Books and comics read in December 2019
Thursday, 2 January 2020 13:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usuallyhatsHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
All-New Wolverine: Enemy of the State II
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire- JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
Young Justice: Gemworld
The Princess Who Flew with Dragons - Stephanie Burgis
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma
Doctor Who: Molten Heart - Una McCormack
Murder Under the Christmas Tree: Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season ed. Cecily Gayford
Bloodlust and Bonnets - Emily McGovern
The Empress of Timbra - Karen Healey and Robyn Fleming
Rivers of London: Body Work
All-New Wolverine: Immune
Lumberjanes: On a Roll
The Gilded Wolves - Roshani Chokshi
America: The Life and Times of America Chavez
Turning Darkness Into Light - Marie Brennan
Well this was a spectacularly ill timed Harry Potter reread. I'd just reached a point where I could make my peace with the fact that these books have some great things in them and were very important to me, but also they and JKR are very very flawed, and then she had to remind us all what a TERF she is. Ugh. ANYWAY.
Doctor Who: Molten Heart
I felt like the worldbuilding and the secondary characters didn't quite convince me in this one, which is unusual for Una McCormack (I did wonder if she was conscious of writing for a slightly younger audience than usual and overshot, but I don't remember this being an issue with her Eleventh Doctor books), but it was a fun read and the characterisation of the regulars was great. I particularly enjoyed seeing Thirteen and Ryan being video game adventure buddies and Yaz and Graham being quietly supportive buddies.
Murder Under the Christmas Tree
Lots of excellent stories here. The Cadfael one was the standout for me - beautifully thoughtful and atmospheric, and had me wondering if I should read more Cadfael. The Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", I'd read before, but rewarded rereading, not least as a curative to the "Holmes doesn't care about people" brigade. The Wimsey story was slight but fun, and the Carter Dickson story, despite some boring incidental sexism in the framing story, was delightfully creepy. Honourable mention too to Val McDermid's very good story for having queer characters, though overall it was sadder than I was looking for.
The Empress of Timbra
I loved many things about this. The worldbuilding was absorbing, and I really liked the brother and sister point of view characters, especially the sister, a sweet, weird, autistic eleven year old. I also really enjoyed how much of it was about people who were basically nice and who liked each other. For quite a while it was cruising for an easy four stars, or even five.
HOWEVER. The protagonists' society was mostly white (not entirely, one of the point of view characters was mixed race, but this was clearly unusual), the antagonists were mostly brown, and while yes, it all turned out to be More Complicated and the antagonists' society was actually more admirable than the protagonists' in a lot of ways, the society made up of mostly brown people was the one attacking and abducting the people the first half of the book made us care about. And it could have been fixed so easily! Just make everyone brown! Or mix it up a bit more! /o\ (I also wasn't super into how homophobia was used as an incidental hint that maybe the antagonists' society is actually better than the protagonists', given that afaict both authors are straight.)
The Gilded Wolves
This YA novel is about six teenagers carrying out a heist, and as such really invited comparisons to Six of Crows, not least because the dynamic between the leads feels so similar. These comparisons didn't really help it, because although it's very enjoyable it's just not as good. The construction isn't as deft or as clever, the prose isn't as tight (though admittedly this may have partly been the slightly overwrought style not quite working for me), and there's slightly too much infodumping, especially of character backstories. And about a third of the way in I realised that I didn't entirely believe that the world still existed when one of the protagonists wasn't looking directly at it, which made the stakes seem lower than they should have felt.
All that being said, there's still a lot to like about this book. The setting is fascinating: Paris in 1889, but with magic powered by mysterious artefacts thought to be fragments of the Tower of Babel*. It does a decent job of reckoning with colonialism, mostly through the fact that of the six leads, three (or possibly four, I can't remember about Tristan) are mixed race, one is Indian, and another is a Jewish immigrant from Poland. The characters themselves are mostly pretty endearing and I liked how hard it went for found family.
Overall, it was mostly pretty fun, though sadly not as good as I wanted it to be. I liked everything it was trying to do, but the execution didn't end up landing for me.
*I'm assuming that's not actually what they will turn out to be in later books, because otherwise the implication that Christianity is real but other religions aren't would make this book plummet in my estimation
Didn't finish: A Study In Scarlet Women
I didn't find this at all convincing and I don't know why. Possibly the plethora of points of view in the first few chapters made it too hard for me to find my feet? Or just a complete failure of suspension of disbelief on my part.
