still don't like second-person narration, but he's got a sequel, called Rule 34, and I think I am legally required to read a novel titled Rule 34 or they take away my fandom card.
Nicole Griffith, Hild
I had to read this one, or they take away my Anglo-Saxonist card. I have very mixed feelings about this book. It's meticulously researched—and you can tell, which isn't a point in its favor. I really didn't need that level of detail about making cheese or anything else in Anglo-Saxon England. Also, I've read Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People several times, so I knew the characters in much different lights: I knew Hild as an adult, and a powerful abbess, not a child who is still only a teenager at the end of this novel. I knew Paulinus as a good guy, not a humorless B-movie villain. I didn't like the way in which another character from Bede got shoehorned in; it felt like Muppet Babies or a bad fanfic, giving in to the desire to have characters meet before they really should. And I hated something at the end which I'll put below because it's a spoiler, obviously. I'm not pleased with the treatment of faith in the book. Many of the characters seem very modern, adopting beliefs quite pragmatically without any actual faith and with doses of skepticism. It's not that I think early medieval people were gullible so much as I think that their thought processes were not always so much like ours.
I found Hild herself very engaging; I didn't always agree with her decisions, but I feel strong sympathy for her. I was sometimes put off by her mother, but then, so was she. I like Cian except that he's almost too stupid about some things to go on living. Some of the characters not from Bede are really interesting, and Griffith is doing very interesting things with the ethnic/racial politics of a fairly new Anglo-Saxon dominance over a largely Celtic people.
I learned at the end that the author apparently has a lot more to write about Hild, so I will probably have to read at least one more book, and I have similarly mixed feelings about that. I do want to know how we get from the end of this novel to where we see Hild in the HE, but I'm not at all sure I'll like it.
THERE BE SPOILERS HERE! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Two things I didn't like:
1. Griffith seems to be finessing the issue of Hild's visions: a few are clearly concocted, not visions at all but things she claims are visions to make her knowledge and insights valuable in a society that wouldn't listen to a girl or woman otherwise. Others seem more mystical, but it's not even clear to me what Hild thinks they are.
2. I found the ending repulsive. I already had trouble believing that Cian had no clue they were half-sibings, and I could not believe Hild and her mother went through with her marrying her half-brother. I think most cultures have an incest taboo for really good reasons, and it's not something I want to read about. I think Hild should have told him and not consummated the marriage. Yes, that might have endangered his life, but if he can't figure out what everyone else either knows or suspects, he really is too stupid to live, and this boy should definitely not pass on his genes. Ick. I'd rather not read a sequel that starts this way; my hope is that it will get that marriage out of the way right quick.