That's Just How That Bird Sings
Aug. 26th, 2005 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenOkay, finally, a book update.
Tanith Lee: Kill The Dead. The book starts out looking like it'll be a battle of wills between a ghostkiller and a stubborn women who doesn't want her sister's ghost banished. But when that's all resolved in the first few chapters, the real plot starts to unfold, and the feckless minstrel who seemed like a peripheral character suddenly becomes much more central. The plot gets very twisty, and while there may be one or two too many coincidences, in the end it's fairly satisfying...moreso than some of Lee's latter-day works.
Stephen Coonts: The Minotaur. Got this book in hardcover, I seem to recall for free after spending more then $50 at the bookstore or something. It was the least objectionable of the remaining choices or something. It looks like a Tom Clancy technothriller, but apparently it's got more than a modicum of spy thriller in it, too. The problem is that the protagonists of the two halves of the book are different. It's also apparently a sequel to Flight of The Intruder, which I've never read or even seen. It took me too long to read, for insufficient reward, but it wasn't outright bad.
Syne Mitchell: End In Fire. I first became aware of Syne Mitchell because one of her books was reviewed on the same page as one of Nicole's, and we happened to get a photocopy of that page. I've read two of her books, which were promising but ultimately a little bit unsatisfying. This one seemed to have an interesting premise--woman trapped in orbiting space station as nuclear war breaks out on Earth, trying to get back to her young son. It's set a few decades in the future, and the nuclear war breaks out between India and China, but expands to include the U.S. as well. It starts out slow, but turns into a serious page-turner in the second half, as you wonder how the hell she's going to survive, or if any of her companions in orbit are.
Barbara Hambly: Stranger At The Wedding. This book isn't really a sequel to Dog Wizard, but the main character is one of the minor ones from that book, so close enough. I'm not as rabid a fan of Hambly as my wife, finding her a bit uneven. And sometimes I get tired of the fact that, in every one of her fantasy worlds, mages seem to be a persecuted minority. It is a built-in source of tension and risk for your mage characters, but sometimes it's too much. Nevertheless, this story works fairly well.
The mage Kyra the Red has a premonition of her sister's death on her wedding day, and goes home to try to prevent it(the death, that is). Her family are rich and powerful, and having a mage in the family is frankly an embarrassment. Her backstory--her initial training in magic, and the chain of events that leads to her being thrown out of her own house--is told in frequent flashbacks, which are sometimes a bit annoying in their timing and length, but end up being crucial to the plot. The ending is very satisfying(and I guessed right!).
Robertson Davies: A Mixture of Frailties. Robertson Davies was a Canadian writer who started in the 50's with the humorous and poignant Salterton trilogy. He went on to write two more trilogies--the Deptford trilogy in the 70's, and the Cornish trilogy in the 80's--and then two books of another, before dying in the 90's. This book is the third of the Salterton trilogy, which I read last of all. It's probably the best of the trilogy, once it gets going. The main character of the book doesn't appear until several chapters in, but once her story, that of a sheltered small-town small-church Protestant Canadian girl going to London on an all-expenses-paid sabbatical to study singing(whew!), gets going, it's compelling. The first few chapters are more light-hearted, but Monica Gall's story is done seriously, and her growth throughout the book is delightful to watch.
Stephen King: Needful Things. This is, apparently, the fourth, and calls itself the final, Castle Rock book. I've only read one other one, The Dead Zone, and the was a few years ago. (I'm now a little bit interested in The Dark Half, and even Cujo, the other two Castle Rock books, but of course there's the Dark Tower series, too...) It's one of King's more mean-spirited books, and the body count gets pretty high, almost monotonously so, before the climax. One feels that King was almost having too much fun wreaking havoc on Castle Rock, and while the final confrontation is satisfying, it's really only a pyrrhic victory. I don't call all of King's books "horror"--Pet Sematary and The Shining were the only ones I'd toss into that bin before, but now I think this one deserves it too. (Okay, maybe Misery as well...not sure.)
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink. The only real nonfiction I've read much of in a while. I put it on hold at the library months ago, and there were over a hundred in the queue ahead of me, but they had lots of copies, and eventually I got my copy. (Still waiting for Jared Diamond's Collapse...) The book is very interesting and thought-provoking, and covers a lot of ground to do with the topic, that of unconscious pre-processing of information in the brain...how it can be powerful, but often misleading. I can't help but wonder, as I do in a lot of popular science books, how reputable is the research they're reporting on--is it accepted, all but proven, or lunatic fringe? But it sounds good.
Here's an experimnt to try with your friends, those who drink colas. Take three glasses; fill one with Pepsi, one with Coke, and the third with either of them. Then challenge your friends to tell you which two glasses have the same drink in them. They don't even have to identify which is which, just which are the same. (According to the book, unless you have special training in taste identification, your chances of picking the right two are abysmal, which presumably means pretty close to one in three.)
Next I think I'll read Sheri S. Tepper's The Visitor. We'll see if she squanders any more of her goodwill. I mean it. I've dropped Piers Anthony, and I was perilously close to doing it with Jack Chalker before he died, so don't think I won't, missy.
