![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Various book reviews
Ah... huh. I apparently have quite a few books I've read that I've reviewed but have not archived those thoughts here. (I tend to write book reviews on Tumblr first because I read very slowly and take notes as I go, and Tumblr's drafts are just much better for doing that.) Also, I finished one of the arts I promised I would do in February (a couple of days late shhh), and so now I can use it in this post. I'm not going to include book club books in this round-up -- I'll save them for another time.
Enchantment (1999) by Orson Scott Card
Archived from here: https://chacusha.tumblr.com/post/753394687702958080/enchantment-1999-by-orson-scott-card
I think either I or my sister got this book for free from some kind of library event back in high school, and it's just been traveling from house to house with me ever since. I'm trying to go through all the unread books currently sitting on my shelves, so I finally finished reading this a couple of months back (it was my bathroom book).
I think the reason why I originally wanted to read this book is that I was going through a fairy tale retelling phase, and I think I heard good things about this book? I know Orson Scott Card is very Problematic, but I thought this was an interesting take on Sleeping Beauty, set in the real world but involving time travel between the modern era (the 1990s) and medieval Eastern Europe.
Quite a few years back, I read a book collecting Russian fairy tales, so I appreciated some of the elements here, like the main character being Ivan(/John/Jack) the Fool. Baba Yaga here felt... very different from the stock character in the fairy tales I read, but that has pretty much been my experience with every modern version of Baba Yaga I've come across, IDK. I'm not as familiar with Jewish folklore, so can't really comment on those aspects of the story, positive or negative.
You know how I was wondering if I've actually softened on Slap-Slap-Kiss/Belligerent Sexual Tension dynamics, or if Quodo is just an exception? Well, yeah, I gotta say it's leaning toward Quodo being a special exception. I was very indifferent to the very 90s haughty-princess-arguing-with-defensive-dude dynamic of the romance here and found it frustrating they're constantly getting into arguments and then being like, "I guess he/she doesn't love me. :(" (I feel like everyone was desperately trying to recapture the magic of Han and Leia and just... not doing a good job at it.) So I'm still leaning toward "most of the time people write this dynamic, it sucks and I don't enjoy it."
There was also some weird gender stuff in the writing (in the form of depicting women as hyperintuitive and Knowing Things without being able to explain how they know things, and men being hyperrational and scientific) and I am just not here for that.
So yeah, overall, I thought this book was only OK and not particularly good or memorable. I liked the fairy tale retelling aspect and the characters were interesting, and I also liked the way seamless POV switching was handled in the writing -- I find that quite hard without using hard scene/chapter breaks. But as a whole, I probably wouldn't recommend the book -- I don't think it's something that particularly sticks with you (part of why it took me so long to write this up, probably).
This is the first thing I've read by Orson Scott Card, by the way (like, I haven't even read Ender's Game...)
The Infinite and the Divine (2020) by Robert Rath
Archived from here: https://chacusha.tumblr.com/post/768111397350572032/the-infinite-and-the-divine-2020-by-robert-rath
My partner recommended this Warhammer novel to me because I like Quodo, and... yeah. Extremely the same vibes: scrungly old man yaoi; if you've been rivals for 65 million years (they are robots), you are no longer rivals, you are GAY; why do I keep thinking about him when I'm trying to meditate -- it must be because I HATE him so much.
Anyway, here's some random thoughts (spoilers):
• I love this Indiana Jones parody opening. XD
• "Everyone had their damage. Of the few who'd already arisen, several of the old highborn of necrontyr emerged not knowing their names. Others were complete automatons, or even mad. In dark moments, Trazyn feared that in ten thousand years, when the dynasties began to awaken in full, he would find all of his peers had diminished. Not he, though. Trazyn had emerged with his faculties entirely intact."
Me: Is Trazyn an unreliable narrator?
My partner: Could be...
• Partner: Where are you in the book?
