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Books and comics read in March 2016
Tuesday, 12 April 2016 17:38
(Slightly belated due to me spending the first week of April in the Lake District with some of my favourite people. <3)
Warlords and Wastrels - Julia Knight
The Fair Fight - Anna Freeman
The Corn King and the Spring Queen - Naomi Mitchison
Midnighter: Out
The Martian - Andy Weir
Catseye - Andre Norton
Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days
Blood of Dragons - Robin Hobb
Tremontaine Season One
Born With Teeth - Kate Mulgrew
The Martian
I've never been a fan of puzzles, largely because I go from "oh a puzzle" to "WHY CAN'T I SOLVE THIS I HATE EVERYTHING" in the space of about ten seconds, but as it turns out I really enjoy watching other people solve them. So I liked the Watney-POV sections of this book very much! The other sections I was less enamoured of - they felt a bit flat, partly I think due to the contrast between single character first person conversational and multiple character omniscient third person style, but also I thought the prose just wasn't that great. :( I did however really like how throughout the earth-based sections there was this sense of everyone coming together to rescue Watney and the feeling that they were determined to rescue him if it was at all possible, no matter the cost in money, resources, time etc. ♥
Didn't finish: The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930 - Angus McLaren
This sounded really interesting - looking at how masculinity and heterosexuality were constructed and policed through the legal and medical systems - but ultimately I found it pretty frustrating. I felt like it didn't make strong enough connections between the legal cases it examined (I didn't get as far as the medical section) and what it was trying to say about masculinity as a construct, and when it picked exemplar cases instead of looking at trends, didn't adequately justify their selection either in terms of how they contributed to the argument or why they were characteristic of the period. The wide and slightly unfocused geographical sweep didn't help either - the main focus seemed to be England, but the introduction talked about "Western culture", and cases from France and British Columbia also came up. So I stopped reading it and read a comic instead.
A short story I enjoyed this month: Flightcraft - Iona Sharma. Really beautifully written story about flight and magic and aftermaths. <3
Warlords and Wastrels - Julia Knight
The Fair Fight - Anna Freeman
The Corn King and the Spring Queen - Naomi Mitchison
Midnighter: Out
The Martian - Andy Weir
Catseye - Andre Norton
Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days
Blood of Dragons - Robin Hobb
Tremontaine Season One
Born With Teeth - Kate Mulgrew
The Martian
I've never been a fan of puzzles, largely because I go from "oh a puzzle" to "WHY CAN'T I SOLVE THIS I HATE EVERYTHING" in the space of about ten seconds, but as it turns out I really enjoy watching other people solve them. So I liked the Watney-POV sections of this book very much! The other sections I was less enamoured of - they felt a bit flat, partly I think due to the contrast between single character first person conversational and multiple character omniscient third person style, but also I thought the prose just wasn't that great. :( I did however really like how throughout the earth-based sections there was this sense of everyone coming together to rescue Watney and the feeling that they were determined to rescue him if it was at all possible, no matter the cost in money, resources, time etc. ♥
Didn't finish: The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930 - Angus McLaren
This sounded really interesting - looking at how masculinity and heterosexuality were constructed and policed through the legal and medical systems - but ultimately I found it pretty frustrating. I felt like it didn't make strong enough connections between the legal cases it examined (I didn't get as far as the medical section) and what it was trying to say about masculinity as a construct, and when it picked exemplar cases instead of looking at trends, didn't adequately justify their selection either in terms of how they contributed to the argument or why they were characteristic of the period. The wide and slightly unfocused geographical sweep didn't help either - the main focus seemed to be England, but the introduction talked about "Western culture", and cases from France and British Columbia also came up. So I stopped reading it and read a comic instead.
A short story I enjoyed this month: Flightcraft - Iona Sharma. Really beautifully written story about flight and magic and aftermaths. <3