Yellow gingham on the bed, remember?

Stealing this from qian to give it a try!

What are you reading now?

I know themis will probably roll her eyes at my recurring insistence on braving the Byatt gauntlet despite her overwroughtness and obsession with playing out the same gender roles in fiction over and over, but... I can't help it, her prose style has a certain je ne sais quoi. So I just finished with "Morpho Eugenia" which--had a lot of Byatt weaknesses in it, like uncomfortable exotification of a non-English locale as a metaphorical backdrop for what the English characters are up to, and presenting heterosexuality with that same vaguely predatory, conquest-based framework from the man's perspective, and in general I didn't care for it. But we'll see how I feel about "The Conjugial Angel," which is the second half of Angels & Insects.

My other problem with "Morpho Eugenia" was the really boring and typical treatment of incest. I feel like incest in fiction, unless the story is About Incest in and of itself (and even then), always takes place between these two beautiful ciphers of people who just decide to start defying Westermarck just.. because... and outside the context of the kinds of toxic family environments in which these things actually transpire, and ignores that it's kind of one symptom that usually goes along with a whole syndrome of family dysfunction, not a sexy taboo act that springs out of nowhere. Then again, it's almost always a heavy-handed metaphor for something, or a lurid detail. Sigh.

I'm also reading Emma because I feel like it, which is, of course, much better. Emma Woodhouse! It's kind of fun to mentally exercise yourself trying to speculate what other literary characters she directly influenced.

What did you just finish reading? Apparently what I've read so far in 2013 has been:

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch: Fun! Great fun. I don't say that lightly, I do not generally find crime-procedural urban fantasy to be any fun whatsoever. But it's funny and upbeat and fairly creepy reading, actually, with a pretty horrific villain and supernatural conceit, and Peter Grant and Thomas Nightingale (I think he's a Thomas, anyway) are pretty endearing.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: I... don't really understand this book's strange, melodramatic appeal, and yet I am sure I would and will reread it sometime. I think it has something to do with Francis. (There's a great YT fic called the mother of beauty from this year.)
The Bone Key by Sarah Monette: Collection of Kyle Murchison Booth stories, which I have finally gotten around to reading all of. They're... uneven overall, and variable, and have a tendency to be kind of anachronistic, and I don't really like how Monette writes women in her horror stories, it cleaves rather closely and without much subversion to many misogynistic horror tropes (and horror is basically a collection of misogynistic tropes). But I'd read more of them, I admit. I like "The Green Glass Paperweight" and "Drowning Palmer."
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter: One of those "things I never got around to reading in the stage in my development when I should've!" It's... good, although I think it suffers from some Seinfeld Is Unfunny for younger people like me through no fault of its own and due to the oversaturation of dark feminist fairytales in the past 10 years?
The Magician King by Lev Grossman: Aaaaaargh. Basically everything that was piss-annoying about Grossman as an author in The Magicians was amplified, and--you know, I actually liked The Magicians, in spite of my general desire to slap the male heterosexuality right out of Grossman's authorial perspective, but The Magician King was just a mess and went from bad to worse in how it treated women. Not good.
Cotillion by Georgette Heyer: Heyer's so all-over-the-place for me but this one was really, really fun. And hilarious.

 So I guess you've all probably heard enough about this if you follow me on any other social platforms, but I don't even caaaaare, I'm in that floaty bubble where you mostly have not started thinking about all the ways the BBC could mess up that thing you care about.

"The night is dark and full of circuses." -- relia

Things that transpired between starting The Night Circus and finishing The Night Circus
- 4 weeks
- Halloween
- Hosing cat's litter box out on two different occasions
- At least 4 movies in theaters
- Losing my wallet
- 2+ NYC outings
- 30K+ of productivity
- Bumpy flight from Philadelphia to Dallas

Things that transpired between starting Sorcery & Cecelia and finishing Sorcery & Cecelia:
- Flight from Dallas to LAX

Does that tell you something about the experience of finishing The Night Circus? Have you learned from my mistakes? Because you should.