Me: Trazyn and Orikan are trying to kill each other.
Partner: ........
Me: Omg. 😂 I guess I'm at the *first* time Trazyn and Orikan are trying to kill each other, then.
• I am not a Warhammer fan myself, but my partner will periodically explain things/provide infodumps to me whenever I'm curious about something, and one thing I love is that the Orks are so fae and whimsical. Part of this fae whimsicality, for example, is that things become true because they believe that they're true. For example, they believe that when you paint things red, it makes them go faster, but because they believe this, it actually *does* make them go faster. But another part of this fae whimsicality is that they have the fourth-wall-breaking ability to change the genre of a work they're in. My partner once explained to me that there's an Ork detachment that, when you play it, its main specialty is that the guys are really speedy and are able to control the board through maneuverability. This is not a particularly reliable game strategy, though, because against a skilled player, it basically turns into a game of luck where you can win if the objectives award a lot of points for board control but you will lose otherwise. So it basically turns a war game about battle strategy into a game of chance -- in particular, about whether you can make "gotta go fast" into a winning strategy. So basically, you have these Orks zooming around the battlefield in their Mad Max trucks deciding to play Mario Kart instead of, like war, and this mental image is just so funny to me.
Anyway, the reason why this is relevant to this book is that you have these very serious aristocratic faux-Egyptian ancient robots (an archivist and a sorcerer, basically), but then when they're in the vicinity of the Orks, the narration changes to, like, "The crescent shape of the command barge rose, slugga and shoota rounds pinging off its armoured underside," and you see all these "stormboyz" flying around with carefree glee as their shoddily thrown-together ships are one second away from an explosion and you can just imagine the cartoon BOOM sound effect that would result from that. Like, once the Orks enter the scene with their trukks and sluggas and kroozers and outlandishly-slapped-together control panels labeled with simplistic things like "GO" and "STOP," then suddenly the genre of the work changes from whatever it was to hijinks-filled cartoon comedy.
• Partner: Have you gotten to Trazyn and Orikan's date yet? 🥺👉👈
Me: No but they're, like... having coffee together?
Partner: Oh yeah, I guess they kinda have two dates. But you'll know when you get to the date scene I'm talking about.
Me: (later) THEY'RE ON THEIR DATE.
• Omg, Trazyn and Orikan literally made each other worse 😂
One thing that makes Trazyn and Orikan's dynamic very similar to Odo and Quark's is that both Trazyn and Orikan are kinda awful in their own ways, same as Odo and Quark. Like, they're both just jerks who are mean and petty and terrible to each other and just never really get better. 😆 (Comparing to my thoughts on Slap-Slap-Kiss above, here too I think the Slap-Slap-Kiss dynamic works. Because they're both kind of terrible? Does it work better for repressed gay characters than het pairings? Or is Slap-Slapstick-Kiss a variation on Slap-Slap-Kiss that is actually good? I have no idea, but Trazyn and Orikan's dynamic actually worked for me even if they're enemies the entire time.)
The big-scale battle scenes in this book are a little too long, although I guess if you're writing for a game called Warhammer, you have to do that. I did like (in the last battle) seeing all of the armies you saw Trazyn collect during the book. It was a bit of a running gag that he would steal some warriors and equipment for his collection, and that got a funny payoff at the end.
END SPOILERS
Anyway, here's some art I drew to celebrate finishing this.
Anthropology (2000) by Dan Rhodes
My partner got me this book because he was curious about drabbles and asked Twitter for recs and got recced this book that consists of 101 stories of 101 words each, all on the theme of love/boyfriends and girlfriends. Each story is a bite-sized thing that forms a kind of joke or subversion of expectations, all told from the point of view of a boyfriend talking about their girlfriend. My partner apparently gifted it to me without having read it himself and so I read it while in between book club books (I will say it's an easy read as it's only about 10k words total), and ended up going back to him being like, "Uh... did you read this? Why did you rec this to me??" because I felt there was this creeping sexist vibe to all the stories, and it was very out of character for my partner to rec something like that to me!
