Recent Readings

[tirinian]

Since I've actually read enough in the last few months to be worth reviewing, and it's a slow night, lets see what we've got. In vaguely chronological order:

I re-read the four books of Julian May's Pliocene Exile series. It was one of my favorite series in college, but while they're still good, I don't think I'd put them quite that high anymore. This may partly be that I'd forgotten how little the people I think of as the stars (Elizabeth, Mark, Aiken, and Felice) are actually in it, while all sorts of other people run around doing stuff I don't care about so much. It may also be that I think the Metapsychic Rebellion series is pretty weak, and that dissatisfaction rubs off on to these ones. Still, it's a nicely drawn world, very readable, and she's good about doing bad things to her characters, which I appreciate in an author. Lives 8.5 days of game before being drowned in a flood, but .5 of that may be nostalgic approval from years past.

A moderately funny, moderately "realistic" novel about a superhero team hunting down a supervillain, Soon I Shall Be Invincible should be right up my alley. But really, I was kind of disappointed. It's told in alternating viewpoint chapters, going back and forth between the villain and the new recruit on the hero team. I like parts of the villain's personality, which interestingly plays on the "super-genius yet blabs his plans" sort of thing, but he's too much the whiny "everyone picked on me as a kid" geek for me to really like him. The hero is more vanilla - generally more likeable, but without anything in particular that stood out for me. The plot's also scattered - there's a "big reveal" about the hero's past that just gets dropped on the floor, a major third character whose motivation is both opaque and apparently inconsistent, and a "big reveal" that the villain does (deliberately) about his past that just goes nowhere to the person he tells. All in all, it's readable, but nothing very special. Still, it's only a first book, and shows promise. Lives 6.5 days of game before being arrested and thrown back in jail to try again next time.

On firstfrost's recommendation, I took these three, Orphans/Fugitives/Titans of Chaos with me on vacation and read them. They're good, but I don't think I'm quite as fond of them as she was. She said they reminded her a lot of an emerging powers run, and while I can see where she got that (the five kids who are the central characters are all discovering their weird powers), it didn't work for me that way because it's all told through the viewpoint of one character, and she's cooler when she's on her own than she is when she's with the rest of the group. I suppose this gives the rest of the group an excuse to be useful, but I kept feeling like they actually had a "make her stupid field" on around them, such that I wanted her to lose them again and go off on her own. (There's some slight in world justification for them *actually* having a make her stupid field, either accidentally generated by one of their powers or set up by one of the bad guys, but I don't think that was intended to be what I thought was happening, and if it was, it never gets fixed.) Still, they are good, and worth reading. Live 8 days of game before having their memories wiped and being sent back to the village.

I'd never read a Glen Cook novel, but everyone seems to like the Black Company a lot, so I figured it was worth giving one of his one shot novels, The Tower of Fear, a try (also on firstfrost's recommendation). I quite liked this one. It has multiple smart people fighting over various personal and political goals in a conquered city, without any obvious sides to root for (although there are a couple to root against). People sometimes leap to the wrong conclusion, but they always leap to a *reasonable* conclusion, based on what they know. I did find the fact that the conquerors are pretty Roman a little distracting, as I kept trying to draw historical analogies to the other two sides (the conquered and the mercenary force), and not coming up with one. I was also a little disappointed with the epilogues, which were basically "and this is how everyone who's left eventually loses and dies to the inevitable passage of time." Sure, it's going to happen, but it's rarely what I want to actually see as an epilogue. Still, lives 9.5 days of game before leaping from the Tower to its death.

Switching from SciFi to Gay, Full Circle is basically a tracing of the last 40 years of gay liberation through the life of the main character. It's entertainingly written, but there's not so much plot, it just kind of wanders along with Things Happening (Vietnam, Harvey Milk, AIDS, etc.). I suppose that's frequently the way of Literature (as opposed to genre fiction), but really, I'm a fan of Plot. Such as it is, the plot is about his relationship with the boy next door (his first boyfriend), and their various fights and reconciliations, which is all done well enough, but left me with little to take away from the book. I did enjoy reading it while I was going along though. Lives 8 days of game before dying from HIV.

Kipling gets a bad rap as an imperialist pig-dog. There are certainly times and places where he is, but this isn't one of them. The British barely appear in The Jungle Books, and where they do they're as often messing things up as fixing them. There is a definite Humanocentric air that PETA wouldn't approve of, but I had no problems with that. Still, I'm not as fond of these stories as I am of what I remember of the Just So Stories. They tend to be a bit slow, and Mowgli is a bit of a prat sometimes. The interleaven poetry is really pretty though. Lives 7.5 days of game before getting chased out of the Jungle for being a Man.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I seem to randomly bump into Kipling poems once in a while, and many are the equivalent of a catchy song I can't get out of my head for a week. The Land is the most recent one that got stuck in my head some months ago...

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Full Circle sounds a lot like Forrest Gump.

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

Not an unfair comparison. Fun enough while reading/watching, but no there there, afterwards.