All-New Wolverine: Enemy of the State II
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire- JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
Young Justice: Gemworld
The Princess Who Flew with Dragons - Stephanie Burgis
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma
Doctor Who: Molten Heart - Una McCormack
Murder Under the Christmas Tree: Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season ed. Cecily Gayford
Bloodlust and Bonnets - Emily McGovern
The Empress of Timbra - Karen Healey and Robyn Fleming
Rivers of London: Body Work
All-New Wolverine: Immune
Lumberjanes: On a Roll
The Gilded Wolves - Roshani Chokshi
America: The Life and Times of America Chavez
Turning Darkness Into Light - Marie Brennan
Well this was a spectacularly ill timed Harry Potter reread. I'd just reached a point where I could make my peace with the fact that these books have some great things in them and were very important to me, but also they and JKR are very very flawed, and then she had to remind us all what a TERF she is. Ugh. ANYWAY.
Doctor Who: Molten Heart
I felt like the worldbuilding and the secondary characters didn't quite convince me in this one, which is unusual for Una McCormack (I did wonder if she was conscious of writing for a slightly younger audience than usual and overshot, but I don't remember this being an issue with her Eleventh Doctor books), but it was a fun read and the characterisation of the regulars was great. I particularly enjoyed seeing Thirteen and Ryan being video game adventure buddies and Yaz and Graham being quietly supportive buddies.
Murder Under the Christmas Tree
Lots of excellent stories here. The Cadfael one was the standout for me - beautifully thoughtful and atmospheric, and had me wondering if I should read more Cadfael. The Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", I'd read before, but rewarded rereading, not least as a curative to the "Holmes doesn't care about people" brigade. The Wimsey story was slight but fun, and the Carter Dickson story, despite some boring incidental sexism in the framing story, was delightfully creepy. Honourable mention too to Val McDermid's very good story for having queer characters, though overall it was sadder than I was looking for.
The Empress of Timbra
I loved many things about this. The worldbuilding was absorbing, and I really liked the brother and sister point of view characters, especially the sister, a sweet, weird, autistic eleven year old. I also really enjoyed how much of it was about people who were basically nice and who liked each other. For quite a while it was cruising for an easy four stars, or even five.
HOWEVER. The protagonists' society was mostly white (not entirely, one of the point of view characters was mixed race, but this was clearly unusual), the antagonists were mostly brown, and while yes, it all turned out to be More Complicated and the antagonists' society was actually more admirable than the protagonists' in a lot of ways, the society made up of mostly brown people was the one attacking and abducting the people the first half of the book made us care about. And it could have been fixed so easily! Just make everyone brown! Or mix it up a bit more! /o\ (I also wasn't super into how homophobia was used as an incidental hint that maybe the antagonists' society is actually better than the protagonists', given that afaict both authors are straight.)
The Gilded Wolves
This YA novel is about six teenagers carrying out a heist, and as such really invited comparisons to Six of Crows, not least because the dynamic between the leads feels so similar. These comparisons didn't really help it, because although it's very enjoyable it's just not as good. The construction isn't as deft or as clever, the prose isn't as tight (though admittedly this may have partly been the slightly overwrought style not quite working for me), and there's slightly too much infodumping, especially of character backstories. And about a third of the way in I realised that I didn't entirely believe that the world still existed when one of the protagonists wasn't looking directly at it, which made the stakes seem lower than they should have felt.
All that being said, there's still a lot to like about this book. The setting is fascinating: Paris in 1889, but with magic powered by mysterious artefacts thought to be fragments of the Tower of Babel*. It does a decent job of reckoning with colonialism, mostly through the fact that of the six leads, three (or possibly four, I can't remember about Tristan) are mixed race, one is Indian, and another is a Jewish immigrant from Poland. The characters themselves are mostly pretty endearing and I liked how hard it went for found family.
Overall, it was mostly pretty fun, though sadly not as good as I wanted it to be. I liked everything it was trying to do, but the execution didn't end up landing for me.
*I'm assuming that's not actually what they will turn out to be in later books, because otherwise the implication that Christianity is real but other religions aren't would make this book plummet in my estimation
Didn't finish: A Study In Scarlet Women
I didn't find this at all convincing and I don't know why. Possibly the plethora of points of view in the first few chapters made it too hard for me to find my feet? Or just a complete failure of suspension of disbelief on my part.
no subject
Date: 2 Jan 2020 15:47 (UTC)I particularly love the full cast audios the BBC did lo, this many years ago, featuring Philip Madoc as Cadfael. AFAIK there's only two of them - Dead Man's Ransom and The Virgin in the Ice. No, actually, I think they also did Monk's Hood. I think the others are just audio versions read by - I want to say Derek Jacobi, but I could be mis-remembering.
Anyhoo, I'll look out for Murder Under the Christmas Tree.
no subject
Date: 4 Jan 2020 12:46 (UTC)Thanks, I'll look into the audios!
no subject
Date: 4 Jan 2020 15:11 (UTC)