The cover of the edition I got has some Tim Burton-esque illustration of a boy and girl, and I don't know how much control the author had over that / whether he would agree that's the vibe he was going for with his writing? But anyway, the stories here are all quirky and weird/exaggerated, some in a macabre way, but others just in a... vaguely politically incorrect way? I don't know how to describe it. All the women in the stories have a variety of outlandish names; there's a lot of racism/Orientalism/dated language in a way that I couldn't tell if the author was trying to go for a pastiche of a particular style of literature (the technology featured in the book is similarly dated/all over the place in a way that also makes it feel like some kind of pastiche and hard to place in time).
I wouldn't mind that -- it's just quirky / some modern guy trying to go for a non-modern feel to the stories. However, what I didn't like is that basically ALL attraction in the book is entirely based on looks. You only have ~100 words for each story so I get having to tell rather than show attraction, but like not once ever is attraction to a woman demonstrated by finding her funny, witty, intelligent, silly, talented, quirky, ambitious, nerdy, impressive, cool, or literally anything aside from looks. Instead, it's all about how beautiful/lovely she is; how beautiful her hair is, how hot she looks, how she has legs for miles, etc. etc. Which again, makes this book have a really dated feel despite being written in 2000, but yeah, all the guys in this book are drooling over hot women who are either dumb as bricks or just completely callous/indifferent/cruel to them. There's NO one in the book, whether the narrator of each story or the trail of ex-boyfriends a girlfriend leaves behind her, that is into her for reasons aside from her looks.
As a result, reading this collection of stories just feels like getting a glimpse into the mind of a deeply sexist and shallow guy who has no self-awareness of his own shallowness. It's a bit of a creepy experience in a way I think is entirely unintended.
Anyway, I asked my partner to read it and let me know if he agreed with my impression. He read it really quickly and his evaluation was even harsher than mine, basically consisting of the comments, "If you're writing a story, you have to have more to say than just your kinks," (he noticed a lot of smoking kink, in addition to feet and Asian fetishism), and "Okay there were a couple of stories here that made me laugh, but having two funny stories out of 101 isn't good enough." Ouch, harsh. 😂
But yeah, if you're going to have 101 stories about love and presumably different boyfriends, I think the least you could do as a writer is make the narrators seem different from each other? u_u
So yeah, my evaluation? Hard pass.
The Big Game (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, #4) (1993) by Sandy Schofield
I got this DS9 tie-in novel from![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
JessKo. It's a very Quodo-flavored one, featuring some suggestive moments like Odo enjoying Quark whimpering in his office, Odo trolling Quark, and stuff like that, and a plot where Odo becomes a player in a poker tournament that Quark is running. I did really like dynamic here where Odo and Quark are ostensibly cooperating to find a murderer, although they still have very different objectives that come apart. That's the good stuff!
That said, I was expecting from the beginning of the story that this would be a murder mystery type story, and it was a bit underwhelming that the murderer is pretty quickly caught about three-fifths of the way through and the rest of the book is spent on some time-wasting sci-fi bullshit where I felt the stakes weren't really realistic or needed (physical/electronic disturbances being caused by invisible ships are being blamed by the Cardassians/Bajorans on each other, risking a war -- at this point in the show, I just don't feel it's very realistic for either of these people to risk war over what nebulously may or may not be a military action, and both sides would be deescalating or at least trying to pursue diplomatic resolutions first; it just felt to me like characters holding the Idiot Ball). Relatedly, there was too much time spent with characters who are not advancing the plot (stuck in Ops trying and failing to fix things). I just felt it would have been a MUCH stronger story if the sci-fi plot had been jettisoned to focus on a multi-species poker tournament murder mystery and give it the space to be a proper mystery with red herrings, surprise reveals, and so on.