~

Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus: AT LAST. At last I can review this unadulterated piece of derivative horseshit. Actually, I don't even know if 'derivative' is the right word, because I honestly don't know if the author has read enough books to derive anything from them. You probably remember my continuing adventures with this book. The most chilling moment was when I turned to the back and among the acknowledgments was a nod to inspiration from Punchdrunk, the company that does Sleep No More. It was like a hand reached out and touched me. A slimy, cold hand.

I guess this book's second worst crime, after boring me out of my disproportionately large hat-defying skull, was its criminal waste of its only remotely promising character -- Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, a half-Indian half-French mercurial dilettante who was apparently only around to start the circus, be fickle, be unworthy of our heterosexual male hero, and accidentally fuck things up for other people. Sorry, dude. You should've tried being in a different book, one with more plot and less ahistorical bullshit. Aside from that, words cannot express how much I grew to loathe both principal star-crossed lovers by the end of the book, but not as much as I grew to loathe the book itself and its yawning lack of plot, noticeable setting, world-building, characterization, or reasons for me to keep reading other than stubbornness. There was also a dash of considerable, laughable Orientalism, but it didn't even stand out in the scrap heap.

There's not much else to say about this. It's a lot easier to review a book with some flaws, or many flaws, than it is to review one with few -- or, in this case, one that's entirely comprised of flaw. I don't know what about this book wasn't a flaw. I guess it acts as a decent cautionary tale against writing in time periods because they're fashionable when you don't know anything about them, publishing your NaNoWriMo, or naming twin characters "Poppet" and "Widget" and causing this reviewer's frontal lobe to disengage and try to fly out of his head in an agonized attempt to escape the excruciating insipidness of the book.

Unless it gets the movie deal that's been rumored, in which case this reviewer will have to dance a long slow dance with Mr. Jasper Daniel and then remind himself that the world does in fact contain actual serious real-world injustices much worse than the existence of The Night Circus.

~

Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia: Since I feel a kind-of obligation to being forthright just in case it ever comes up, I disclaim that I have a very passing professional acquaintance with the authors of this book. So I also feel like it'd be weird to review it in-depth. It's one of those things I should've read five years ago. Just to note that I read it, though, and my basic reaction: it was good, it hopped along entertainingly, it was a breath of clever plot and capable writing after the long asphyxiating period of trying to get through Night Circus (along with Brandon Sanderson's questionable command of the English language, at other intervals). I mean, it had the usual charming ahistoricism and glossy G-rated false nostalgia of any Georgette Heyer-inspired pastiche, and it was incredibly Heyer/Austen, almost predictably so -- the two most major male characters were like, direct mirrors of the Duke of Avon and Mr. Darcy -- but it did it well so I enjoyed it. This isn't a genre I go to for an accurate picture of the early 19th century anyway, so probably neither should you, but this book is good and deserves the moderate acclaim it's gotten.

I'm actually more excited to review this thing than I was to read it. But down to business: what a strange book, I'm not sure I've ever read something so technically well-written that was so terrible. It had the feel of the fiction debut of an accomplished fanfic writer (and, given he was apparently a Warhammer writer, perhaps this has some basis) -- someone too used to working with borrowed worlds, and as a result not incapable with words but entirely unable to come up with a good idea. I'm not even sure where to start on the badness of this book: I guess I'll note that the entire thing could've been written from TV Tropes. If you read the words "Victorian Jack the Ripper-based dystopian AU where Count Dracula marries Queen Victoria, with a cast of characters ripped from history and literature" and try to picture what that would be like, you're probably right. There was nothing surprising about the story: pretty much everything was a cliche. It was like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen careened into a long Sherlock Holmes movie and "A Study in Emerald" in a high-speed car crash, and the book was put together from the resulting scrap metal.

