evelyn_b

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

Sargasso of Space was not bad! As previously noted, it has zero female characters. But the characters are so flat that you could just as easily pretend they were all women and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. I didn't mind that. The plucky Free Traders bid for trading rights to a newly discovered planet; when they get there they discover a lot of crashed ships, and a group of unscrupulous human looters who are using ancient "Forerunner" technology to lure in ships and crash them so that they can steal stuff. Nothing spectacular, but lots of cool by-the-way descriptions of eerily inhuman ancient space architecture and weird extraterrestrial life forms.

True Pretenses was all right in the end and so was The Heiress Effect (by Courtney Milan), but I think I'm going to have to conclude that I'm just not the audience for this kind of romance novel, whatever the subgenre is called that has shirtless but not headless covers. I think it really is a "not for me" issue and not the fault of the authors. But it's been fun to investigate just the same, and now I can stop feeling guilty for not giving them a chance. ( A little about that: )

All three of these books (Hold Me, The Heiress Effect, and True Pretenses) are apparently part of ongoing series in which a lot of interconnected characters each get their own romance plot. I've been trying to figure out why I'm taken aback by this marketing trend, and I think it's just plain cynicism: I'm perfectly happy to believe in one happy couple, for the duration of one book, but five in the same social circle? come on.

What I'm Reading Now

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer. Thanks to the encouragement of thisbluespirit and wordsofastory, I am giving Heyer another try! ( We begin with an Exposition Dinner )

I have to say, I ship them already, and will be extremely disappointed if Heyer tries to wrangle Kitty into the arms of some smug curled-lip wrist-grabber who is too manly to care about fashion. Everyone knows that manliness is just a hoax created by dandies to relieve pressure on the waistcoat market.

What I Plan to Read Next

A Fox Under My Cloak finally arrived, so maybe that. Maybe something Australian.

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What I've Finished Reading

Brat Farrar was terrific, maybe the best Tey of all? Of course our old friend the Blue-Eyed Nymphomaniac makes an appearance, and Tey manages to shoehorn in a dig at Scottish Independence for no reason whatsoever (except the only necessary and sufficient reason, which is that it's a Tey book and no one has made a dig at Scottish Independence yet).

Singing in the Shrouds was enjoyable for its conversations, for a good cast of characters, and for Alleyn's correspondence with Troy. The reveal was a disappointment. I guess it still counts as having fooled me if the solution was so obvious I would never have guessed it out of respect for the author. Good job subverting those expectations, Marsh!

I gave up on Champagne for One a while ago, even though I liked the setup, because I couldn't bring myself to pay attention to Archie anymore. I have no idea why my eyes glaze over every time Archie Goodwin tries to tell me about anything other than the weirdness of working for Nero Wolfe, but figuring it out will have to wait.

I should have given up on Night Watch, the Sherlock Holmes-Father Brown crossover, but instead I read the whole thing. I liked the idea of a Sherlock Holmes-Father Brown crossover too much, I think, and kept hoping it would get better. It's not the worst Long-Lost Holmes Adventure you could read (I appreciated that Stephen Kendrick doesn't try to play the "Watson could never truly understand Holmes!" card) but the prose and the characters were too indistinct to carry it off. My hopes for Father Brown character development were dashed; here he doesn't even get to be an effective epigram delivery system.

What I'm Reading Now

I picked up Georgette Heyer's Behold, Here's Poison on impulse at a book sale, and it is just the thing. The corpse turns up promptly on page 7, well before we've had the chance to form attachments to anyone living or dead, along with more arch artificiality than you can shake a cigarette holder at. You bright young things and your brittle wordplay! You bitter old dears and your burning resentments! It's like it was written by the most perfectly calibrated machine.

I was sort of vaguely planning to take a break from Ngaio Marsh, but then I realized I have only three books to go before KILLER DOLPHIN! so I have to keep on. False Scent is a Theater Crowd mystery and consequently off to a good start.

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What I've Finished Reading

"Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars -- the other kinds of men, the other lives?"

The Left Hand of Darkness was even better than I expected. I don't know if I'm completely ready to talk about it yet -- I might make another post next week or a month from now, or I might just answer questions if you have any, but I loved it. It's very carefully built as a story about an alien envoy learning a new world, and built so that you become accustomed to the Gethenians slowly and incompletely, the way Genly Ai does, and there's an emotional undertow that creeps up on you so that you barely notice it until you're half drowned.

By "you" I mean "me," of course -- me and Ai.

I'm trying to think of a way to call this a "mature" or "literary" take on space diplomacy without being a jerk about it, because the things I'm comparing it to are also things I love. I keep wanting to say that it's George Eliot to Star Trek's Dickens: clear-eyed and grounded, I mean, and patient with its premise to a degree that Star Trek never manages. It's tough (I want to say "realistic," but who knows?) about the enormously complicated prospect of meeting anyone for the first time, let alone in space, even with the Trek-like cheat of common ancestry -- but it's also essentially hopeful. I was glad for that: Alien was a great movie, but I don't want all my first-contact stories to be Alien. Or most of them, even.

What I'm Reading Now

So I found this Georgette Heyer book at my mother-in-law's house (it's one of the books she bought as part of a Romance Novel Paperback Club in the early 2000s, most of which have titles like Fake ID Bride and The Billionaire's Secret Baby) and people keep telling me to read Georgette Heyer, so I took it home. It's called The Grand Sophy. The opening is not immediately arresting: a couple of middle-aged drawing-room types throw themselves an exposition party, in a plummy style similar to the one I associate with impending murder.

( Things pick up immediately when Sophy arrives. )

The Laughing Monsters is not really my thing at all, but so far it's been a little better than the first few pages led me to expect. How much better remains to be seen. There's a guy who's been hired to spy on another guy in a city with unreliable electricity, no one is likable because no one's supposed to be, the streets are in bad shape and everyone is cagey about their intentions.

And I took both Under the Volcano and The Victim out from the library, because I was feeling optimistic. What I can say about Under the Volcano so far: it's got great weather and good drunkenness. Otherwise, I'm reserving judgment. I haven't read very far.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Victim, whatever's next on my bookshelf, assorted Victorians for tutoring. Work is going to be taking over my reading life for the next three weeks, so these posts might get sparse, or they might not, depending on how badly I manage my time.