But I guess that would have only involved a much smaller subset of characters, and I did like the ensemble focus here. It kind of makes me want to write a fic like that, with A, B, and C plots featuring the whole main cast of DS9 -- I've never tried that before in fanfiction!
Anyway, I thought this was a nice, quick read (apparently, written by a husband/wife duo using a pen name, one of whom I'm guessing really likes poker? IDK). I just wish it was the murder mystery that it seemed to be at the beginning!
Enchantment (1999) by Orson Scott Card
Archived from here: https://chacusha.tumblr.com/post/753394687702958080/enchantment-1999-by-orson-scott-card
I think either I or my sister got this book for free from some kind of library event back in high school, and it's just been traveling from house to house with me ever since. I'm trying to go through all the unread books currently sitting on my shelves, so I finally finished reading this a couple of months back (it was my bathroom book).
I think the reason why I originally wanted to read this book is that I was going through a fairy tale retelling phase, and I think I heard good things about this book? I know Orson Scott Card is very Problematic, but I thought this was an interesting take on Sleeping Beauty, set in the real world but involving time travel between the modern era (the 1990s) and medieval Eastern Europe.
Quite a few years back, I read a book collecting Russian fairy tales, so I appreciated some of the elements here, like the main character being Ivan(/John/Jack) the Fool. Baba Yaga here felt... very different from the stock character in the fairy tales I read, but that has pretty much been my experience with every modern version of Baba Yaga I've come across, IDK. I'm not as familiar with Jewish folklore, so can't really comment on those aspects of the story, positive or negative.
You know how I was wondering if I've actually softened on Slap-Slap-Kiss/Belligerent Sexual Tension dynamics, or if Quodo is just an exception? Well, yeah, I gotta say it's leaning toward Quodo being a special exception. I was very indifferent to the very 90s haughty-princess-arguing-with-defensive-dude dynamic of the romance here and found it frustrating they're constantly getting into arguments and then being like, "I guess he/she doesn't love me. :(" (I feel like everyone was desperately trying to recapture the magic of Han and Leia and just... not doing a good job at it.) So I'm still leaning toward "most of the time people write this dynamic, it sucks and I don't enjoy it."
There was also some weird gender stuff in the writing (in the form of depicting women as hyperintuitive and Knowing Things without being able to explain how they know things, and men being hyperrational and scientific) and I am just not here for that.
So yeah, overall, I thought this book was only OK and not particularly good or memorable. I liked the fairy tale retelling aspect and the characters were interesting, and I also liked the way seamless POV switching was handled in the writing -- I find that quite hard without using hard scene/chapter breaks. But as a whole, I probably wouldn't recommend the book -- I don't think it's something that particularly sticks with you (part of why it took me so long to write this up, probably).
This is the first thing I've read by Orson Scott Card, by the way (like, I haven't even read Ender's Game...)
The Infinite and the Divine (2020) by Robert Rath
Archived from here: https://chacusha.tumblr.com/post/768111397350572032/the-infinite-and-the-divine-2020-by-robert-rath
My partner recommended this Warhammer novel to me because I like Quodo, and... yeah. Extremely the same vibes: scrungly old man yaoi; if you've been rivals for 65 million years (they are robots), you are no longer rivals, you are GAY; why do I keep thinking about him when I'm trying to meditate -- it must be because I HATE him so much.
Anyway, here's some random thoughts (spoilers):
• I love this Indiana Jones parody opening. XD
• "Everyone had their damage. Of the few who'd already arisen, several of the old highborn of necrontyr emerged not knowing their names. Others were complete automatons, or even mad. In dark moments, Trazyn feared that in ten thousand years, when the dynasties began to awaken in full, he would find all of his peers had diminished. Not he, though. Trazyn had emerged with his faculties entirely intact."
Me: Is Trazyn an unreliable narrator?
My partner: Could be...
• Partner: Where are you in the book?
Me: Trazyn and Orikan are trying to kill each other.