This all could have been averted with the help of a Sassy Gay Friend if Newman weren't so goddamned addicted to putting every vaguely period character he could think of in this book. Out of a cast of thousands, I can think of maybe five characters he actually made up himself. You think it's kind of tacky to turn Oscar Wilde into a vampire to avoid his fate? Think again. You think it takes a lot of nerve to make Lord Ruthven work for Vlad Dracula? Psh. You think you don't have to mention every luminary in late Victorian society or fiction at least in passing? You have no idea. It was impossible to take seriously because it was a gallery of cameos in this overblown Dracula AU -- like a series of in-jokes meant to please people who know of things like A.C. Swinburne's sexual tastes -- and I kept being distracted by the book's need to mention offhand that Allan Quatermain existed somewhere or whatnot. It made LXG look restrained. In addition, practically every offensive trope or stereotype for this time period that you could think of featured eventually -- you've got two primary male characters motivated by fridged women, some evil Chinese gangsters, aforementioned Depraved Homosexuals, brutish and warlike Slavs, bitchy dilettantes, sexy vampire women, and basically enough to get about fifteen bingoes in What Not Do Do In Historical Fiction Bingo. It was kind of impressive.

But aside from the cheesy and unimaginative problems in ideas and characters -- which were a lot -- it had peculiarly good dialogue and period voice. The plot itself was badly handled, and only materialized about halfway through the book, and I really think a ban on Jack the Ripper in fiction should be instated; the characters were all pretty cardboard save the two protagonists, who weren't bad. Actually, the whole thing read like someone who had the skill level to write The Warrior's Apprentice was trying to write A Song of Ice and Fire; it's never a good idea to include a cast of thousands if you can only think of personalities for two or three of them, and one is Arthur Holmwood from Dracula. I was surprised to read it through and discover the plot improved a fair share by the climax, but that was a few hundred pages too late.

Overall, Anno Dracula is an interesting study in mistakes and I recommend it to anyone who writes Dracula spinoffs or Victoriana and curious about what not to ever, ever, ever under any circumstances do. Also instituting bans on: crazy men obsessed with dead girlfriends, Mycroft Holmes, 'As I'm certain you're aware, Robert'.

Stolen from themis .   Bolded for read, italicized for started, underlined for meaning to read.

( NPR's Top 100 SFF Books )

Off the top of my head, I would've narrowed the list a bit more to print SFF and stuff published within the genre (meaning I'd exclude the likes of Wicked, Outlander, and The Time Traveler's Wife even if I thought they deserved to be there, as well as Watchmen and Sandman, which are greats but not in this industry); while all media crosspollinates and they've all influenced one another, that's true of everything, you could make the same argument of film and fiction, but I'm pretty sure everyone agrees these lists would be impossible to make without any divisons.  Aside from that, like so many lists of this nature, this thing has an incredible newness bias -- Patrick Rothfuss, seriously?  George R.R. Martin?  Susanna Clarke?  If you're whapping up Jim Butcher, for God's sake, you might as well include J.K. Rowling for impactfulness -- this list really needs to decide what kind of list it is.

Otherwise, yesterday I went to the Jersey shore for the first time.  Today is the Pennsylvania Renfaire, not for the first time.  Inbetween I had a complicated dream about a LARP/IF game/virtual reality simulation that turned evil and trapped all the players in but none of the other players would believe it in time -- this was something I discovered in a level that was supposed to be about exorcizing a house haunted by an evil father, but turned out to be possessed by a tainted AI version of the Egyptian god Horus and was far above my level.  Then it poisoned all the food and turned all the meat raw.  It was the first dreaming simulation of biting into raw chicken I've ever had, I'd rather not repeat it.

