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bearshorty) wrote2024-09-11 02:39 pm
bearshorty) wrote2024-09-11 02:39 pm
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Book Post: Rooney, Brust, Leckie, Scalzi, Bujold, Sawyer and Quinn
Catching up on my books from May and June:
Normal People by Sally Rooney, 273pp
I didn't like this book. I heard so many great things and that the show based on it was great and it was a good romance, so I thought I would check it out. Connell and Marianne have an on and off relationship for years in high school and college. At first Connell has social standing then in college it is Marianne. They hide their relationship in high school and he still hurts her feelings. Then in college they have a period when they are together, then they end it because neither of them can properly talk to each other. And then they circle each other and I just don't care about their relationship at all. Just break up for good already! I just couldn't stand either of them. I didn't care about their relationship or their whining or their various misunderstandings. I couldn't relate to them and their wishy-washiness and miscommunication. This was not a book for me.
Taltos by Steven Brust, 174pp [Taltos series 4]
This was the fourth book in the series, but the first one chronologically so far. Which I think works really well. We are already comfortable with the friendly relationship between Vlad and Morrolan in other books, but in this book they meet for the first time and there is certainly a different vibe. But they also go to the basically underworld together and bond through shared experience despite being snarky with each other and it is just very funny to me and highly amusing. I'm also more comfortable with the world building that it doesn't hurt my head anymore, so I can enjoy seeing how a lot of things came to be. We also get more insight into Vlad's early life as well - we got just a bit of that in the early book. I liked those parts of the book a lot. Also, because this book is basically a hero's quest to the underworld juxtaposed with Vlad's early life, there is less mafia stuff, which also means I enjoy it more. I heavily dislike any organized crime stories, so when the other books focus on internal politics of that I am not engaged with it. Here it was just set up for the main plot, which was more straightforward.
This was my favorite book of the four I read so far. I like what it was doing and I liked that I had later context for some of it, which make several scenes more amusing. Including having Vlad meet several characters we know well for the very first time like Aliera. Plus the reader knows Morrolan will be fine after their quest, so there is just waiting to see how that will be done. Next up will be Phoenix.
Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie, 403pp
A collection of 18 short stories, eight of them self-contained, three in Imperial Radch world, and seven in the Raven Tower universe (which I probably liked the most). I read all of Leckie' novels ("Provenance" was probably my favorite) and I like her universes and stories, so I was looking forward to this collection and it was quite good. I'm not generally a fan of short stories - very few authors can pull off a good collection. For me Asimov and Gaiman are a standard for how to pull this off. Very few other authors can. I didn't have big expectations, but I did enjoy this collection of short stories overall. Not all were engaging but there was variety, and it did let me understand the Raver Tower universe a bit more, which was more interesting than I thought. And there was different styles of writing, which lets Leckie play with some conventions: there was a farce set in a society where women are in change and a guy doesn't want to me married off, there were dinosaurs in space, a life from alien perspective and a surprising death of one of the first person narrators, there was a story about the perils of a universal translator, and even a small thing about a zombie grandpa, and manipulations of the minor gods, etc. Not all stories were engaging like about a Mars tunnel and one story I didn't understand, but overall a very good short story collection that I was happy to spend time with.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi, 262pp
When Hugo nominations came out, the description of the book sounded amusing and I do like Scalzi's humorous books so I checked this out. I really enjoyed this book. It was light, fluffy, pretty funny and had intelligent typing cats. Charlie's uncle died and it turns out he was a supervillain and Charlie needs to take change of his business. At least that is what he thinks. Supervillain business is explained including a laser satellite and a volcano island. All Charlie wants to do is take over a pub and pick up the pieces of his life after a divorce and a terrible job, and here he needs to negotiate with dolphins and stop a league of Supervillains. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the twist ending and Charlie' happily ever after and was just very much amused by this book. I'm glad it didn't actually win a Hugo since it was a bit too light for that, but it was certainly a fun book to read.
Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold, 125pp [audiobook] [Penric and Desdemona 4].
This book was available only on audiobook in the library so I listened to it. The narrator wasn't that great, which didn't help. I might have liked this novella more if I was just reading it. The setting of this book is much different than the other three novellas, so much so that I thought I skipped a book and had to double check. It took me a while to figure out that Penric' employer in the previous three books has died, and that him wanting to study shamans in the end of last book didn't really come to fruition or was just not mentioned and ignored here. He left that city and sought employment in a different place, Lodi, which reminded me of Venice with its canals and all the water. I have been to Venice and it was not my favorite Italian city (I liked Florence a lot, and I loved Rome. In Venice I just really liked the gelato but otherwise found it old and confusing).
There is a young man who washed ashore with a wild demon inside and Penric needs to track that boy, with a help of a very young saint to take a demon away, during a Bastard's Eve celebrations in Lodi. I figured out the plot way before the characters did, which often drives me crazy, since it was pretty obvious and I just want the characters to catch up. Plus the last 1/4 of the book is just wrapping up the story and is more emotion based than plot. This novella is just weird.
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, 297pp [Hugo book].