Partner: ........
Me: Omg. 😂 I guess I'm at the *first* time Trazyn and Orikan are trying to kill each other, then.
• I am not a Warhammer fan myself, but my partner will periodically explain things/provide infodumps to me whenever I'm curious about something, and one thing I love is that the Orks are so fae and whimsical. Part of this fae whimsicality, for example, is that things become true because they believe that they're true. For example, they believe that when you paint things red, it makes them go faster, but because they believe this, it actually *does* make them go faster. But another part of this fae whimsicality is that they have the fourth-wall-breaking ability to change the genre of a work they're in. My partner once explained to me that there's an Ork detachment that, when you play it, its main specialty is that the guys are really speedy and are able to control the board through maneuverability. This is not a particularly reliable game strategy, though, because against a skilled player, it basically turns into a game of luck where you can win if the objectives award a lot of points for board control but you will lose otherwise. So it basically turns a war game about battle strategy into a game of chance -- in particular, about whether you can make "gotta go fast" into a winning strategy. So basically, you have these Orks zooming around the battlefield in their Mad Max trucks deciding to play Mario Kart instead of, like war, and this mental image is just so funny to me.
Anyway, the reason why this is relevant to this book is that you have these very serious aristocratic faux-Egyptian ancient robots (an archivist and a sorcerer, basically), but then when they're in the vicinity of the Orks, the narration changes to, like, "The crescent shape of the command barge rose, slugga and shoota rounds pinging off its armoured underside," and you see all these "stormboyz" flying around with carefree glee as their shoddily thrown-together ships are one second away from an explosion and you can just imagine the cartoon BOOM sound effect that would result from that. Like, once the Orks enter the scene with their trukks and sluggas and kroozers and outlandishly-slapped-together control panels labeled with simplistic things like "GO" and "STOP," then suddenly the genre of the work changes from whatever it was to hijinks-filled cartoon comedy.
• Partner: Have you gotten to Trazyn and Orikan's date yet? 🥺👉👈
Me: No but they're, like... having coffee together?
Partner: Oh yeah, I guess they kinda have two dates. But you'll know when you get to the date scene I'm talking about.
Me: (later) THEY'RE ON THEIR DATE.
• Omg, Trazyn and Orikan literally made each other worse 😂
One thing that makes Trazyn and Orikan's dynamic very similar to Odo and Quark's is that both Trazyn and Orikan are kinda awful in their own ways, same as Odo and Quark. Like, they're both just jerks who are mean and petty and terrible to each other and just never really get better. 😆 (Comparing to my thoughts on Slap-Slap-Kiss above, here too I think the Slap-Slap-Kiss dynamic works. Because they're both kind of terrible? Does it work better for repressed gay characters than het pairings? Or is Slap-Slapstick-Kiss a variation on Slap-Slap-Kiss that is actually good? I have no idea, but Trazyn and Orikan's dynamic actually worked for me even if they're enemies the entire time.)
The big-scale battle scenes in this book are a little too long, although I guess if you're writing for a game called Warhammer, you have to do that. I did like (in the last battle) seeing all of the armies you saw Trazyn collect during the book. It was a bit of a running gag that he would steal some warriors and equipment for his collection, and that got a funny payoff at the end.
END SPOILERS
Anyway, here's some art I drew to celebrate finishing this.
Anthropology (2000) by Dan Rhodes
My partner got me this book because he was curious about drabbles and asked Twitter for recs and got recced this book that consists of 101 stories of 101 words each, all on the theme of love/boyfriends and girlfriends. Each story is a bite-sized thing that forms a kind of joke or subversion of expectations, all told from the point of view of a boyfriend talking about their girlfriend. My partner apparently gifted it to me without having read it himself and so I read it while in between book club books (I will say it's an easy read as it's only about 10k words total), and ended up going back to him being like, "Uh... did you read this? Why did you rec this to me??" because I felt there was this creeping sexist vibe to all the stories, and it was very out of character for my partner to rec something like that to me!