I'm surprised I picked this book up. I'm not surprised because of the title or the concept, which are both eye-catching, but because it had some of the shoddiest marketing and design Daw ever gave a first (with the publisher) novel -- which is a shame, because it was a great book and kind of a rare beast in the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore. I'm a little surprised it didn't get marked magical realism and shunted into literary fiction, and I wonder if the kinds of readers it would've found there wouldn't've appreciated it better. Anyway, the main reasons I call it shoddily done are its cover -- which is really "this is a generic book about Africa, it glows red-orange with a desert backdrop and the silhouette of some black woman who does not really resemble the described protagonist of the book" -- and the lack of copyediting, which missed commas and word choice here and there in a way that made it look like someone just didn't go over it with the finest-tooth comb.

Even so, how often do you read a chosen-one story set in post-apocalyptic far-future Sudan about a mixed-race girl born of war rape who learns sorcery to face her evil biological father and bring salvation to her genocide-suffering people? I think that question answered itself. It's undeniably true that the only places that ever seem to get far futures in science fiction are Western ones, or occasionally East Asian. It's also undeniably true that racist, imperialist writers tend to implicitly treat places that are war-torn as though they're still in the Middle Ages, like technology and social sophistication can't coexist with bloodshed and violent atrocity; Okorafor is of Nigerian descent, though, and seems to have gone to effort to know what the hell she is talking about regardless, so this is not that kind of book.

It's set in very dark times in the future, and the threat of violence is always hanging over characters' heads (there are many violent or disturbing scenes that leave nothing to the imagination, including one involving female circumcision); it doesn't have a gratuitous or gritty tone to it, though, but plays out like a mythic-legendary story about a chosen leader born in horrible circumstances in the middle of a genocidal war and going through a bildungsroman to master her powers and defeat her evil father. Except it's not Luke Skywalker, it's a young mixed Arab/African (sort of; ethnicities have shifted in this future) woman with blonde hair that marks her as forbiddenly mixed-race, and it's not Darth Vader, it's a cruel fascist imperialist soldier to whom magic and sexual assault are both just means to a genocidal end. Basically, if you dig that kind of SFF mythic-arc story in general, then I recommend picking up Who Fears Death, because it's a hell of a lot more fresh than the usual Western tropey take on that and the fact that it is inherently about genocide, rape, war, racism, imperialism, gender, and healing makes it a lot more powerful.

But that's all praising the subject matter, not the story Okorafor specifically wrote -- so also, the story's really interesting and gripping! It suffers some pacing issues during long Onye Learns Magic and Onye Has To Pass Another Test sections, but otherwise stuff keeps happening and the reveal of information happens with perfect timing -- I sucked in a breath in surprise and dread at a couple events -- and it's definitely full of action and eventfulness. I liked all the characters aside from one, though I think it'd be spoilery to elaborate; if anything the story's main weakness is that it's a chosen-one-is-special story so inherently the moral involves a lot of other people being ultimately less worthy than the chosen one, but I knew that going in. Aside from that, it's sad, fairly riveting, sometimes beautiful, and definitely thought-provoking. I wish there was more stuff like this coming out in science fiction and fantasy.

So these reviews are doubling up because for different reasons I don't really feel like I can write a comprehensive review of either, but I want to jot down I finished them all within the past few days. I think I'll keep it brief, but I'll put the Camelot (the Starz series) stuff behind a spoiler cut because I have more spoilery things to say about that. However, I doubt much of it will be that surprising to people familiar with the legends; some of it is straight from, other stuff is easy to guess.

Day Watch and Twilight Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko: This is sort of a weird series to try and review, since I haven't read Night Watch (this one) (as opposed to the Pratchett one) (or the one by Sarah Waters) in ages and I've finally finished the next two at relia's behest. To an extent reading a book translated from another language, you don't know if you're reviewing the writer or the translator -- in this case I suspect the translator, since the series is clunky in a didn't-try-too-hard-to-translate-this sense, but I wouldn't know. I also don't know just about anything about Moscow, so I have no idea how the translation fared on the Moscow front. As a result, my only substantial review-thoughts are about the fantasy story and fantasy worldbuilding itself, and again, I've got no clue how much authorial intent and emphasis might've gotten lost in translation here.

