Wednesday Reading Meme

[dhampyresa]

What did you finish reading

Graveyard Dust, by Barbara Hambly: I loved it! It was brilliant. I loved Baron Samedi helping out Ben, Gabriel was adorable and Marie Laveau was really scary and for good reason. Olympe and Paul are such great parents and people. Mostly, I really liked the way voodoo was treated, especially Mamzelle Marie's comment on how maybe slaves don't want to pray to a god that looks like their masters. Also Rose. Rose was brilliant and I really felt for Nogent. And every tim Ben has cholera flash-backs, I want to hug him.


What are you reading

Sold Down the River, by Barbara Hambly: I've only just started, but I really love the friendships in this series. Shaw looking out for Ben! Olympe and Rose teaming up to make Ben do the right thing!

Hannibal's Odyssey: The Environmental Background to the Alpine Invasion of Italia by William Mahaney: This is very interesting so far, but very dense. I don't know if I'm projecting or what, but the author sometimes comes off as a big fanboy. I am more than okay with that. I am so so glad all the distances are given in metric, though. There was a bit where the Roman units were explained in imperial terms and frankly, I understood none of it.


What are you reading next

The Benjamin January series, still.

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yay!I love Graveyard Dust, it's one of my favorites in the series. I love the courtroom scenes (the French vs English bits are so hilarious), I love Rose pretending to be other people to help with the investigation, love Ben and Hannibal getting poisoned at the end- it's like delicious dramatic h/c fic!- and I love the resolution with Baron Samedi. I also think it's really amazing how Hambly made Jumon sympathetic without lessening the cost of his actions.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

It's probably my favourite so far. The courtroom scenes were indeed hilarious. Hambly did a great job and normally I would have reacted to Jumon's situation with "too bad, so nad", but his actions are a hard-line for me, so it was more like "too bad, not sad".

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I don't really feel sad for him either. But it would be easy to have made him a simplistic evil villain, and instead he comes off as a three-dimensional character. Which I think is pretty impressive, since I imagine his actions are a hard-line for most people!

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I mean obviously what happened to him was terrible, but that's not excuse. He is very three-dimensional, as are all of Hambly's characters. People are free to kink on whatever they want, even this, but the moment you take that stuff into RL, you lose all my sympathy. Within the story, he did take it into RL, even if he's fictional. Err, does that make sense?