Tanith Lee: Kill The Dead. The book starts out looking like it'll be a battle of wills between a ghostkiller and a stubborn women who doesn't want her sister's ghost banished. But when that's all resolved in the first few chapters, the real plot starts to unfold, and the feckless minstrel who seemed like a peripheral character suddenly becomes much more central. The plot gets very twisty, and while there may be one or two too many coincidences, in the end it's fairly satisfying...moreso than some of Lee's latter-day works.
Stephen Coonts: The Minotaur. Got this book in hardcover, I seem to recall for free after spending more then $50 at the bookstore or something. It was the least objectionable of the remaining choices or something. It looks like a Tom Clancy technothriller, but apparently it's got more than a modicum of spy thriller in it, too. The problem is that the protagonists of the two halves of the book are different. It's also apparently a sequel to Flight of The Intruder, which I've never read or even seen. It took me too long to read, for insufficient reward, but it wasn't outright bad.
Syne Mitchell: End In Fire. I first became aware of Syne Mitchell because one of her books was reviewed on the same page as one of Nicole's, and we happened to get a photocopy of that page. I've read two of her books, which were promising but ultimately a little bit unsatisfying. This one seemed to have an interesting premise--woman trapped in orbiting space station as nuclear war breaks out on Earth, trying to get back to her young son. It's set a few decades in the future, and the nuclear war breaks out between India and China, but expands to include the U.S. as well. It starts out slow, but turns into a serious page-turner in the second half, as you wonder how the hell she's going to survive, or if any of her companions in orbit are.
Barbara Hambly: Stranger At The Wedding. This book isn't really a sequel to Dog Wizard, but the main character is one of the minor ones from that book, so close enough. I'm not as rabid a fan of Hambly as my wife, finding her a bit uneven. And sometimes I get tired of the fact that, in every one of her fantasy worlds, mages seem to be a persecuted minority. It is a built-in source of tension and risk for your mage characters, but sometimes it's too much. Nevertheless, this story works fairly well.
The mage Kyra the Red has a premonition of her sister's death on her wedding day, and goes home to try to prevent it(the death, that is). Her family are rich and powerful, and having a mage in the family is frankly an embarrassment. Her backstory--her initial training in magic, and the chain of events that leads to her being thrown out of her own house--is told in frequent flashbacks, which are sometimes a bit annoying in their timing and length, but end up being crucial to the plot. The ending is very satisfying(and I guessed right!).
Robertson Davies: A Mixture of Frailties. Robertson Davies was a Canadian writer who started in the 50's with the humorous and poignant Salterton trilogy. He went on to write two more trilogies--the Deptford trilogy in the 70's, and the Cornish trilogy in the 80's--and then two books of another, before dying in the 90's. This book is the third of the Salterton trilogy, which I read last of all. It's probably the best of the trilogy, once it gets going. The main character of the book doesn't appear until several chapters in, but once her story, that of a sheltered small-town small-church Protestant Canadian girl going to London on an all-expenses-paid sabbatical to study singing(whew!), gets going, it's compelling. The first few chapters are more light-hearted, but Monica Gall's story is done seriously, and her growth throughout the book is delightful to watch.
Stephen King: Needful Things. This is, apparently, the fourth, and calls itself the final, Castle Rock book. I've only read one other one, The Dead Zone, and the was a few years ago. (I'm now a little bit interested in The Dark Half, and even Cujo, the other two Castle Rock books, but of course there's the Dark Tower series, too...) It's one of King's more mean-spirited books, and the body count gets pretty high, almost monotonously so, before the climax. One feels that King was almost having too much fun wreaking havoc on Castle Rock, and while the final confrontation is satisfying, it's really only a pyrrhic victory. I don't call all of King's books "horror"--Pet Sematary and The Shining were the only ones I'd toss into that bin before, but now I think this one deserves it too. (Okay, maybe Misery as well...not sure.)
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink. The only real nonfiction I've read much of in a while. I put it on hold at the library months ago, and there were over a hundred in the queue ahead of me, but they had lots of copies, and eventually I got my copy. (Still waiting for Jared Diamond's Collapse...) The book is very interesting and thought-provoking, and covers a lot of ground to do with the topic, that of unconscious pre-processing of information in the brain...how it can be powerful, but often misleading. I can't help but wonder, as I do in a lot of popular science books, how reputable is the research they're reporting on--is it accepted, all but proven, or lunatic fringe? But it sounds good.
Here's an experimnt to try with your friends, those who drink colas. Take three glasses; fill one with Pepsi, one with Coke, and the third with either of them. Then challenge your friends to tell you which two glasses have the same drink in them. They don't even have to identify which is which, just which are the same. (According to the book, unless you have special training in taste identification, your chances of picking the right two are abysmal, which presumably means pretty close to one in three.)
Next I think I'll read Sheri S. Tepper's The Visitor. We'll see if she squanders any more of her goodwill. I mean it. I've dropped Piers Anthony, and I was perilously close to doing it with Jack Chalker before he died, so don't think I won't, missy.