A Hugo winning book about two parallel universes. In one the Neanderthals because the winning species with evolution with their own culture, which Sawyer clearly put a lot of thought it. The other is our world. A Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, ends up in our world. We get a view of both worlds. In ours we see Ponter adjust to our world with the help of a few scientists, and in the Neanderthal world, we see Ponter's partner getting accused of his murder and the partner's quest to prove his innocent and perhaps get Ponter back. I thought the Neanderthal world was interesting - it was certainly different. The society does seem a little idealized - they don't have overpopulation and have respect for the earth and look how terrible our society is. There seems to be a lot of moralizing when the characters from two worlds discuss different aspects of it like law, politics, or religion. It just felt like over the top criticism of our society. And not a lot to show the drawbacks of the Neanderthal one - it wasn't exactly a utopia if you start to think about it but it is presented like one. The response in our world to a Neanderthal felt a bit contrived.
But what I didn't like at all was that when we introduced to the character of Mary, who is a scientist specializing in Neanderthal genetics in our world, in the first scene with her, she gets raped. Graphically. And we don't really need the whole distasteful scene. After, we see her trauma in some ways but not really that deeply and at least she does get to talk to someone, but as I was reading, I kept wondering why that was necessary. Why start your introduction to this character this way. And by the end of the book it felt like that was written to put an obstacle in the Ponter and Mary's potential romance. Which is terrible. There could be many way to convey that Mary is attracted to Ponter but doesn't get together with him than having that trauma. That part of the book was just not needed. Women in general were not written well.
So while this book did sustain my interest, the more I think about it, the more issues I have with it. And certainly no interest to read more in the series.
Romancing Mr. Bridgerton by Julia Quinn, 420pp [Bridgeton 4].
After I watched the first part of third season of Bridgerton on Netflix in the spring, I put the ebook on hold in the library since I wanted to know what happened and I kept hearing about book comparison. It is a popular series and I didn't get the book until late June (well books 4, 5 and 6 since the ebooks are published as a collection). But this is the first book I read in the Bridgerton series, having only seen the TV show. My brain was also feeling fried for some reason, so I welcomed the idea of reading a very silly romance with very low stakes. And then I read books 5 and 6, and then also got books 1 to 3 in the library and read those and now I'm waiting for 7 and 8. They might be very very silly books but they are amusing.
I like the TV Penelope, which made me see the book Penelope in a similar way. Colin of the books is a bit different from TV Colin - he is snarkier and I like the book Colin much more. Penelope in the books gives up her secret identity while in the TV show the resolution is different. But I actually enjoyed seeing what the TV show took from the books and were the differences are. TV was closer to the books than I thought. Overall, it was just nice to turn off my brain.
Normal People by Sally Rooney, 273pp
I didn't like this book. I heard so many great things and that the show based on it was great and it was a good romance, so I thought I would check it out. Connell and Marianne have an on and off relationship for years in high school and college. At first Connell has social standing then in college it is Marianne. They hide their relationship in high school and he still hurts her feelings. Then in college they have a period when they are together, then they end it because neither of them can properly talk to each other. And then they circle each other and I just don't care about their relationship at all. Just break up for good already! I just couldn't stand either of them. I didn't care about their relationship or their whining or their various misunderstandings. I couldn't relate to them and their wishy-washiness and miscommunication. This was not a book for me.
Taltos by Steven Brust, 174pp [Taltos series 4]
This was the fourth book in the series, but the first one chronologically so far. Which I think works really well. We are already comfortable with the friendly relationship between Vlad and Morrolan in other books, but in this book they meet for the first time and there is certainly a different vibe. But they also go to the basically underworld together and bond through shared experience despite being snarky with each other and it is just very funny to me and highly amusing. I'm also more comfortable with the world building that it doesn't hurt my head anymore, so I can enjoy seeing how a lot of things came to be. We also get more insight into Vlad's early life as well - we got just a bit of that in the early book. I liked those parts of the book a lot. Also, because this book is basically a hero's quest to the underworld juxtaposed with Vlad's early life, there is less mafia stuff, which also means I enjoy it more. I heavily dislike any organized crime stories, so when the other books focus on internal politics of that I am not engaged with it. Here it was just set up for the main plot, which was more straightforward.
This was my favorite book of the four I read so far. I like what it was doing and I liked that I had later context for some of it, which make several scenes more amusing. Including having Vlad meet several characters we know well for the very first time like Aliera. Plus the reader knows Morrolan will be fine after their quest, so there is just waiting to see how that will be done. Next up will be Phoenix.
Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie, 403pp
A collection of 18 short stories, eight of them self-contained, three in Imperial Radch world, and seven in the Raven Tower universe (which I probably liked the most). I read all of Leckie' novels ("Provenance" was probably my favorite) and I like her universes and stories, so I was looking forward to this collection and it was quite good. I'm not generally a fan of short stories - very few authors can pull off a good collection. For me Asimov and Gaiman are a standard for how to pull this off. Very few other authors can. I didn't have big expectations, but I did enjoy this collection of short stories overall. Not all were engaging but there was variety, and it did let me understand the Raver Tower universe a bit more, which was more interesting than I thought. And there was different styles of writing, which lets Leckie play with some conventions: there was a farce set in a society where women are in change and a guy doesn't want to me married off, there were dinosaurs in space, a life from alien perspective and a surprising death of one of the first person narrators, there was a story about the perils of a universal translator, and even a small thing about a zombie grandpa, and manipulations of the minor gods, etc. Not all stories were engaging like about a Mars tunnel and one story I didn't understand, but overall a very good short story collection that I was happy to spend time with.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi, 262pp
When Hugo nominations came out, the description of the book sounded amusing and I do like Scalzi's humorous books so I checked this out. I really enjoyed this book. It was light, fluffy, pretty funny and had intelligent typing cats. Charlie's uncle died and it turns out he was a supervillain and Charlie needs to take change of his business. At least that is what he thinks. Supervillain business is explained including a laser satellite and a volcano island. All Charlie wants to do is take over a pub and pick up the pieces of his life after a divorce and a terrible job, and here he needs to negotiate with dolphins and stop a league of Supervillains. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the twist ending and Charlie' happily ever after and was just very much amused by this book. I'm glad it didn't actually win a Hugo since it was a bit too light for that, but it was certainly a fun book to read.
Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold, 125pp [audiobook] [Penric and Desdemona 4].
This book was available only on audiobook in the library so I listened to it. The narrator wasn't that great, which didn't help. I might have liked this novella more if I was just reading it. The setting of this book is much different than the other three novellas, so much so that I thought I skipped a book and had to double check. It took me a while to figure out that Penric' employer in the previous three books has died, and that him wanting to study shamans in the end of last book didn't really come to fruition or was just not mentioned and ignored here. He left that city and sought employment in a different place, Lodi, which reminded me of Venice with its canals and all the water. I have been to Venice and it was not my favorite Italian city (I liked Florence a lot, and I loved Rome. In Venice I just really liked the gelato but otherwise found it old and confusing).
There is a young man who washed ashore with a wild demon inside and Penric needs to track that boy, with a help of a very young saint to take a demon away, during a Bastard's Eve celebrations in Lodi. I figured out the plot way before the characters did, which often drives me crazy, since it was pretty obvious and I just want the characters to catch up. Plus the last 1/4 of the book is just wrapping up the story and is more emotion based than plot. This novella is just weird.
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, 297pp [Hugo book].
A Hugo winning book about two parallel universes. In one the Neanderthals because the winning species with evolution with their own culture, which Sawyer clearly put a lot of thought it. The other is our world. A Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, ends up in our world. We get a view of both worlds. In ours we see Ponter adjust to our world with the help of a few scientists, and in the Neanderthal world, we see Ponter's partner getting accused of his murder and the partner's quest to prove his innocent and perhaps get Ponter back. I thought the Neanderthal world was interesting - it was certainly different. The society does seem a little idealized - they don't have overpopulation and have respect for the earth and look how terrible our society is. There seems to be a lot of moralizing when the characters from two worlds discuss different aspects of it like law, politics, or religion. It just felt like over the top criticism of our society. And not a lot to show the drawbacks of the Neanderthal one - it wasn't exactly a utopia if you start to think about it but it is presented like one. The response in our world to a Neanderthal felt a bit contrived.
But what I didn't like at all was that when we introduced to the character of Mary, who is a scientist specializing in Neanderthal genetics in our world, in the first scene with her, she gets raped. Graphically. And we don't really need the whole distasteful scene. After, we see her trauma in some ways but not really that deeply and at least she does get to talk to someone, but as I was reading, I kept wondering why that was necessary. Why start your introduction to this character this way. And by the end of the book it felt like that was written to put an obstacle in the Ponter and Mary's potential romance. Which is terrible. There could be many way to convey that Mary is attracted to Ponter but doesn't get together with him than having that trauma. That part of the book was just not needed. Women in general were not written well.
So while this book did sustain my interest, the more I think about it, the more issues I have with it. And certainly no interest to read more in the series.
Romancing Mr. Bridgerton by Julia Quinn, 420pp [Bridgeton 4].
After I watched the first part of third season of Bridgerton on Netflix in the spring, I put the ebook on hold in the library since I wanted to know what happened and I kept hearing about book comparison. It is a popular series and I didn't get the book until late June (well books 4, 5 and 6 since the ebooks are published as a collection). But this is the first book I read in the Bridgerton series, having only seen the TV show. My brain was also feeling fried for some reason, so I welcomed the idea of reading a very silly romance with very low stakes. And then I read books 5 and 6, and then also got books 1 to 3 in the library and read those and now I'm waiting for 7 and 8. They might be very very silly books but they are amusing.
I like the TV Penelope, which made me see the book Penelope in a similar way. Colin of the books is a bit different from TV Colin - he is snarkier and I like the book Colin much more. Penelope in the books gives up her secret identity while in the TV show the resolution is different. But I actually enjoyed seeing what the TV show took from the books and were the differences are. TV was closer to the books than I thought. Overall, it was just nice to turn off my brain.