The cover of the edition I got has some Tim Burton-esque illustration of a boy and girl, and I don't know how much control the author had over that / whether he would agree that's the vibe he was going for with his writing? But anyway, the stories here are all quirky and weird/exaggerated, some in a macabre way, but others just in a... vaguely politically incorrect way? I don't know how to describe it. All the women in the stories have a variety of outlandish names; there's a lot of racism/Orientalism/dated language in a way that I couldn't tell if the author was trying to go for a pastiche of a particular style of literature (the technology featured in the book is similarly dated/all over the place in a way that also makes it feel like some kind of pastiche and hard to place in time).
I wouldn't mind that -- it's just quirky / some modern guy trying to go for a non-modern feel to the stories. However, what I didn't like is that basically ALL attraction in the book is entirely based on looks. You only have ~100 words for each story so I get having to tell rather than show attraction, but like not once ever is attraction to a woman demonstrated by finding her funny, witty, intelligent, silly, talented, quirky, ambitious, nerdy, impressive, cool, or literally anything aside from looks. Instead, it's all about how beautiful/lovely she is; how beautiful her hair is, how hot she looks, how she has legs for miles, etc. etc. Which again, makes this book have a really dated feel despite being written in 2000, but yeah, all the guys in this book are drooling over hot women who are either dumb as bricks or just completely callous/indifferent/cruel to them. There's NO one in the book, whether the narrator of each story or the trail of ex-boyfriends a girlfriend leaves behind her, that is into her for reasons aside from her looks.
As a result, reading this collection of stories just feels like getting a glimpse into the mind of a deeply sexist and shallow guy who has no self-awareness of his own shallowness. It's a bit of a creepy experience in a way I think is entirely unintended.
Anyway, I asked my partner to read it and let me know if he agreed with my impression. He read it really quickly and his evaluation was even harsher than mine, basically consisting of the comments, "If you're writing a story, you have to have more to say than just your kinks," (he noticed a lot of smoking kink, in addition to feet and Asian fetishism), and "Okay there were a couple of stories here that made me laugh, but having two funny stories out of 101 isn't good enough." Ouch, harsh. 😂
But yeah, if you're going to have 101 stories about love and presumably different boyfriends, I think the least you could do as a writer is make the narrators seem different from each other? u_u
So yeah, my evaluation? Hard pass.
The Big Game (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, #4) (1993) by Sandy Schofield
I got this DS9 tie-in novel from
That said, I was expecting from the beginning of the story that this would be a murder mystery type story, and it was a bit underwhelming that the murderer is pretty quickly caught about three-fifths of the way through and the rest of the book is spent on some time-wasting sci-fi bullshit where I felt the stakes weren't really realistic or needed (physical/electronic disturbances being caused by invisible ships are being blamed by the Cardassians/Bajorans on each other, risking a war -- at this point in the show, I just don't feel it's very realistic for either of these people to risk war over what nebulously may or may not be a military action, and both sides would be deescalating or at least trying to pursue diplomatic resolutions first; it just felt to me like characters holding the Idiot Ball). Relatedly, there was too much time spent with characters who are not advancing the plot (stuck in Ops trying and failing to fix things). I just felt it would have been a MUCH stronger story if the sci-fi plot had been jettisoned to focus on a multi-species poker tournament murder mystery and give it the space to be a proper mystery with red herrings, surprise reveals, and so on.
But I guess that would have only involved a much smaller subset of characters, and I did like the ensemble focus here. It kind of makes me want to write a fic like that, with A, B, and C plots featuring the whole main cast of DS9 -- I've never tried that before in fanfiction!
Anyway, I thought this was a nice, quick read (apparently, written by a husband/wife duo using a pen name, one of whom I'm guessing really likes poker? IDK). I just wish it was the murder mystery that it seemed to be at the beginning!