50-book challenge: March.

[rivka]

Books I read in March:

In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, by John Taliaferro.
I checked this out of the library on the strength of the subtitle, and was fascinated and delighted. It's the story of a missionary couple, Tom and Ellen Lopp, who were among the first white people to live year-round in Alaska. The Lopp's story is used to illuminate conflicting approaches to mission work; political and social wrangling about how native people ought to be treated; and relations among missionaries, whalers, gold rush miners, agents of what would someday be the Coast Guard, and native Alaskans. Taliaferro describes early Alaskan policy as being based on vague feelings of guilt about the way that Native Americans were treated, and a desire to do better by the "Eskimos" - yet he also shows how paternalistic and exploitative the "Eskimo helpers" were, and how programs initially designed to benefit Native Alaskans were ultimately perverted to serve the economic interests of whites. Against this backdrop, the Lopps come off as remarkably liberal and modern-minded heroes.

Hmm. Everything in the above paragraph is true, but it completely neglects to convey the fact that this book is also a thrilling adventure story about death-defying feats of Arctic survival and travel, including a midwinter journey driving an enormous herd of reindeer across literally trackless portions of the Alaskan interior, to rescue stranded and starving whalers on the north coast. I'd say that the book is probably composed of equal parts of "Hmm, interesting" and "WHOA!!"

Hundred Dollar Baby by Robert B. Parker.
A Spenser novel like many other Spenser novels - it was mildly enjoyable to read, and then leaked out of my head pretty much instantly, afterward. It sort of feels as though Parker will keep putting the same elements together as long as they'll sell, and isn't invested in bringing anything new to the series. I suppose it's hard to blame him.

Strong, Smart, and Bold: Empowering Girls for Life, by Carla Fine.
This was just drivel. It read like a puff piece on self esteem in a women's magazine, blown up to book length without adding any depth or nuance. Yeesh.

The Machine's Child, by Kage Baker.
I wish there were some kind of mechanism by which people who are really writing a single book that is several thousand pages long could publish them that way, rather than splitting them into a long series of novel-length installments. Kage Baker's Company series is great, but at this point either she has too many balls in the air at once, or the wait between novels is too long for me to keep track of all the different threads. Like minnaleigh, I enjoyed the earliest books in the series, the ones that were limited to specific timepoints and cultures, the most. This one was pretty good, though.

The Chains That You Refuse, by Elizabeth Bear.
I'm not generally a short story reader, but I saw this in the new books rack at the library and thought, "If you're going to be reading matociquala's LJ, you ought to read something she's written." For the most part, I liked it very much. A few of the stories (and the poems, because I have such a poetry blocok) didn't work for me, but several - the title story, the postapocalyptic one about a deal with the devil, the eerily prescient one that takes place in a sunken New Orleans, the two about a much-diminished Norse (God? Hero? I don't know my Norse mythology very well) - were fantastic.

Blood and Iron, by Elizabeth Bear.
Oh my gosh, this was good. Gripping and creepy. Two nasty powers are counterposed: Faerie (weakened, but still very dangerous), and the Promethean Society, a group of human mages bent on destroying Faerie. The protagonist was stolen by fairies as a young woman and now steals other humans for them, bound in servitude to the Queen of Elfland and very uncertain about where her loyalties actually lie. A lot of the book is obscure; murkily portentious things happen, the characters react ambiguously, the reader (well, if the reader is me, anyway) is confused. But I still really liked it. There are some astonishingly vivid, haunting images and set pieces. The magic is interesting. The prose is very well-written. If you have a high tolerance for ambiguity and angst, and an even higher tolerance for mashed-together bits of Celtic myths and ballads, then this is definitely the book for you. There will be sequels, which may make things clearer eventually.

Bloodsucking Fiends: a Love Story, by Christopher Moore.
Girl becomes vampire, meets wholesome Midwestern boy, and falls in love. Wholesome Midwestern boy's stoner buddies become vampire slayers. The plot was okay, I guess, but the characters were pure cardboard and the book suffered from a overdose of self-admiring zaniness. Yes, Mr. Moore, I get how interestingly and amusingly offbeat you are. Now, could you please just tell a story?

Total for March: 7
Total for the year: 26.

Comments

[geekchick]

I liked You Suck more than Bloodsucking Fiends, purely because of Abby Normal. Still, nothing has ever (for me) lived up to Lamb.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I am forbidden to discuss You Suck here because it was an April book. ;-) But yeah, Abby Normal was a good character, and some of the selfconscious zaniness was toned down.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to say about _The Machine's Child_, but I wanted to answer this:
>I wish there were some kind of mechanism by which people who are really writing a single book that is several thousand pages long could publish them that way, rather than splitting them into a long series of novel-length installments.

I have a lot of trouble handling single books that are more than 300 pages long, even in paperback. I need them as e-books or audiobooks. (It's the handling that's difficult, not the reading.) I saw a long novel (the title of which is currently gone from memory) in a bookstore, printed as 3 small volumes in a box. The box was labelled _Title_, and the books were _Title Part 1_, Title Part 2_, and Title Part 3_. I had seen other printings as a single large volume, as it's a fairly old book. I thought the divided printing was brilliant.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Is Strong Smart and Bold related to Girls Inc? I used to use a curriculum of theirs, and those words popped up ALL THE TIME - it's kind of their motto.

The Taliaferro sounds great - right up galagan's alley.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

A Spenser novel like many other Spenser novels - it was mildly enjoyable to read, and then leaked out of my head pretty much instantly, afterward. It sort of feels as though Parker will keep putting the same elements together as long as they'll sell, and isn't invested in bringing anything new to the series.

Yes, exactly. My mind always says, "Wait for it... ok," at the point where he (inevitably) has a character say, "We'd be fools not to."

Also, if he's not obsessed with prostitution, he certainly writes about it a lot. I'm not sure if I find this lazy or disturbing (or both).

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Is Strong Smart and Bold related to Girls Inc?

Yep. Was their curriculum any good? Because this really wasn't.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Um, it was okay - a B, perhaps. Not my favorite curriculum, but it was a bit out of my comfort zone.... that's a long story.

[redbird]

I have a copy of Mary Gentle's Ash as one huge trade paperback, the UK edition that I went out of my way to acquire here in Montreal. The US edition is as four mass-market-size paperbacks.

I wanted the single volume because I've too often misplaced one volume of a series somewhere in the chaos of our book collection [we need more shelves] and it's frustrating to be rereading something and realize I'm missing a middle piece. (Misplacing the whole book is now possible, of course.) The publisher was probably right that more people want books of a convenient size, and either are more organized or care less about misplacing things before they get around to rereading.