Aside from that: they're urban fantasy books about a war between initiated agents of Light and agents of Dark, basically, and the Xanatos gambits and Xanatos roulettes undertaken in the service of this. I really dig a lot of the worldbuilding (the Dark and the Inquisition appealed to me especially) and the complicated/twist-filled plots that are set up; I was enh on the contrived Xanatos masterminds do everything devices often needful to pull off said complicated plots, because it's gotten to the point where the everyman POV characters are resigned to how little difference they can make in the hands of chessmasters, and that's no fun; I disliked how preachily in-the-right the Light protagonists always seemed to be even when the Dark was humanized somewhat, it had a a very "and goodness knows the wicked's lives are lonely!!" feel to it. But the world is cool, if you're into urban fantasy in a sort of fantasy-otherworld-war-on-civilian-turf setting, and the plot arcs are interesting and all wrap together, especially in Twilight Watch.

Camelot: Hmm. I'm not reviewing-reviewing this either (episode by episode, anyway) because I haven't actually seen all the episodes, but I've seen almost all. Overall I'd say it's better than I'd feared, not as good as I'd hoped, but at least it's, uh, better than Merlin. It should also be called Morgan, or maybe Morgan Pendragon, or The Mighty and Powerful Morgan, because she is the entire reason to watch the show. Hot DAMN is she the entire reason to watch the show.

( Tis a silly place )

This was the GRRM-penned episode. It may be confirmation bias played a factor in my judgment, but I think it showed: everyone's dialogue seemed particularly on-point, especially the Tyrion-Bronn sections. Anyway, this is still the part of the book where stuff is heating up, so it was bound to be intense.

That being said, oh my God.

( Spoiler Green is made of spoilers. )

Musing on that point, I think the Gratuitous HBOness isn't actually doing that any favors, though probably unintentionally. Contrary to semi-popular misconception, the A Song of Ice and Fire series did not come quite this HBO already: the adaptation's added a lot of random sex and violence, to say the least. This is all well and good when it's (the still WTF) Petyr Baelish monologuing to a pair of cavorting whores, but it makes the Dothraki portrayal look even more brutal and savage and lurid than it was in the books because we have to watch all their uncivilized-savage-person-violence as Dany does.

I'm not a fan of the HBO-ifying in general; it gives it a mood occasionally too close to HBO'S Rome, where you get dulled to the violence in the company of Antony and Atia eventually because you can't emotionally engage with it. In A Song of Ice and Fire, you're supposed to take all the violence dead seriously: it's a world where bad things happen to people, oftentimes for no reason, but commoners and foreigners and whores are not meant to be redshirts even if some of the POV characters think so. Adding too much more background violence makes it just seem like it's colored with blood and no one cares -- which undermines the context of various characters' classism, callousness, and self-centeredness, and misses the whole point of the intended social complexity in favor of a simplified bloody political sword-and-sorcery epic. It's good TV and good entertainment, but it's not the books.

I always get nervous when reading a new Discworld book. It's like watching my favorite sports team on their winning streak. Is this the book that's going to suck? Is this the one that'll break the winning streak? Please don't suck. Please don't be beige. Please don't disappoint me. It's like the opposite of watching Criminal Minds. Watching Criminal Minds is like following the Boston Red Sox. Practically anything is an improvement. Reading Discworld, on the other hand, is like watching the Yankees on the veeeerge of carrying it to the World Series and you're like, don't fuck this up Yankees don't fuck it up don't fuck it up -- well, I am pleased to report that on the score of I Shall Wear Midnight, the Yankees have not yet fucked up. Here's to hoping.

( Spoilers and D&D analogies )

 Overall it was good and full of great exchanges and bits and character interactions -- unfortunately, authorial unwillingness to sacrifice any of them for the plot meant the plot really suffered as a result. And that was a pity, because otherwise ISWM really could've been the coolest Tiffany book.